Chu Teh-Chun valuation
Took Chinese calligraphic training into French abstraction and never quite left either behind.
Chu Teh-Chun was born in Jiangsu province in 1920 and trained at the Hangzhou National College of Art alongside Zao Wou-Ki, under Wu Dayu and Fang Ganmin.
What a work by Chu Teh-Chun is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Chu Teh-Chun was born in Jiangsu province in 1920 and trained at the Hangzhou National College of Art alongside Zao Wou-Ki, under Wu Dayu and Fang Ganmin. He taught in Taiwan through the 1950s and moved to Paris in 1955, where a Nicolas de Stael retrospective the following year turned him decisively towards abstraction. What followed is a body of painting that reads simultaneously as lyrical abstraction in the French post-war manner and as the landscape and calligraphic tradition he was raised in: light breaking through darkness, gestures that behave like brush strokes because they are. He was elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts in 1997, the first member of Chinese origin, and died in 2014.
Oils on canvas are the principal market and are unique. Dating matters a great deal, as the palette and handling change markedly between the 1960s, the luminous 1980s canvases and the late work. Titles are frequently numbered rather than descriptive, and the same title recurs, so the inventory number and dimensions are what identify a specific painting. He signed in both Chinese characters and Latin letters, usually both, on the face and again on the reverse. Ink works, watercolours and a modest print output also appear.
West Lake, Taipei and the Paris Salon
At Hangzhou Chu studied Chinese painting under Pan Tianshou and Western painting under Fang Ganmin and Wu Dayu, and with Zao Wou-Ki and Wu Guanzhong he is counted among the West Lake school. From 1945 he taught in the architecture department of the National Central University in Nanjing, and from 1949 Western painting at the National Taiwan Normal University.
In April 1956 his portrait of his wife, Tung Ching-Chao, won a silver medal at the Paris Salon, and in 1964 an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh brought him international notice. In 2003 he gave a large painting to the Shanghai Grand Theatre, where it hangs in the central lobby. He died in Paris in March 2014.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
