Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum

Founded in 2008 at the initiative of China Minsheng Bank, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum was the first non-profit art museum in mainland China to emerge from a financial institution. It is currently located at No. 48 Weihai Road in Shanghai’s Huangpu District. From the outside, the building looks like an ordinary office block. Yet when I visited, it was hosting Sculpting This Life of Mine: A Major Giacometti Exhibition. Although the ticket desk was on the fifth floor and the galleries on the sixth, an exhibition display had already been installed at the main entrance on the ground floor. It was quite distinctive. You may wish to place the photos here first; after reading my introduction and looking at the images, you may well notice what is so special about it.

Giacometti was a renowned modern artist from Italy, though most of his artistic production took shape in Paris. His artistic path was first shaped by the influence of his parents, both Post-Impressionist artists. Later, after encountering African and Oceanic art in Paris, he created a number of works marked by a distinctly Cubist sensibility. He then came under the powerful influence of Surrealist painting, producing many works that reflected dreams and the subconscious. Later still, he drifted farther and farther from Surrealism, to the point of being expelled from the Surrealist circle altogether. His work then returned to more tangible, worldly subjects. He is best known for his bronze sculptures, followed by his prints, oil paintings, and watercolors.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Giacometti was, in every sense, a quintessential modern artist, and his career passed through several of the most famous movements of modern art. Lately, I have been doing some research on modern art, and in the process I have cleared up many of the misunderstandings I once had about it. Like many people, I used to think that the endless proliferation of “-isms” in modern art was mainly the result of the Industrial Revolution and the invention of photography: once artists could no longer compete through the traditional goal of faithfully reproducing the visible world, they were forced into innovation and rupture so that art might adapt to a rapidly changing age. I no longer think this is the reason modern art kept evolving and reinventing itself, or at least not the principal one. Before modern art, the mainstream of Western art largely served the needs of the powerful, depicting religious scenes or imitating the visible world. Those artists were more like great craftsmen—by which I mean no disrespect to craftsmen whatsoever, only that their original purpose in making art was different. But beginning with Manet’s submission of Luncheon on the Grass to the Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, artists began to turn painting and art-making into a mode of self-expression. No longer did they see the purpose of art as serving the material world; instead, they stood above their own age, sensing, anticipating, and revealing the world around them. This was a profound breakthrough of both idea and spirit, and it made art something greater. In fact, it was also one of the strongest possible affirmations of the autonomy of art.

But back to Giacometti. Among the works on view, his early paintings bore the unmistakable features of Post-Impressionism. In the subsequent galleries, however, the representative works on display were chiefly his bronze sculptures of human figures. These sculptures have an extraordinarily distinctive character. Seen from the front, the faces are strikingly gaunt; from the side, they become surprisingly prominent, as though a normal human face had been compressed inward from both sides and distorted by the pressure. The nose in particular is always especially pronounced. It is said that Giacometti regarded the nose as the most characteristic feature of the human face. You can see this clearly in the side-view photographs I took of the sculptures. Beyond the face, there is very little bodily detail: the limbs and torso are all extremely elongated and slender. Even in the sculpture he made after the small woods of his hometown, the trees themselves take on the same thin, attenuated form. The galleries also contained quite a few of his prints, which largely continue the formal language of the sculptures: spare lines, gaunt faces, and deliberate distortion. This, unmistakably, is the artist’s signature.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Now then—having looked through the attached photographs, have you perhaps already noticed the clever visual idea behind the exhibition display at the museum’s main entrance on the ground floor?

Admission to the exhibition is CNY 68, with half-price tickets for students, and a visit takes about 1 to 1.5 hours. In addition to the ticket desk and gift shop, the fifth floor also has a reading room where books may be consulted free of charge with valid identification. All in all, it is a deeply worthwhile exhibition, and one well worth seeing.