Sanyu valuation
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 or 1901 (the sources differ), into a wealthy family, and went to Paris in 1921, where he stayed for the rest of his life.
What a work by Sanyu is worth
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Bio
Sanyu was born Chang Yu in Sichuan, in 1895 or 1901 (the sources differ), into a wealthy family, and went to Paris in 1921, where he stayed 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.
La Grande Chaumière, Roché and Robert Frank
Sanyu came from Nanchong, where his family owned one of the largest silk mills in Sichuan, and after two years in Berlin he returned to Paris in 1923. At the Grande Chaumière he met Marcelle, whom he married in 1928. In 1929 the collector and dealer Henri-Pierre Roché, author of Jules et Jim, began buying his work and encouraged him to make prints.
Money from home dried up as the silk business declined, and in the war years he showed only plaster sculptures of animals and figures at the salons. In 1948 he went to New York and shared a studio with the photographer Robert Frank. Rita Wong's catalogue raisonné, published by the Yageo Foundation, numbers the oils.
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