Cèzann Vs. Duchamp

The importation and spreading of western arts into China has a history of over one hundred years. Their popularity has shown powerful living energy. But Chinese artistic community has not fully and sufficiently absorbed them. The author of this thesis holds the view that the subject of "Modern Western Painting: Surpass to the Tradition" is helpful for us in deepening our understanding of the development of western arts and in finding out certain relationships between modern and traditional arts. In the mean time we may be enabled to place our own arts in an accurate position, and from this point we value our tradition more and have a keen awareness of down-graded arts in contemporary western society. This awareness will be significant to keep Chinese artists from blind worshipping western culture and seeking homogenous arts.In the course of the study, the author becomes aware of that modern western painting's surpass to its tradition is not only one in conception but also one in basic laws (perspective, dissection, structure and color, etc.), skills, media-material as well as others. Therefore, analysis on conceptual surpass relates to that of other aspects, esp. of media-materials, which play a fundamental role in modern arts. The continual innovation in modernism made nearly all skills, conceptions and styles exhaustedly employed. However, media-materials have the possibility of infinite expansion with technological progress, which offer possibility the emergence for new conceptions and expressions.First of all the theses makes a clear definition of "modern" and "traditional" as well as the relations between modern arts, postmodern arts and traditional arts. In a board sense, tradition is not something outdated and rigid. It's flowing and open. It has a beginning but without an end. Today's fashion may be tradition for tomorrow. All existing things can be tradition for new systems. In a narrow sense, traditional arts refer to that before post-impressionism in late 19th century. In this way, we can have an accurate and non-rigid definition of "tradition" when talking about this term.