Fruit

Ding Fuzhi Chinese

Not on view

With the discovery of oracle-bone scripts at the turn of the twentieth century, painting was stimulated by another wave of influence from calligraphy.The pictograms—functioning as word, image, and concept—were an important stimulus for Ding Fuzhi. His inscription on this painting is composed of characters adapted from Shang oracle bones.
Ding depicted the characteristic silhouette of each piece of fruit, consciously playing the naive quality of the painted image against its counterpart, the primitive script. At the same time, his command of oracle-bone script and his analytic understanding of form as color are utterly sophisticated.

Fruit, Ding Fuzhi (Chinese, 1879–1946), Album leaf; ink and color on paper, China

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