“Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965)” contains nearly 90 paintings. Early examples depict Tang-style court ladies, scholars perusing paintings and a calligrapher monk imbibing wine before setting to work. In later works, a line of destroyers plows through waves, and steam shovels strip mine for coal. The most imposing works throughout are panoramic views of majestic mountains, rivers and forests, in which a range of robust textures and scratchy, dry-brush markings impart a vigorous, sometimes wild sense of modernity.

Image Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) “Drunken Monk” (1944), a hanging scroll, at the Metropolitan Museum. Credit... Nanjing Museum

Organized by the Nanjing Museum in China and the Cleveland Museum of Art, this exhibition is a landmark: the first full-dress retrospective of a 20th-century Chinese artist to be seen at the Met. It occupies ground prepared by the excellent exhibitions of classic Chinese painting that Maxwell K. Hearn, a longtime curator at the Met and now head of its department of Asian art, has been staging there for more than three decades.

In some ways it might have made more sense for the Met’s first 20th-century Chinese artist to be a better-known figure, like Fu’s contemporary Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) or the elder Qi Baishi (1864-1957). (Their work has been in the news because, thanks to the enthusiasm and wealth of Chinese collectors, it ranked first and second in earnings at auction last year, above Warhol’s and Picasso’s). Zhang, a collector and brilliant forger of historical paintings, left China forever in 1948, and went on to develop an astute fusion of Chinese ink painting and Abstract Expressionism that can be quite dazzling. Qi, an immensely popular painter who specialized in bold, often whimsical calligraphic close-ups of vegetables, insects and water creatures, stayed on, protected by his fame, living and working in Beijing a bit like a hermit in his hut, and having little to do with Mao’s regime.

With Fu, we have something altogether different, an implicitly more austere, possibly academic artist, but one immersed in his moment. Not only did Fu not leave China, but he also participated actively in the Communist apparatus as an artist, teacher and writer. His work reflects its historical context with particular vividness, although it is also sometimes so completely reflective that it becomes a curiosity, a historical artifact, and we lose the sense of its art. All of this means that the show raises all sorts of interesting questions about the relationship between art and freedom, aesthetics and politics, and innovation and tradition.

The through line of Fu’s career is ink-and-brush painting, for which he was never less than an impassioned advocate even when, in the 1920s, he had little access to it. Sequestered in private collections in a country with few museums, this kind of painting was also frequently viewed as a fusty, if not decadent, relic of the imperialist elite. Fu would come into his own as an artist only in the 1930s, after two extended visits to Japan, where Chinese painting, treasured for centuries, was more accessible and avidly studied by artists and art historians alike. Also important to him were histories of Chinese painting by Japanese art historians, which he translated into Chinese and which influenced his own writings.