Italian painter's brush with New China came five decades ago

CAFA Art Museum Director Wang Huangsheng says, "Sassu's artistic language combines romantic feelings with realistic attitudes. He constructed an enchanting atmosphere of traditional Italian art with powerful colors and daring strokes, and meanwhile expressed the dignity of life."

The exhibition also displays dozens of diaries and sketches Sassu made during his 1956 visit. He then headed a delegation of Italian artists, who were among the first Western intellectuals setting foot in China after 1949.

Sassu detailed their traveling in cities including Beijing, Shenyang, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong in his autography A Cry of Color.

Sassu wrote that his first hours in China were as fantastic as how the Orient was portrayed in The Thousand and One Nights, for China had numerous colors that were beyond people's imagination. For instance, he compared the sandy wind in Beijing to "an orange and yellow layer of yarn".

One of Sassu's most fruitful days in China was visiting Qi Baishi at his Beijing home.

Sassu said meeting the master of Chinese painting and seeing his art and the emotion in his works were crucial, maybe even more important than meeting Picasso.

"Through those works of flowers and birds, and fish, he shows the sensitiveness as an artist in depicting nature," Sassu said.