NEW HAVEN, CT.- A promised gift to the Yale University Art Gallery of thirty-three landscape paintings created by the contemporary Chinese artist Mu Xin (born 1927), has been announced by Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director. The group of works, known as "Tower Within a Tower," is from the collection of the Rosenkranz Charitable Foundation whose president, Robert Rosenkranz, Yale College class of 1962, is a keen collector of modern Chinese art.  

“These works are an invaluable addition to our holdings in Asian art,” said Mr. Reynolds. “and we are deeply grateful to Robert Rosenkranz for his thoughtful generosity, as well as for his role in recognizing the outstanding quality and originality of Mu Xin’s work. The Yale Art Gallery was privileged,” he added, “to share in the presentation of the exhibition "The Art of Mu Xin – Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes" and we are honored that the paintings will be in our care for the pleasure and instruction of future generations.”  

In making the gift Mr. Rosenkranz said, “In the late 1970s, Mu Xin was placed under house arrest, and created the landscape paintings in the dead of night. They reflect no anger, no political critique, no feelings of victimization. Instead, they turn toward classical Chinese landscape themes which are made part of an extraordinary synthesis of elements that reflect the aesthetics and humanist ideals of the high renaissance. This impulse to respond to adversity by cultivating one’s highest qualities,” he continued, “is especially resonant and inspiring today. In part because of extraordinary aesthetic qualities of Mu Xin’s art, and in part because of the values it exemplifies, I am proud that these paintings will have a home at Yale.”  

Mu Xin’s thirty-three small landscape paintings, each sheet measuring some thirteen by seven inches, represent a unique episode in the history of modernism in twentieth-century China. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, Chinese painters had either attempted to integrate foreign approaches into traditional Chinese approaches or to react to foreign approaches by attempting to define an essential “Chineseness” about their painting. While doing the latter, however, they unavoidably incorporated foreign elements into their works. Mu Xin studied Western painting in both Shanghai and Hangzhou in the late 1940s with two prominent teachers, Liu Haisu and Lin Fengmian. He probably learned to combine Chinese ink with Western gouache from Lin who had adopted this approach to modernizing Chinese painting during the 1930s. Mu Xin also became aware of Renaissance painting through the medium of reproductions. He looked particularly to the work of Leonardo da Vinci, which he knew through the Phaidon publication on Leonardo. His images often have the feel of photogravure reconverted to painting. He may also have been exposed to the decalcomania of the Surrealists. He incorporated all of these elements into his Tower Within a Tower suite of paintings, creating his own very personal modernist vision. 

Over the past two years this group of landscapes was exhibited widely and to great acclaim in the exhibition "The Art of Mu Xin-Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes," organized by Alexandra Munroe, Director of Japan Society Gallery, and Wu Hung, the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History, University of Chicago. The exhibition opened on October 2, 2001, at the Yale University Art Gallery, traveled to the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, and the Honolulu Academy of Arts. It closed on September 7, 2003, at the Asia Society Museum, New York, where it was titled Landscape of Memory: The Art of Mu Xin.  

“The catalogue, prepared by the Yale University Art Gallery and published by the Yale University Press, is an important contribution to the study of Chinese painting of the second half of the twentieth century,” said David A. Sensabaugh, curator of Asian art at the Art Gallery. “Essays by Alexandra Munroe, Richard Barnhart, Jonathan Hay, and Wu Hung provide different contexts for understanding the artist, allowing him to be seen both within the long history of Chinese painting and the history of twentieth-century Chinese painting. The book sumptuously reproduces each painting and conveys the full impact of the prison notes, as if they constituted a wall of writing.”  

The Yale Art Gallery’s holdings of Asian art comprise more than six thousand objects representing four millennia of art, beginning with ceramic vessels from the Neolithic period and ending with contemporary paintings, prints, sculpture, and ceramics. While the strength of the collection is in Chinese and Japanese art, a number of superb pieces come from India, and Southeast Asia. A modest but fine assemblage of ceramics and textiles is representative of Islamic art of the Near East.