Red Cliffs and Green Valleys

Wang Meng Chinese

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Wang Meng’s grandfather Zhao Mengfu was one of the first artists to make landscape paintings that referred knowingly to earlier styles. This idea, simple on its face but revolutionary in its impact, required not just a knowledge of art history but the ability to forge something new out of it, and it became the dominant mode for ambitious landscape painters going forward. This intimately scaled hanging scroll shows Wang Meng working in this vein, using ropy texturing brushstrokes and vigorous dotting to refer to elements of his grandfather’s style and to those still-earlier painters who had inspired it.

Red Cliffs and Green Valleys, Wang Meng (Chinese, ca. 1308–1385), Hanging scroll; ink on paper, China

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