People visit the ongoing exhibition Meet Renoir Under Olive Trees in the 798 Art Zone in Beijing.

 

Baijia Lake Art Center Beijing is holding an exhibition of Renoir's works. The event is one among many which is feeding a thirst for Western art. Lin Qi reports.

Yan Lugen, who is in the real estate business, is known as an avid collector of Western art.

He is believed to have amassed hundreds of works of Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin and Auguste Rodin, among others, over the past decade.

The self-made billionaire is passionate about turning his interest in art into a business. So, two years ago he founded the Baijia Lake International Culture Investment Group, which organizes cultural projects, and the company's core product, as he tells China Daily, is to stage shows of "international art masters" at home.

On July 1, Yan inaugurated his Baijia Lake Art Center Beijing, in the 798 Art Zone, with an exhibition called Meet Renoir Under Olive Trees. It has 45 high-resolution reproductions of the French impressionist artist's works.

The original works were painted in the last 20 years of the artist's life, which were spent at Les Collettes, a farm full of olive trees.

The paintings are now scattered among some 20 museums worldwide, according to Teit Ritzau, the CEO of UEG ADM, a Danish company which specializes in traveling exhibits, and which is helping run the ongoing Renoir exhibition.

The one-off copies were made more than a decade ago for a film about Renoir's life by his great-grandson Jacques Renoir, a film director and photographer.

The great-grandson, who attended the exhibition opening, tells China Daily that the Renoir family were authorized by related museums to make these copies of the original paintings.

Jacques Renoir's black-and-white photos of Les Collettes are also on show.

The past five years have seen many "Western art masters' shows" organized and funded by the mainland's private sector. The exhibitions, which introduce the art of household names in impressionism and modernism to audiences in major cities, attract large crowds.

In the past, such exhibitions were held mostly by national museums in Beijing. But now, companies that boast abundant capital are venturing into this growing market that is satisfying a public craving for quality art products.

Yan says he hit upon the idea to bring more Western artworks to China after he staged two Homage to Masters exhibitions during the Nanjing International Art Festival, an annual event staged since 2014.

The exhibitions displayed part of his collection of Western art and he says he was impressed by the influx of visitors, including some who had "queued for between five and six hours to see the shows".

"After all, only a small proportion of Chinese are able to visit museums overseas and view the masterpieces. A greater number of people hope to enjoy Western art within a short distance of their homes and workplaces," he says.

But some of the exhibitions that claim to showcase "masters' art" have drawn criticism for not showing real masterpieces and being too commercial.

Visitors to the Picasso in China exhibition now on in Beijing complain that after spending 100 yuan ($15) they get to see mostly lithographs and ceramics done by the Spanish artist. The 83 works on display are said to be from eight private collectors abroad.

Commenting on the Picasso exhibition, Chinese painter and art critic Xi Yaoyi says: "It only has a few canvases that are not even representative of Picasso's art. At this show, people can't fully understand his style or achievements."

Chen Lyusheng, deputy director of the National Museum of China, says that prolific artists like Picasso produced thousands of works and they are widely dispersed among public museums and galleries and in private collectors.

He says it is not difficult to mount an exhibition of a master's works by borrowing them from private collectors, but the best pieces are largely held by prestigious museums that are very selective about where their treasures are shown.

However, rising to the defense of private organizations that hold such events, Yan says they need time to become more professional.

He says unlike State-funded museums, the private sector has to sustain itself on tickets and marketing so that they can stage more shows.

He says the cost of the ongoing Renoir exhibition includes insurance, transportation, payment for borrowing works and sometimes even conservation fees. The total cost of such shows can work out to several millions of yuan.

He says he hopes to recover his costs through ticket sales (45 yuan for an adult) and other promotional activities. The exhibition ends on Aug 20 and will move to a shopping mall in Shenzhen in September.

Yan's company is also working with Germany's Bell Art Center to present an exhibition of Anselm Kiefer's works at the Baijia Lake Art Center later this year. And because of his sizeable body of work, Yan estimates the cost of the event will run into tens of millions of yuan.

The 71-year-old German artist is the first on a list of Western artists whose works Yan plans to showcase under a five-year agreement with the Bell Art Center signed recently, he says.

Yan says private organizations can also help in marketing Chinese artists abroad.

He says an overseas exhibition of Chinese oil painter Jin Shangyi is on his agenda.