Evolution Of Artistic Style Of Wang Meng Landscape

This thesis was mainly designed to study the rules in the changes of Wang Meng's artistic styles, who ranked among the Famous Four Artists in the Yuan dynasty. Through the study on the social environment at the time, the artist's life and the stylistic evolutions in his preserved paints, the writer summarized the intrinsic connections and rules of the diversely changing artistic styles of Wang. Based on the previous research, the writer also attempts to further the study of Wang Meng's paintings by putting his works with different styles into an orderly sequenced time chain.Different stylistic features in Wang's works are shown in paintings drawn in different periods. The artist has experienced three major stylistic changes in his artistic career over forty years. They can be divided into three periods according to their respective subjects and composition: study landscape painting, seclusion landscape painting, and thatched cottage landscape painting. The artistic styles in different periods are distinctive and closely related. The relation among them is orderly progressive.In the period of thatched cottage landscape painting, the artist learned from the previous generations extensively, not getting free from the imitation. Therefore, he didn't have obvious individual characteristics. The pictures were full of a flavor of peaceful and cheerful secular life.In the period of study landscape painting, the artist began to develop his own style, which was characterized by dense lines and thick dots. The pictures were given the significance of personification. The implied meaning of a cottage between a pine tree and a hill had appeared. The content of the pictures changed from broad gardens to high mountains and dense forests, beginning to explore the manifestation of high and wide dimensions. The mood of the painting tended to be quiet and beautiful without any secular flavor. At this moment the artist had formed his own style and was superior to his ancestors and contemporaries in composition and mood. He developed a school of his own in Yuan Dynasty.In the period of seclusion landscape painting, the style of the artist was very clear and was characterized by a chain of multi-peaked mountains. The general appearancewas complicated in landscapes and dense strokes, but the mood of it was quiet and serene and almost secluded from mortal life. This was a manifestation of the artist's personality of living in seclusion. In the composition of the painting, the artist mixed together various schools and created his own. He developed a new stage in the quality formed by the interaction of painting brush, paper and ink. He contributed a lot to the painting in Yuan Dynasty. It was at this moment that the artist attained his greatest achievements.The author attempted to find out a kind of intrinsic connection among the composition of Wang's paintings, social environment and personal experience so as to explicate the rule dominating the formation and evolution of Wang artistic styles.