African Venus

#89032     50″ X 72″      ac

•  Titian: “Venus of Urbino”, 1538. Uffizi, Florence
•  H. Rousseau: “The sleeping Gypsy”, 1897. Museum of Modern Art, NY

Chen has really gone exotic! For the best past of five centuries artists have been painting replicas or interpretations of Titian’s “Venus of Urbino”. Probably no interpretation in all this time has been so far out.

Tsing-fang and his wife Lucia have an interest in African art, which Lucia sells in her gallery. So the use of a Black African Duchess in tribal paint and African cushions should not surprise us. Yet we are startled.

Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) was a customs bureaucrat and musician who described himself as realist painter, although this can only describe his figurative approach, not his fanciful mixing of images. Although he began showing in the Salon des Independants in 1886, he was more than 50 years old when he received his first substantial recognition by showing “The Sleeping Gypsy” in that Salon in 1897.

In Chen’s painting the white moon in a blue sky and the white mane and tail of a docile lion seem like icons of magic, which are accentuated by the wild pattern of white paint on Venus’s body and the extravagant striped curtain and cushion. It is difficult to cease staring at this picture and searching for the interlocking of elements that make it interesting.

– Lawrance Jeppson