Guan Zilan

Guan Zilan was a Chinese avant-garde painter who was one of the first artists to introduce Fauvism to China. She was born in Shanghai in 1903, during the late Qing dynasty. Her parents were successful textile merchants who gave her an artistic education from a young age. She studied painting at Shanghai Shenzhou Girls' School and later Western painting at China Art University, where she was taught by Chen Baoyi and Hong Ye, two well-known painters. After graduating in 1927, she went to Japan to further her studies at Bunka Gakuin in Tokyo, where she was influenced by Henri Matisse's Fauvism. She returned to Shanghai in 1930 and became a favorite in the art world of the young Republic of China. She was known for applying Western painting style to Chinese traditional subjects, such as women, flowers, and landscapes. Her most famous work is Portrait of Miss L. (1929), which depicts a young woman in a colorful dress and hat, with a vibrant background of flowers and trees. She was also a model of beauty and modernity, and appeared on the cover of the popular magazine Liangyou (The Young Companion) in 1929. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, she supported her former teacher Chen Baoyi, who refused to work for the Japanese and died in poverty in 1945. She stayed in Shanghai after the Communist takeover in 1949 and worked at the Shanghai Research Institute of Culture and History. She changed her artistic style to conform with the socialist realism dominant in Communist China. She died of natural causes in Shanghai in 1986, at the age of 83.