Mountain Rain is Coming
Shi Lu Chinese
Not on view
Born as Feng Yaheng into a wealthy landowner family in Sichuan, Shi Lu studied traditional painting in Chengdu but left school in 1939 for Yan'an in Shaanxi Province, the wartime headquarters of the Communist Party after the Long March. He changed his name to Shi Lu as an expression of his admiration for the individualist painter Shitao (1642–1707) and the revolutionary writer Lu Xun (1881–1936). During the 1940s Shi Lu espoused the revolutionary aims of the Communist Party, creating cartoons, woodcuts, New Year's pictures, and other forms of propagandist art. After 1950 he embraced Russian-inspired Social Realism in large-scale works on such subjects as the history of the Chinese Communist Revolution.
This painting marks a change in Shi Lu's style. His peasants, bearing their load through the landscape, reflect training in Social Realism, but the free brushwork and wild ink of his mountains echo the work of Shitao.
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