Museums in Paris: Yan Pei-Ming

Another joint exhibition is being hosted at the Petit Palais and the Musée d'Orsay.  The exhibition is dedicated to the paintings of Chinese-French artist Yan Pei-Ming.

In 1980, Yan Pei-Ming arrived in France from Shanghai at age 20.  He was trained in France and early discovered the paintings of 19th-century French artist Gustave Courbet (1819-1877).  Courbet led the movement in Realism and is considered a forefather of Impressionism.

Like other artists before Yan Pei-Ming (including Claude Monet), Courbet inspired painters to paint what they see, using vibrant colors to depict real life, not some stylized or Romanticized vision of life.  As a result, Courbet was considered to be avant garde.   

Yan Pei-Ming, who is based in Dijon, has enthusiastically emulated both Courbet's attitude and style in his own paintings.  Recently, he was commissioned to create new works that celebrated the 200th anniversary of Courbet's birth.  Some of those paintings and others are now exhibited at the Petit Palais and the Musée d'Orsay.

At the Petit Palais:

Nearly all of Yan Pei-Ming's paintings are monumental, like the one below, which measures 13' tall by 19' wide.  Most are done in shades of black, white, and gray.

In 1870-1871, Courbet led the effort to remove the Colonne Vendôme because it represented military conquest and was antithetical to the republican Commune.  (You might remember as earlier blog post about the Colonne Vendôme.)  The painting below depicts the outcome of Courbet's effort.  (Although the column was torn down, it was subsequently restored and stands there today.)

Promesse tenue means promise kept.

The portrait below seems to depict Courbet's contempt for the establishment.  During his life, he advocated for a new order, both in his politics and in his paintings.  The Yan-Pei Ming portrait below was hung in the gallery next to the Courbet painting that follows.  

At the Musée d'Orsay:  The exhibition of Yan Pei-Ming's paintings was co-hosted at the Musée d'Orsay.  There, in one of the museum's largest galleries, a monumental group of three related paintings is displayed. The paintings were inspired by Gustave Courbet's A Burial at Ornans, 

A Burial at Ornans (also called A Painting of Human Figures, the History of a Burial at Ornans) by Gustave Courbet (1849 and 1850)

Thanks for viewing the Yan Pei-Ming exhibition with us.