The Chinese artist, although popular in China and France during her lifetime, has not had her work publicly exhibited since a 1984 retrospective show at the Musee Cernuschi, an Asian art museum in Paris.
The Hood show includes just 24 paintings by the artist, but each marks an important development in her personal and professional life, from Fan's training in Paris painting live models and her experiments with avant-garde styles like Impressionism, to her incorporation of ancient Chinese art-making techniques such as ink painting and calligraphy.
While mostly a collection of small to midsize oil paintings, the Hood's exhibit includes watercolors, ceramics and photographs as well.
The exhibit grew from a chance encounter that Hood Museum director Michael Taylor had with the artist's work while visiting one of her sons in Stoddard. Taylor described his initial attraction to Fan's work as "a gut reaction."
He knew nothing about the artist's biography or the range of her work, he said.
"These were really interesting paintings that seemed to have more than just a decorative feel; there seemed to be a story here," Taylor said. "Suddenly it all started to become very rich."
The details of Fan's integral connection to Chinese politics became evident after Taylor hired Xinyue Guo '14, an art history major fluent in Mandarin, to help him sort through and categorize source material.
Guo said she was immediately excited to take on the project during her sophomore summer.
"I remember meeting with Michael [Taylor] at Dirt Cowboy to look at some of the paintings and I was struck," she said. "I had never seen anything like that before, Chinese subjects with oil painting techniques."
Together Taylor and Guo sorted through the artist's diaries, letters, photographs and books, as well as addressed questions to her three sons. They were ultimately able to contextualize Fan's art within her personal story, choosing to organize the exhibit chronologically to emphasize this development.
At age 12, following the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, Fan traveled to France and studied at prestigious art schools in Paris. She learned standard Western artmaking practices and gained exposure to experimentation by Paul Cezanne and Claude Monet.
In 1925, the 27-year-old Fan returned to China with her husband Tsongming Tsen, a Chinese politician, poet and writer who had also been living in France. She joined contemporary artists trying to meld Western instruction in single-point perspective, three-dimensional rendering of objects and realism with ancient Chinese methods like brush and ink and calligraphy.
Over the next decade, Fan gained popular acclaim in China and helped to establish a realist tradition in the country. She spent much of her time working in Paris and traveling Europe between 1925 and 1930, but remained in China during the 1930s.
Tragedy struck Fan in 1939, when a gunman loyal to Chiang Kaishek assassinated her husband. Fan was injured in the attack but survived. She fled China with her three young sons shortly after the Communist Party gained control of the country in 1949, settling first in Paris and later in Brookline, Mass.
While the exhibit pulls from only a small collection of Fan's work, it includes paintings of live models from her studies in France, outdoor landscapes from her travels in Europe, Chinese streets and the Forbidden Temple in Beijing from her time in China and mountain scenes from her final home in Massachusetts.
"You have the world of China with its artistic traditions and you know she definitely references those in her ceramics, her brush and ink paintings," Taylor said. "And then there's the world of the Western education she received, the more traditional academy work with a live model."
Wherever her life took her, Fan continued to paint, Taylor said.
One piece from the exhibit, "The Marshes Have Many Fragrant Grasses," painted in 1960 with oil on canvas, obliquely references Fan's sense of loss at the death of her husband. Loosely painted with impressionistic strokes of green, white and blue, the painting depicts a woman dressed in clothes for mourning, her arms outstretched holding lotus flowers. The title references an ancient Chinese poem about grief.
Other standout pieces from the collection include "Blind Beggar with Child," a 1936 watercolor and sumi ink pence drawing that the artist executed on Chinese paper. The painting is informed by the astute focus on anatomical correctness that Fan learned studying in Paris, but her choice of subject, the loose lines defining her subjects' clothing and her choice of medium demonstrate her experimentation.
Finally, there is the artist's self-portrait, confident and bold, which confronts visitors as they enter the gallery. The artist pictures herself with bold black but cropped hair and outfitted in a long black dress, sophisticated but confident with red lipstick and a green bracelet.
