Foal

Xu Beihong made his name with horses at a full gallop, but this is a foal, a young colt, painted in nothing but black ink on paper. He made it in 1948, during the last months of China's civil war and only a year before the new government put him in charge of the national art academy in Beijing. The work shows the two trainings he spent his life joining. The body is built with the Western anatomy he had studied in Paris, then set down in the loose, wet brushwork of traditional Chinese ink. He leaves the space around the animal empty, in the old manner, so the bare paper itself becomes the air the young horse stands in.