獻給常玉 | 常玉 SANYU

Henri-Pierre Roché

1929

I look at his beautiful paintings...
he's quite a guy, and he's on his way.

Max Jacob

1929

Sanyu is a formidable force who works with precision and purity.
And what intelligence! What technique!

邵洵美

1929

All the lines of his nudes can speak, and they cry out the anguish of sex!...Look at the composition! The lines!...Simplicity affirmed by complexity! Complexity embraced by simplicity!

Johan Franco

1932

Nicole Parent

1995

——

Paris le 8 juillet 95

Je suis la sœur de Claude Parent, qui a reçu cette lettre à ma place, sans doute. Je me souviens très bien de SANYU. C’était un homme charmant, très intéressant et très “intérieur.” Il avait créé, dans mon club, des cours de Ping-Tennis, je ne sais plus en quelle année… 1962, 63?

Nous avions de très bon rapports. C’est tout ce que je peux vous dire. Il était aussi passionné de peinture.

Je ne l’ai pas fréquenté très longtemps car le Ping-Tennis n’ayant pas “pris” comme nous l’aurions souhaité, il n’a pas continué à donner ses cours. Depuis, je ne l’ai plus revu.

Désolée de ne pouvoir pas en dire davantage à son sujet.

Nicole Parent

Pamela Forrest

1996

Robert Frank

1997

Jean Claude Drouin

1999

Natacha Levy

2011

Serge Tcherepnin

2012

He showed me his paintings and explained that his art was a perpetual quest for the perfect line, never artificial, moving and sinuous lines which seem to breathe and move with a life of their own.

Chang Yian

I met San Yu in Paris in 1956, late fall. As a recipient of a J. H. Whitney Fellowship, I was pursuing further piano study and performance opportunities in Europe after getting out of Julliard School in New York.

Expatriates tend to congregate, and in Paris, Kuo Yu-shou, who had studied at the Sorbonne in the 20s and subsequently was appointed cultural officer by the Chinese Nationalist government played host at many parties to which I was invited. After all, although I was living in the U.S., the Chinese connection was his long acquaintance with my parents. There I met San Yu, among other painters, musicians, students, etc. from China. I later realized that he was a problem to the community in that he was continually insolvent, though he had lived in Paris since the 20s.

He lived in the 14th Arrondissement, not far from where I was staying at the time, and used to visit me. We took long walks along the boulevards and Parc Monsouris. I could see he was an eccentric and a dreamer. He would talk to trees; he talked about “ping-tennis” a game he invented which he was sure would bring him a fortune. I dared not ask how he survived meantime, but I gathered he painted walls and did carpentering.

I was surprised when I visited his studio that it was clean and spacious. White walls were hung with his paintings and shelves held his ceramics. I was immediately struck by their singularity. It was obvious that every piece came from an unique vision, one at once childlike and sophisticated, playful yet profound.

One painting struck me particularly: a whimsical floral still-life, a white vase, flatly outlined against an aubergine background. I loved the way the sides of that vase were silhouetted.

Though I had never before purchased an art-work and was concerned how I would live out the year on my fellowship-grant, I was determined to own it. Seeing my interest, San Yu was happy to make the sale, and insisted on giving me another small painting, an almost abstract goldfish painting.

The following year, 1958, I returned to Paris. I remember he cooked a meal for me in his studio on a Bunsen-burner type of single gas jet, fishing out supplies from sacks which he said were remains of air-lifted supplies from Liberation days!

We spent New Year’s Eve 1958 at the Café Dome, watching people from the heated terrace. We were both rather depressed. He had never stopped dreaming of “making it big” on ping-tennis, but meanwhile I think it was getting more and more difficult for him to survive. Nobody bought his paintings. I don’t remember if that was the last time I saw San Yu.

Shortly after his death, I, by now married and back in New York, was notified that he had left me 2 paintings. I was really surprised and moved that he had remembered me in his last days.

When I received the Lotus painting, I was overwhelmed. It was so typical a San Yu, the restrained and delicate innocence of the flower stems, their stylized composition brought to me the impact of a man who absorbed the essence of the East and the West and made it his own.

As for the little dog in the chair, was he not trying to express his own wishes, to be that pet, a center of attention and in a state of well-being?