Temple on a Cliff

Temple on a Cliff, 1967

Where object was made: China

Material/technique: paper; ink

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 60 x 45.1 cm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 23 5/8 x 17 3/4 in
Frame Dimensions (Height x Width x Depth): 30 7/8 x 24 7/8 in

Credit line: Gift of Arthur S. Johnson and Helen Marcy Johnson

Accession number: 1979.0019

Not on display

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Label texts

Archive Label 2003:
Zhang Daqian started his study of the old Chinese masters at an early age and was especially skilled at imitating the 17th-century individualist Shitao. During his travels abroad in the 1960s and 1970s Zhang absorbed ideas from Western art and began to experiment with semi-abstract styles. However, while pushing Chinese brushwork further toward abstraction, he never lost the spirit of traditional painting. Here he has curiously rendered the cliffs with bold splashes of ink wash, while defining the houses, bridge, and trees with finer, more detailed brushwork. The small scale of the drawn objects bestows a sense of monumentality upon the mountains.