Fang Ganmin

Fang Ganmin
Fang Ganmin, c. 1930
Native name	方幹民
Born	(1906-02-15)15 February 1906 Wenling, Zhejiang, China
Died	21 January 1984(1984-01-21) (aged 77) Suzhou
Nationality	Chinese
Known for	Painting, drawing, sculpture
Movement	Cubism, Chinese Modernist
Spouse(s)	Su Ailan（蘇愛蘭）

Fang Ganmin (simplified Chinese: 方干民; traditional Chinese: 方幹民; 15 February 1906 - January 1984) was a Chinese painter, sculptor and educator, who was educated in Paris and spent most of his adult life in China. Regarded as one of the fathers of Chinese oil painting, Fang was born in the Wenling county, Zhejiang province. He began studying painting in 1924 and went to Paris in 1925, enrolling in the L'Ecole Superieure Nationale des Beaux Arts, making him, along with Xu Beihong and Sanyu, one of the first Chinese painters to study abroad in France. Upon returning to China, he assisted in founding and taught at the National Arts Academy, Hangzhou, becoming a professor at the Western Painting Department. During the Cultural Revolution, Fang was shamed and tortured by the Red Guards, and most of his work was destroyed. He died in 1984. His students include Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun and Wu Guanzhong.

Fang Ganmin studied in Shanghai Meizhuan and under Jean-Pierre Laurens (1875–1932), son of Jean-Paul Laurens (1838 – 1921), at the L'Ecole Superieure Nationale des Beaux Arts, Paris from 1926 to 1929, together with Chinese artists such as Yan Wenliang. He taught in Xinhua AFA, Shanghai, and Hangzhou Academy.

In 1951 and 1952, a campaign against modernist art, condemned in Soviet terms as both bourgeois and formalist, had forced Lin Fengmian and Wu Dayu to leave the art academy in Hangzhou and return to Shanghai. Realism was deemed the progressive style. Fang Ganmin managed to remain, but was nonetheless marginalised and condemned for his modern styles.

Of Fang’s early paintings, two are particularly noteworthy. They are exercises in the Cubist manner, and give to their subject, both nudes, the geometrical and sculptural, but not the fragmented, effect of a picture by Braque. One of them is ''Melody in Autumn'' (1934). In jest, his students called his style fang (‘square’), punning on his surname Fang, which also happens to be one of the characters of the Chinese word for ‘cubic’.