Sanyu
Chinese modernist in Paris who painted pink nudes and single potted plants with a calligrapher's line.
Sanyu was born Chang Yu in Sichuan in 1895 into a wealthy family and went to Paris in 1921 on a work-study programme, staying for the rest of his life. He drew at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere rather than the Beaux-Arts and produced a body of work that belongs to neither tradition exactly: nudes reduced to a few sweeping lines with enormous simplified limbs, single potted flowers isolated against flat grounds, and small animals adrift in vast empty landscapes. His family money disappeared, he lived in poverty, and he died in Paris in 1966 of a gas leak, largely forgotten. The reassessment came decades later.
The output is finite and the market is principally in Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China. The oils on canvas or masonite are the core; the ink and pencil drawings of nudes, of which several hundred survive, are far more numerous and are collected seriously in their own right. Both have attracted forgery, and the standing catalogue raisonne and the National Museum of History in Taipei, which holds a large group, are the references. Signature is usually the character for Yu with SANYU in Latin letters, lower corner.
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