The oil painting Put Down Your Whip, by the famous painter Xu Beihong, had a turnover of HK$ 72 million in Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong on April 7, not only significantly refreshing Xu Beihong’s painting auction record, but also hitting a new world auction record for Chinese paintings once again.
At 7 p.m., located at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, the auction venue was full of audience. Put Down Your Whip was at a price of HK$ 2,000 million for starting, and then the price rose alternately. A telephone bidding competitors won after bidding with other bidders for about 10 minutes at the final hammer price of HK$ 64 million. Plus commissions and other expenses of HK$ 8,000,000, this anonymous collectors will pay the price of HK $ 72 million to get the painting.
Put Down Your Whip is adapted from the famous playwright Tian Han, according to the German writer Goethe one-act play adapted by his novel, and is adapted into a war street play later. In October 1939 , Xu Beihong saw the China National Salvation Theater was giving the performances on a plaza in Singapore, deeply moved , and took about 10 days time to create a piece of anti-Japanese theme paintings.
This oil painting Put Down Your Whip is 1.44 meters high , 0.9 meters wide , and Xu Beihong painted the play’s protagonist, a famous actor Anna close to the real proportion. In the painting, Anna wearing a blue and white pattern dress, holding red silk, dancing, young and old look intoxicated to watch, and there are some rags, someone in military uniform with guns, making a lifelike painting reproduction of the life of the state and heavy mood of the people during the war.
This painting has repeatedly exhibited in Xu Beihong’s lifetime, but since 1954 it “disappeared”. The auction house got the painting from an Asian collector, making it reappear after hiding half a century before the world .
Last November, Xu Beihong’s painting Slave and Lion was sold for HK$ 53.88 million in Hong Kong, making a world auction record for Chinese paintings at that time.
