Cui Bai
Cuī Bái ( Chinese崔 白; also Cuī Bó; Wade-Giles : Ts'ui Po) was a painter of the Northern Song Dynasty .
Life
Little is known about his life. Born in Fengyang ( Anhui Province ), Emperor Song Shenzong brought him to the court in Kaifeng in the middle of the 11th century . There, Cuī worked mainly as an animal and plant painter. He is generally described as a genius, but eccentric and clumsy in everyday life. He impressed his contemporaries by the fact that he used to paint his creations directly with a brush on silk without any preliminary study and was even able to draw long straight lines without a ruler.
Rabbit and magpies
Cuīs fame is based on only one surviving picture that can be attributed to him with certainty: a hare and two magpies from 1061. It shows two birds in a wintery, barren landscape chatting to an astonished hare, who may be disturbed while cleaning, and possibly mocking him. The animals are reproduced with a rare anatomical precision. The virtuoso use of various painting techniques is also widely admired: dry, rough strips of ink give the tree its bitter gnarled appearance, while broad, wet forms of the earth. Even the winter mood of the sky is based on the skillful placement of delicate, matt ink surfaces.
The tension between the actors, the pair of birds and the hare, leads to a liveliness and dynamic that is unusual for Chinese painting , which is underlined by the diagonal division of the picture. The serenity of the hare is seen by some interpreters as an allegory of man or the state, which has found a state of peace beyond the challenge of the world. The play on words contained in the title of the work speaks for this. The character for "Elster" is pronounced phonetically the same as a character that means "luck". The title can therefore also be read as “The rabbit and double happiness”.
The picture is considered an exemplary expression of the northern song masters' feeling for nature and is counted among the greatest works of Chinese painting.
literature
- James Cahill : The Chinese painting ("Chinese painting"). Skira-Klett-Cotta, 1979, ISBN 3-88447-056-6 (reprint of the Geneva 1960 edition).
- James Cahill: The Chinese Painting . Editions d´Art Albert Skira, Geneva, 1960.
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Cui, Bai |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Cui, Bo; Ts'ui, Po |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Chinese painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 11th century |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Fengyang |
| DATE OF DEATH | 11th century |