André CLAUDOT 克罗多（1892-1982）, A Corner of the Beijing City Wall, 1926, oil on canvas, 60.7 x72 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Dijon

Thursday, April 11, 2024
11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Dodd Hall, Rm 146

As art historians rediscover and interpret the modern art of pre-1949 China, seeking to document the experiences of Chinese artists studying abroad has been of particular interest. Somewhat less attention has been focused on the impact of foreign artists who mentored students in the nation’s fledgling modern art institutions. This paper explores the role of the free-thinking French painter André Claudot（1892-1982）, who spent four years teaching in China between 1926 and 1930, a period when China’s art world arguably reached the peak of its twentieth century cosmopolitan ambitions. Claudot, a veteran of Montparnasse who painted exuberant canvases in a fauvist manner, left a demonstrable legacy in the work of his oil painting students in Beijing and Hangzhou. The equally interesting artistic exchanges among Claudot and Chinese ink painters, including Lin Fengmian, Qi Baishi, and Li Keran, will serve as the primary theme of this talk.

Julia F. Andrews is Distinguished University Professor Emerita and Academy Professor at Ohio State University. Her first book, Painters and Politics in the Peoples Republic of China, 1949-1976, received the 1996 Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies（AAS）for modern China. She co-curated A Century in Crisis：Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth Century China in 1998 for the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao. Her more recent book, Art of Modern China（co-authored with Kuiyi Shen）, was awarded the biennial Humanities Book Prize of the International Convention of Asia Scholars in 2013. Trained at Berkeley, she served as Assistant Curator at Los Angeles County Museum of Art before moving to Ohio State in 1986.

Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship（2017）, Fulbright awards（2016 and 2003）, the Ohio State University Distinguished Scholar Award（2013）, a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation/A.C.L.S. Post-doctoral Fellowship in Chinese Studies（1995-1996）, a University of Michigan Post-Doctoral Fellowship（1989-1990）, and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1980 and 1981, with support from the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, she was an advanced doctoral student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She has recently co-edited Art and Modernism in Socialist China：Unexplored International Encounters, 1949-1979, with Shuyu Kong and Shengtian Zheng for Routledge（forthcoming 2024）.

This talk is a part of Art History C148E/C248E - Art in Modern China.