Xu Beihong

Xu Beihong was born on 19 July 1895 in Yixing, Jiangsu Province, China. His father, Xu Dazhang, a private-school teacher and painter, taught him Chinese classics and calligraphy from around age six and Chinese ink painting from about age nine. Xu moved to Shanghai in 1915, and in 1916 he studied French there at Fudan University. In 1917 he traveled to Tokyo to study art.

In 1919 he joined a government-sponsored group of Chinese students sent abroad to study fine arts, enrolling first at the Academie Julian in Paris and later at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts. Between 1919 and 1927 he also traveled and studied across Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland, before graduating from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1927 and returning immediately to China.

Back in China, Xu became a central figure in modern art education, teaching in Shanghai and Nanjing and building an approach that combined Western academic technique, especially anatomical drawing and oil painting, with Chinese ink and brushwork. In 1930 he held what is described as the first solo exhibition by a Chinese painter outside China, in Brussels, followed later that year by a second Brussels show and an exhibition in Berlin at the invitation of the Verein Berliner Kunstler. In 1933 he organized the Modern Chinese Paintings Exhibition in Paris, featuring his own work alongside that of Zhang Daqian and Qi Baishi, which toured on to Belgium, Milan, and Moscow.

In 1939 Xu became a visiting professor at Rabindranath Tagore's Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, India, exhibiting there and, in February 1940, presenting a comprehensive show of 206 works in Calcutta under the joint auspices of the Indian Society of Oriental Art and the Sino-Indian Cultural Society; he donated the proceeds to refugee relief for those displaced by the Japanese occupation of China. He became director of the Beiping Art Academy in 1946, and after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 he was named president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, a post he held until his death.

Xu Beihong died on 26 September 1953 in Beijing, at the age of 58. Multiple encyclopedic and museum sources attribute his death to a stroke, described in some accounts as a recurrence of a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by overwork. His former residence in Beijing was converted into the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum, and his wife, Liao Jingwen, oversaw the artist's collection and archive for decades after his death.

Xu Beihong is consistently described in institutional and scholarly sources as the most influential Chinese artist and art educator of the twentieth century, credited with pioneering the integration of Western realist technique into Chinese painting and with training successive generations of Chinese artists through his academy leadership. His 1939 to 1940 stay in India, at the invitation of Rabindranath Tagore's Visva-Bharati University, drew attention and, by some accounts, praise from Indian contemporaries, including the Santiniketan painter Nandalal Bose. That exchange, and his subsequent decades as an academy president in Beijing, are the two poles around which most critical assessment of his career still turns: an internationally engaged modern painter, and a foundational institution-builder for Chinese art education.

Xu Beihong's auction market is anchored in mainland China and Hong Kong, and it has grown in a series of record-setting steps over two decades. Slave and Lion sold for HK$54 million at Christie's Hong Kong in November 2006, then a record price for the artist's work at auction. Put Down Your Whip surpassed that in April 2007, selling for HK$72 million at Sotheby's Hong Kong. The current all-time high is Cultivation on the Peaceful Land, which sold for RMB 266,800,000 (about USD 41.9 million) at Poly International Auction Co. in Beijing; market data services record this sale to 2011. No later sale has been documented in available market data as exceeding this figure.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Xu Beihong, so provenance and documentation matter more than usual; the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum in Beijing and family archives are the primary points of institutional reference, alongside the major auction houses that have sold his work. His market is concentrated in a small number of very high-value lots sold mainly through mainland Chinese and Hong Kong salesrooms, so a handful of results carry outsized weight in any read of his overall market trend. Given his stature as a historical, deceased master with no living estate representation in the conventional gallery sense, collectors should expect authentication and cross-border sale records to require careful, source-by-source verification.