Wu Dayu’s Painting Study

Wu Dayu was considered as one of the first generation oil painters in China.When Wu Dayu was young, he went to France for further study. The masterpieces created by Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse laid deepimpression to Wu Dayu. After backing China, Wu Dayu was taught inHangzhou Fine Art collage. In1950, Wu Dayu was fired, and went back toShanghai.In the early stage, his paintings had characteristics of Impressionism, however, in the late period (from late1970s to his death), he reached a new realm onthe expression of “spirit, momentum, character” and created a number of poetic works, which made a perfect combination of Chinese culture and Western culture. Nowadays more and more people put their eyes on studying the works ofWu Dayu, but the study on the “sense of poem” is weak, and such phenomenoncan not help us catch the whole features of Wu Dayu’s works.Thanks to the profound knowledge of western culture, Wu Dayu’s worksshow not only the western feature, but also oriental romantic charm, and theappearance of a picture turns a language as sense of poem.This essay mainly talked about the later works of Wu Dayu, by analyzingthe art career of Wu, studying and analyzing the brush stokes, layouts, colors,and theme. We finally find out the symbol of Wu’s visual language---“art’s senseof poem”. We tried to put Wu’s research into the development of Chinesemodern art, and we also use different means to demonstrate Wu’s paintings’enlightenment to current art field and the meanings which give us. In themeanwhile, the development of Chinese contemporary art is turbulent andwhen we review the path of such development, we shouldn’t neglect studyingWu Dayu.