The Origin Of Wen Zhengming's Green Landscape Painting Styl

The Ming Dynasty was a period of milestone in the history of landscape painting,in which paintings expressed the interaction of ideas,accompanied with some degrees of development of various other branches of art.Also,the phenomena that the boundary between the the painters’ individual social identity and painting style became blurring emerges.Living at the prosperity of painting resulted from the rapid propagation in the Song and Yuan Dynasties,Wen Zhengming,a representative of the Wumen School of Painting in the Ming Dynasty and an outstanding leader in Wuzhong’s painting society,did not directly learn from the literati ink landscape that is mainly based on brushing and inking,but did inherit a traditional landscape painting style colored by a mixture of blue and green.Although such traditional style was highly ignored by majority of literati painters during that period,Wen pushed such style back to the spot light of the landscape painting through not only properly enriching the number of color blue and green in his work,but also skillfully using a much thinner brushstrokes to depict the framework of his painting.This comeback of Wen-traditional style then opened up a new chapter in traditional painting.This paper aims to investigate the reasons for the formation of Wen’s literati style of traditional landscape painting.This paper based on Wen’s late life masterpiece Wan He Zheng Liu Tu treats conveyed painting thoughts in the preface of Wen’s work,personality,morality,and personal literati social circle as robust evidences and regards Wen’s selection of mentors from both northern and southern schools as a core idea to reveal the significant factors that formed Wen’s personal unique traditional landscape style and to confirm artistic value and influence of Wen’s works.The paper is divided into four sections:The first section illustrates the detailed classification of Wen’s traditional painting style,the evolution of his emphasized traits of his painting style through his life,and the impact from his mentor on his style formation that will be discussed from the special angle combining both ‘Xing’ and ‘Li’.The second section analyzes the characteristics of artistic language and representations of personal thoughts conveyed by his paintings through interpreting his representative work,Wan He Zheng Liu Tu.Besides,in this section,how Wen’s inking preference,thoughts conveyed in his traditional painting works facilitates the inheritance and evolution of traditional Yuanti and literati paintings.Third,how Wen’s traditional landscape painting style inherited and reformed literati and Yuanti paintings will be demonstrated through analyzing Wen’s personal characteristics,inking preference,the ways of demonstrating the picture layout in Wen’s traditional landscape paintings,Wen’s mentor choice,and geographical factors.On this basis,from objective and subjective perspectives,this section also deeply studies the reasons why Wen created the literati traditional landscape painting by combining with Yuanti painting style.Finally,the fourth section summarizes new fields of literati painting by which Wen’s traditional paintings affects and developed.It will argue that these new fields inherits and prospers the tradition of landscape paintings,where the ‘color’ and ‘inking’receive the equal attention.Also,this section roughly analyzes the impact of Wen’s traditional landscape paintings during Ming and Qing dynasties and the reasons that Wen style painting wanes.