The Reappearance of Regional Art

As we described at the beginning of this chapter, the cautious liberalization proposed by Zhou Enlai in his speeches of 1959 and 1961 was paralleled by greater diversity in the administration and practice of art. The most notable trends of the period—the development of regional schools of art and the limited reappearance of artistic individualism—may be attributed, in part, to

this ideological stance. A more important change, however, was wrought by the administrative decentralization of the Great Leap Forward.

This restructuring had irreversible consequences for the Chinese art world in its encouragement of local artistic activity. While events in the major art centers of Beijing and Shanghai continued to be reported nationally, regional groups of artists began to receive unprecedented national attention during the Great Leap Forward. Conditions necessary for this critical success included one or more effective local arts leaders, unusually strong support for these leaders by the provincial party organization or by a national political leader, a local group of capable artists, and good relations with national CAA leaders. In most cases, such groups worked in Chinese media, such as guohua or wood-block prints. We will look at two schools of guohua painters, those of Nanjing and Xi'an, and two groups of printmakers, those of Sichuan and Heilongjiang.

The Nanjing Painters

The group that received the earliest and most enthusiastic national recognition was the Nanjing guohua painters. In a review of a late-1958 exhibition of their work in Beijing, editors of the official art journal cited the strength of Nanjing painting as evidence that guohua was flourishing nationwide. Further, in this era of decentralization, the Jiangsu provincial party secretary was lauded for his successful participation in their activities.^[147]

Although some of the Nanjing artists had exhibited in previous exhibitions

Image not available

Figure 81
Zhao Hongben and Qian Xiaodai,
illustrations for Monkey Beats the
White-boned Demon, lianhuanhua, ink
on paper.

and had strong individual reputations, the emergence of the Nanjing painters as a regional group corresponded with a new cultural formula. Mao Zedong urged that literature and art should "combine revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism." Party theorist Zhou Yang elaborated on Mao's views in a June 1958 article that found both realism and romanticism in the works of great writers of China's past. The new formula was exemplified in the contemporary period by Chinese folk songs and by the poems of Chairman Mao.^[148]

The December 1958 Jiangsu Province Guohua Exhibition had the good fortune to open in this euphoric atmosphere of cultural nationalism.^[149] Just as Zhou Yang cited folk songs and Mao's poems as exemplars of the union of revolutionary realism and romanticism, an important article in praise of the Jiangsu exhibition identified two art forms as particularly appropriate for the current era: peasant paintings and Chinese paintings. "Chinese painting is our nation's precious art treasure," the author wrote, "with unique national style, a long history, and excellent traditional skill; it is loved by the masses and valued by our party."^[150]

The leading spokesman for the exhibition, the Nanjing guohua painter Fu Baoshi, was much more modest than the Beijing critics in his claims for Nanjing painting.^[151] He credited the exhibition's success to the unity of party leadership, the painters, and the masses, a unity that included consultative revisions of the work to be shown. The censorship or interference in the artistic process implied by the last phrase leads one to low expectations of the results, which are sometimes justified. A typically uninspiring, though technically skilled, collective product is People's Commune Dining Hall (fig. 82), sometimes called Free Food for All , by members of the preparatory group for the Jiangsu Provincial Guohua Institute. Its closest art historical ancestor might be the documentary scrolls of civil works projects and imperial journeys prepared by artists at the court of the eighteenth-century Qianlong emperor.^[152] Several exhibited works by Fu Baoshi's colleague Qian Songyan, including On Furong Lake (fig. 83), are similarly filled with minute depictions of laudable economic activity.^[153] The well-organized landscape setting of On Furong Lake indicates that Qian's particular contribution to the Nanjing school may have been his sound foundation in traditional painting.

The exhibition flyer, written by the Preparatory Committee for the Jiangsu Branch of the CAA under Fu Baoshi's direction, is more explicit in crediting rectification, ideological education, the Great Leap Forward, and local party officials for the improvement in guohua . Commentators also cited such ideals of the period as "the high-level union of ideology and art" and "the union of revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism," along with popular slogans—"The east wind knocks down the west wind" and "Each day equals twenty years"—as providing motivation for the paintings.^[154]

Image not available

Figure 82
Collective painting, People's Commune
Dining Hall, 1958, guohua.

Image not available

Figure 83
Qian Songyan, On Furong Lake, 1958,
ink and color on paper, 108 cm × 64.5 cm.

Fu Baoshi devotes most of his Meishu article to artistic rather than political questions, yet it is clear that the guohua he promoted was carefully formulated to avoid political difficulties. He describes many conventions of literati painting that his group sought to eradicate, including adulation for the ancients, concern for qualities of brush and ink, interest in the antique or the elegant in painting, and avoidance of real life and of the common people. Nevertheless, Fu Baoshi quotes the early Qing individualist Shitao as writing that brush and ink (bimo ) must follow their time. Bimo , which may be translated literally as brush and ink or figuratively as brushwork, comprises, in Fu's view, the primary expressive tools and forms of China's national painting. Fu exhorts that bimo must not be mystified or made the only creative method, nor should the artist fail to consider whether his brushwork is appropriate to his subject.^[155]

Such opinions argue implicitly for a reform of traditional techniques. Brushwork should not be flaunted for its own sake; brushwork that is out of harmony with a painting's modern subjects should be avoided, but bimo should be retained. In practice, this meant that the Nanjing group sought to develop new types of landscape brushwork to describe China's modern life.

A typical Fu Baoshi work from the 1958-1959 exhibition is his Ode to Yuhuatai , painted to illustrate a contemporary commemoration of Communist soldiers who died in a Nationalist prison in Nanjing (fig. 84). The painting is a highly romanticized view of the city of Nanjing, in which industrial images are used to extraordinary pictorial effect. The foreground is defined, somewhat photographically, by pine branches hanging down from the upper right corner. Less photogenic, but with a surprising abstract beauty, are the delicately rendered power lines sweeping across the lower right section of the picture. The middle ground, in which a memorial stele dominates a tree-covered hill, occupies the left side of the picture. A tiny file of Young Pioneers proceed along a hilltop path to pay respects to the heroes. In the distance we see the hazy city, its smokestacks emitting delicate strokes of gray ink.

The image's pictorial unity is created in a traditional manner. Ink dabs of different tones but similar rounded shapes define the foreground foliage, middle ground trees, and distant puffs of smoke, thus linking all parts of the surface. One might identify them as "Mi-dots," a way of texturing mountains popularly thought to have been invented by the Northern Song painter Mi Fu, but their function has been modernized. The composition is organized by its linear silhouettes, such as the pine branches, power lines, the crenelated wall of the old city, the contour of the hill, and the white path leading to the memorial stele. These gently curving lines come together in the center of the composition, uniting the pine, a traditional symbol of immortality, and the monument to heroic soldiers against a romantically tinted rosy sky. The work, painted for the August 1 military holiday, succeeds in combining revolutionary realism

Image not available

Figure 84 (top)
Fu Baoshi, Ode to Yuhuatai, 1958, ink
and color on paper, 60 cm × 105 cm.

Image not available

Figure 85 (bottom)
Gong Xian (1619-1689), Mountains and
Clouds, leaf from a six-leaf landscape
album, ink on paper, 22.2 cm × 43.7 cm,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York.

and revolutionary romanticism. Indeed, if one can overcome environmentalist objections to the glorification of industrial smoke, the picture is beautiful.

Fu Baoshi's reputation as a painter was well deserved in the context of his time. That his talent was recognized and promoted, however, probably had to do with high-level patronage. In 1938 he had served as secretary in the Third Section of the Political Ministry, serving under the poet Guo Moruo. Guo, who was appointed to direct the government's Culture and Education Committee in 1949, held the post of chairman of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles in 1958. He was one of the greatest enthusiasts of the doctrine of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism, in part because of a long-standing interest in romanticism.^[156] As Guo's critical influence soared, Fu Baoshi reminded the art world of the long relationship between the two men by quoting a Guo Moruo poem of 1944.^[157] The poem advocates smashing elegance, seeking truth, adopting folk forms, and pursuing the ordinary or common (su ) in painting. The 1958 publication of Fu's paintings bore a preface by Guo.^[158]

Guo Moruo's personal secretary confirms that the two men remained close until Fu's death in 1965.^[159] Guo Moruo was Fu Baoshi's primary patron at the national level. Fu's political reliability was suspect in the early PRC period, though, which led to a lowly job assignment at a Nanjing normal school. Former students recall that he required them to make drawings of plaster statues, as did all Chinese art instructors in the early and mid-1950s, but that Fu had his class execute them in ink outline with a Chinese brush, shunning the Western manner.^[160] In October 1956, probably owing to a turnabout in national policy on guohua , Fu was appointed to direct the preparatory committee for the Nanjing branch of the CAA. In February 1957, he became director of the preparatory group for the Jiangsu Provincial Chinese Painting Institute.^[161] The Jiangsu branch of the CAA was formally established on April 13, 1960. Fu Baoshi was elected chairman, and the military artist Ya Ming (b. 1924) was general secretary. Four of the five vice-chairmen, Ya Ming, Chen Zhifo (1886-1962), Qian Songyan (1899-1985), and Xie Haiyan (b. 1910), were guohua painters.^[162] Only Lü Sibai (1905-1972), a French-trained rival of Xu Beihong, worked primarily in oils. With Guo Moruo's assistance, Fu was selected as a delegate to the Political Consultative Conference in 1958.^[163] He became a vice-chairman of the national CAA and a member of the All-China FLAC, which Guo chaired, in 1960.^[164]

Political connections were one element in Fu's rising reputation, but professional factors provided the foundation for his fame. His earlier academic appointments recognized his technical skill, scholarly reputation, and strong personal style. His best landscapes of the mid-1950s are lyrical explorations of color and brushwork. A distinctive feature of these paintings is strong textural contrasts, as in The West Wind Blows Red Rain (fig. 72) and Ode to Yuhua-

tai . In both, Fu juxtaposes tangled brushwork with blank sections of paper. Densely textured surfaces, while present in much of Chinese painting, are particularly evident in works by early Qing-dynasty artists who worked in the Nanjing area, such as Gong Xian (fig. 85) and Zou Zhe. The Nanjing landscape, even today, seems more heavily wooded, and thus visually richer, than that of many other parts of China.

Fu Baoshi was not a Nanjing native, but he is well known as a scholar of early Qing painting.^[165] Whatever artistic affinities he may have felt with previous artists were probably accentuated by his art historical awareness of the seventeenth-century "Eight Masters of Jinling," a loose collection of Nanjing painters centered on Gong Xian and famous in the early Qing period.^[166] Fu Baoshi ultimately became the focus of a latter-day "Jinling" group.

A second key figure in the development of the Nanjing school was Ya Ming, with whom Fu Baoshi collaborated in executing a military history picture in 1957.^[167] Unlike Fu Baoshi, who had studied in Japan and had a well-established academic career before 1949, Ya Ming was a product of the People's Liberation Army. He joined the New Fourth Army at age fifteen and managed to pursue his early enthusiasm for art during his military career. After liberation he was assigned to Nanjing, where he engaged in organizational work for the party. He used his spare time to study Chinese painting, and much of his work shows a good understanding of Fu Baoshi's technical innovations. Ya Ming was a particularly important figure in the establishment of both the Jiangsu Painting Institute, where he served as vice-director, and the local branch of the CAA.^[168]

Ya Ming's contribution to the 1958 exhibition, Peddlers (Huolangtu ), reveals an artist of ambition, technical skill, and enthusiasm for traditional Chinese art (plate 5).^[169] This large horizontal painting successfully synthesizes the contradictory critical ideals of his time, especially realism and romanticism, contemporaneity and tradition. The general theme, prosperity among minority peoples, was politically appropriate for its period.

In the work, a colorfully dressed cluster of tribal women excitedly inspects goods being sold by an itinerant merchant. The painting bears many evidences of a background in socialist realism. The women are all quite robust, as in much Soviet art. As in Western academic art, the figures form complex compositional groups in which dramatic gestures and bent torsos are essential organizational elements. Geometric forms, such as the rectangular rug and the merchant's cart, are rendered with vanishing point perspective rather than the "scattered point" perspective of ancient Chinese art. Moreover, although the work appears in reproduction to be a handscroll in the traditional small scale, it is in fact a large picture meant to be hung on a wall, Western style.

European influences aside, the picture is clearly intended first and foremost to evoke masterpieces of ancient Chinese figure painting. The most obvious

Image not available

Figure 86
Attributed to Emperor Huizong (1082-1135),
copy after Zhang Xuan, Court
Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk,
handscroll, ink and color on silk, 37
cm × 145.3 cm, Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston.

source is a handscroll attributed to the Song emperor Huizong entitled Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (fig. 86). This painting, which has been in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts since 1912,^[170] was reproduced in Meishu shortly before Ya Ming began work on his composition.^[171] Believed to be a copy of a picture by the Tang-dynasty master Zhang Xuan, the Boston painting exemplifies a genre of traditional painting dedicated to depicting aristocratic ladies engaged in graceful feminine occupations. Ya Ming's picture, though less obviously a "beautiful ladies" painting, nevertheless has strong links to the ancient genre. Of the five males included among its two dozen figures, none plays a dominant role in the composition: two are old merchants and three are small children.

The title of Ya Ming's painting, Huolangtu , leads us to classify it not as a "beautiful ladies" painting but as part of a different subgenre of traditional painting. The Song-dynasty artist Li Song is best remembered for a series of album leaf paintings by the same title in which children and a peddler engage in commercial exchange. The objects for sale are rendered with extraordinary detail and in minute scale. A typical example, dated 1212, is far less decorous than Ya Ming's work (fig. 87).^[172] In it the overburdened peddler frantically tries to bring order to his potential customers, a band of small boys who are about to smash a small snake with rocks and sticks. Meanwhile, one of their comrades appears to be stealing from the peddler's baskets. The youngest of the boys, on the fringes of the activity, are barefoot and untrousered, presumably because they are not toilet-trained. In this album leaf, as in Li Song's other peddler pictures, the interaction between the children and the peddler is the psychological focus of the work. Mothers and nurses, when present in Li's

Image not available

Figure 87
Li Song (fl. 1190-1265), The Knickknack
Peddler, dated 1212, album leaf,
ink on silk, 24.1 cm × 26 cm, Cleveland
Museum of Art.

other paintings, lack importance.^[173] Despite the depiction in the Ya Ming picture of a bare-bottomed little boy, his painting has few stylistic affinities with Li Song's work.

The title Huolangtu enriches the painting's meaning by emphasizing small-scale urban commerce. It probably also distracted critics from the fact that, although the subject was ostensibly minority customs, Ya Ming was in fact reviving a genre not considered politically progressive, that of beautiful women. Many of Ya Ming's earlier paintings, such as the undated Mending Nets , his best-known previous painting, also depicted pretty girls.^[174]

Similarities between Ya Ming's work and the Boston picture are explicit. Like most Tang and Song painters, Ya Ming chose to paint on silk with a me-

ticulous outline-and-color technique. While the dimensions of the two works are very different, both paintings are horizontal. Human activity is organized around bolts of fabric stretched across the composition and surrounded by lovely women. Ancient court ladies iron a section of cloth; modern women stretch a piece to inspect it before purchase. A large, flat-bottomed brazier defines the ground plane in the Song painting. In Ya Ming's work, a large wooden washtub serves the same function. In both pictures, a small child, who leans playfully to the left, animates and unifies the picture. Textile patterns, hairpins, and jewelry provide rich surface textures for both pictures as foils to the unpainted silk background on which the images are presented.

A prominent figure in Ya Ming's painting is the woman at right who turns her back toward us (plate 5). The beauty of her face is only suggested by its partial reflection in a hand mirror. This device, though not present in the Boston painting, appears in several surviving album leaves from the Song period. The best-known example may be Admonitions of the Instructress to the Ladies of the Palace , a handscroll owned by the British Museum.^[175] Ya Ming's painting thus reveals diligent study of early Chinese figure painting motifs and conventions, which were then synthesized with thoroughly modern forms.

At the National Cultural Education Heroes Meeting, reported in September 1960, four institutions were particularly singled out as progressive units. They were the Shanghai Art Film Company, the Lu Xun Academy of Art, the Jiangsu Provincial Chinese Painting Institute, and the print group of the CAA's Chongqing branch.^[176] Each of these four units, including the Nanjing group, was rewarded by an article praising its virtues.^[177]

That same month, thirteen Nanjing artists departed on a trip to sketch in China's northwestern and southern regions that was to last until December and cover a distance of twenty thousand li . In May 1961 they presented their new works in a Beijing exhibition entitled "The New Look of Mountains and Streams." Guo Moruo composed a laudatory poem for the occasion.^[178] Zhou Enlai specifically mentioned the Jiangsu painters in his important speech of June 19 as exemplars of China's rich and multihued culture. "I do not approve of saying that only Jiangsu guohua are good, even though I am from Jiangsu. We must say that every region has good guohua paintings."^[179]

In the face of such high-level support, critics presumably felt little inclination to make their own judgments about the paintings; their task was to explain why they liked them. Anonymous spectators were quoted as saying that the paintings conveyed the spirit of the Great Leap Forward, they made viewers love the fatherland, they carried on the excellent national painting tradition, and they advanced the art of guohua . Not only were the mountains and rivers new, but the look of Chinese painting was new. Some works boldly used watercolor and gouache techniques, yet without losing the special traits of Chinese painting.^[180]

Image not available

Figure 88
Ya Ming, Steel Mill, 1960, album leaf,
ink and colors on paper, 27.8 cm ×
40.1 cm, collection of the artist.

Fu Baoshi's works were predictably popular. Qian Songyan's Summer Light on the River was lauded for conveying a calm feeling in terms identical to those used by Zhou Enlai in an important speech of 1959;^[181] several of Qian's other works were judged by viewers to possess poetic meanings (shiyi ) as well.^[182] Ya Ming's Steel Mill album was singled out for its innovative use of the guohua medium (fig. 88).^[183] Indeed, this work is unprecedented, and marks an end to his concentration on female subject matter. Painted on extremely absorbent Chinese paper with ink and hot colors, Steel Mill conveys the feeling of having been painted from life (or at least from color photographs). The work makes little attempt to directly emulate the Soviet or Western styles prevalent in Chinese academies, yet it also completely breaks with conventions of Chinese painting. His only possible figural prototype is a pale one: Fu Baoshi's ancient figures, as we saw in his album leaf of 1956, are similarly slender.

We have attributed the rise of the Nanjing artists to a combination of decentralized artistic administration and the high-level connections of its leading

artists. The group's affirmation of the national tradition and other cultural policies of the period made its emergence particularly important. In addition, the guohua painting of Nanjing is a good example of regional artistic development in the period following the Anti-Rightist campaign. Several other regional groups that emerged during the same period were important for slightly different reasons. The printmakers of Sichuan and Heilongjiang, for example, fully assimilated Soviet models but used them to develop a distinctly regional iconography. The guohua painters of Xi'an, by contrast, developed a new way of painting landscapes in the traditional media. We will briefly survey these three groups before concluding with the spokesman and most important innovator in the Xi'an group, Shi Lu, who went beyond the bounds of regionalism to become an artistic individualist.

The Sichuan Printmakers

A surprising feature of regional schools of art promoted by the PRC art establishment is that most of the artists were not natives of the areas they came to represent. This is particularly true of the Sichuan printmakers, a group that included old soldiers from the northern Chinese campaigns and young graduates of the national art academies. One prominent exception, as we will see, is Wu Fan, a Chongqing native.

Artists from the Sichuan print group, despite their mutual influences, are stylistically fairly diverse. The most substantial feature that distinguishes this group from those of other regions is the high technical quality of their work and the subject matter on which many artists concentrated—namely, Tibetans. The latter was undoubtedly a key factor in the group's rise to national fame, for it gave them a domestically unimpeachable political stand on the side of national unity. The Tibetan rebellion of March 1959 led to diplomatic crises with India and the Soviet Union and gave the Sichuan prints a political weight they might not have carried in more peaceful times. The Chinese response to the crisis was one of the few issues on which the Chinese leadership seems to have been unified.

Several of the Sichuan artists, including Niu Wen (b. 1922) and Li Huanmin (b. 1930), were involved in the Communist conquest of Tibet in 1951 and 1952, and they based their work on their own experience there. One well-known Niu Wen print of 1959 (fig. 89) depicts Tibetan schoolchildren dancing and singing the Communist song, "The East Is Red." The composition's simplified spatial setting refers viewers back to the popularizing directness of the Yan'an print movement, of which the artist had been a part, and gives the work a naive charm.^[184]

The most powerful figure in the Sichuan art world was Li Shaoyan (b. 1918), a Shandong-born printmaker. Li himself attributes the great produc-

Image not available

Figure 89
Niu Wen, The East Is Red, the Sun Is
Rising, 1959, monochromatic woodblock
print, 36 cm × 34.5 cm, collection of the
Chinese Artists Association, Sichuan
Branch.

tivity of the Sichuan group between 1958 and 1966 to the secretary of the municipal party committee, Ren Baige, who encouraged artists to make prints rather than waste time on politics.^[185] As the Niu Wen print makes clear, however, art of the period is closely tied to politics. The difference between "good leadership" of the kind described by artists in Chongqing and Nanjing and the alternative, which artists at the Central Academy of Fine Arts seem to have encountered, is that artists in the two provincial cities were urged to be political in their art but not to give up making art to become laborers or ideologists.^[186]

By 1960 the local branch of the CAA supported at least a dozen printmakers in its print group, a substantial financial commitment.^[187] One artist claims that no other province had such a print group.^[188] Indeed, sums that went to maintain guohua in Nanjing, Xi'an, or Shanghai were allocated in Sichuan to printmakers. This support was justified when the Chongqing branch of the CAA was selected as Sichuan's "progressive work unit" delegation to the National Cultural Education Heroes Meeting in Beijing in 1960 and became one of four nationally publicized arts units.^[189] Four artists from the print group of the Chongqing branch, Wu Fan, Li Huanmin, Fu Wenshu, and Xu Kuang, also received prizes as progressive workers.^[190] Selection of the group for national recognition was undoubtedly influenced by concerns for geographic and administrative diversity: as mentioned earlier, the other three units were in Shenyang, Shanghai, and Nanjing and included an art college, a film group, and a guohua institute. Even so, the Sichuan group had clearly been remarkably active.

The primary reason cited for the group's receiving the award was its enthusiastic implementation of the Great Leap Forward policy of popularizing art.^[191] From the dozen or so Sichuan printmakers in 1949, the group had swelled to more than two hundred ten years later.^[192] The associated artists had completed over two thousand different prints, including many that depicted the liberation of the Tibetan people. Traveling exhibitions of Sichuan prints had been well received, as was a book of reproductions, Sichuan banhua xuanji .^[193] Propaganda activities had been continuous since 1957, with monthly exhibitions of propaganda prints on the street. The Sichuan printmakers also contributed to the beautification of people's lives by publishing, in 1959 and 1960, decorated stationery and matchbox covers. The print group of the Chongqing branch was particularly praised for its excellent combination of art and politics.^[194]

It is not immediately clear why Sichuan should have developed and supported such an active print movement, particularly when dogma of the period proclaimed guohua the national art form, but the reason appears to rest in large part in Li Shaoyan's leadership.^[195] Li began his career as an artist upon going to Yan'an in 1938.^[196] After learning the woodcut technique, he was assigned as a secretary to General He Long of the 120th Division of the Eighth Route Army, a support unit that traveled all over northern China.

Li's work was mainly clerical until He Long asked him to make a set of prints documenting their dangerous journeys in 1940 and 1941. Li consulted a Lu Xun publication of Soviet prints to teach himself how to compose such illustrations. Many of his pictures for this project are quite beautifully carved and organized, though the influence of the Soviet models is strong. The completed series, entitled The 120th Division (Eighth Route Army) in Northern China , of which we saw one example in chapter 2 (fig. 39), was exhibited in Yan'an in 1941.

He continued to work as a woodcut artist in the 1940s, making portraits of leaders and illustrations while art director for the Jin-Sui Daily (Jin-Sui ribao ), the Communist newspaper for parts of Shanxi and Inner Mongolia. He served as leader of the art work group at North China United University and later as director of the art section of New China Daily (Xinhua ribao ) in Chongqing.^[197]

After participating in the liberation of Sichuan by He Long's army, Li Shaoyan remained in the province as an administrator. He eventually rose to a high position in the provincial propaganda department^[198] and became chairman of the local branch of the CAA, which was founded in 1954.^[199] Many of the artists who went to work at the new CAA branch were transferred with Li Shaoyan from the art section of the New China Daily , where they had worked under him.^[200] As in other regions, then, the core of the Chongqing CAA branch had a background in CCP propaganda publications; in addition, the artists had apparently absorbed Li Shaoyan's commitment to making wood-block prints, a feature that stamped the branch henceforth.

Li Shaoyan's prints of the early 1950s depict Tibetans in the same Russian print style he had employed for the 120th Division series.^[201] By the end of the decade, though, he was concentrating on more boldly conceived illustrations.^[202] One of his most charming prints is the somewhat atypical Old Street, New Look of 1958, an uncharacteristically apolitical image at first glance (fig. 90).^[203] The viewer looks down a cobblestone street lined with unevenly tiled stucco houses. A timeless mood is conveyed by the old-fashioned architecture, the only exceptions being two almost inconspicuous modern details: a telephone pole and two distant steamships on the Yangzi River. What is really new, however, is that the narrow lane appears to be completely roofed with bamboo poles from which drying string hangs. The striking sight is clearly the result of communal effort, probably that of housewives who have opened a neighborhood factory.

Several other woodblock artists found themselves in Sichuan as part of military propaganda activities. Li Huanmin, a young veteran of the Communist army in northern China,^[204] attended the cadre training class at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1950 and 1951. After completing the course he was sent to the south to help liberate areas not yet under Communist control. Assigned to work under Li Shaoyan in the art section of the New China Daily , in 1952 he began underground propaganda work for the Communist conquest of Tibet. He reportedly learned to speak Tibetan and to dance Tibetan dances, and claims to feel a great attraction to the Tibetan people.^[205] He indeed became a specialist in the depiction of Tibetan life, usually focusing on images of women at work. One charming image is his Tibetan Girl of 1959 (plate 6). This work, a nostalgic portrait of a youngster who had peeped into his tent after the Tibetan uprising of 1959, recalled his early days in Tibet, when only children dared to come near the Communist cadres.

Image not available

Figure 90
Li Shaoyan, Old Street, New Look,
1958, polychromatic woodblock print,
24.2 cm × 38.3 cm, collection of the
Chinese Artists Association, Sichuan
Branch.

Image not available

Figure 91
Li Huanmin, Weaving a Rug, 1952,
woodblock print, 27.5 cm × 19 cm.

Much of Li's work shows the strong influence of the Western-oriented curriculum at CAFA. As we have seen, specialized training in media such as the woodcut was not part of the pre-1953 CAFA curriculum. Although Li Huanmin undoubtedly was introduced to the genre while in the army in the late 1940s, the young artist turned his attention back to woodcuts only after arriving in Sichuan. By 1952 he had begun making woodblock images of Tibetans at work. Weaving a Rug of that year displays a great interest in the technical possibilities of the medium, as the artist explores textural contrasts between

Image not available

Figure 92
Li Huanmin, Golden Road, 1963, polychromatic
woodblock print, 54.3 cm ×
49 cm, collection of the Chinese
Artists Association, Sichuan Branch.

fiber, wood, and foliage (fig. 91). While the theme of the picture is human labor, the figures occupy a comparatively small part of the composition and do not engage in dramatic gestures; Li had not yet absorbed the heroic aesthetic of mid-1950s socialist realism.^[206] His later work, such as Golden Road of 1963 (fig. 92), places figures in a much more dramatic and central position, an

indication that even the most remote parts of the Chinese art world had learned about up-to-date Soviet art.

A CAFA-trained artist of a later generation arrived in Sichuan in 1958. Xu Kuang had studied at the privately run Shanghai Tao Xingzhi Academy of Arts, a school for gifted children, between 1951 and 1954. In 1954 he was successful in admission examinations to the CAFA middle school, where he gained a firm grounding in socialist realist theory, in Soviet-style drawing, and in oil painting. A number of his classmates at the CAFA middle school were admitted to the college upon graduation. During the 1957-1958 movement, however, Xu Kuang was identified as a rightist and sent to work in Sichuan.

Once he arrived in Sichuan, the leadership apparently valued his talent sufficiently to encourage his art rather than punish his adolescent political errors, and by 1960 he was honored nationally as a "progressive worker." An early print, his 1959 Awaiting the Ferry , depicts four students at the wharf (fig. 93). As is typical of academically trained artists from the mid-fifties onward, his figures are large and dramatically posed, conceived to maximize psychological contrasts. A powerfully muscled standing youth waits with hands on hips and face turned to search the distant waters. A seated girl crosses her arms in a more resigned gesture of impatience. Two other girls happily read, as though oblivious to the passage of time. Large, theatrical figures are typical of Soviet art of the period, but the young printmaker has Sinicized the image somewhat, minimizing shadows on faces and adopting a palette based largely on inklike shades of gray. Although Xu Kuang was probably too young to influence the established printmakers of the local CAA branch, it is interesting to observe traces of the heroic academy style appearing in their works during subsequent years.

Wu Fan, the only Sichuan native in the group, contributed a rather different approach. He was trained at the National Hangzhou Arts Academy between 1944 and 1948, the first two years of which the academy was actually in wartime exile in his native Chongqing. Enrolled in the guohua major until the school returned to Hangzhou, he subsequently switched to the Western painting major. The prewar academy in Hangzhou, as we have seen, encouraged experimentation and individuality; all that changed only in the 1950s, when the curriculum became much more circumscribed.

Wu returned to Chongqing after graduation to work as a middle school art teacher. According to Wang Zhaowen, Wu had an early interest in communism. He was immediately given a cultural position by the Communist government in Chongqing, and in 1950 he began to work as an editor for the Chongqing Municipal Federation of Art and Literary Circles. In 1956 he was transferred to the Chongqing branch of the Chinese Artists Association, where he was affiliated with the print group.^[207]

Most of his published prints date to the period after 1956; in fact, it

Image not available

Figure 93
Xu Kuang, Awaiting the Ferry, 1959,
polychromatic woodblock print,
40.3 cm × 33 cm.

appears that his emergence as a printmaker was the result of the artistic opportunities afforded by his new position. The distinguishing feature of his early prints is their great variety, probably an indication of both personal exploration and political zeal. They proceed from an up-to-date Soviet-style "girl-and-tractor" picture, in which the viewer looks up at the heroine as though from a rabbit's-eye view, to a series of sympathetic studies of young working women, mainly dining hall workers and bus ticket vendors, to sweet images of peasant children at play and work.^[208] His stylistic breakthrough occurred around 1957, a result of the national emphasis on indigenous styles. He began experimenting with Chinese water-based ink and pigments (shuiyin ) rather than with the more commonly used European-style oil-based printing ink. A 1957 effort, Planting Season , depicts peasants planting rice shoots on a green hilltop

Image not available

Figure 94
Wu Fan, Planting Season, 1957, polychromatic
woodblock print, 35.2 cm ×
16 cm, collection of the artist.

(fig. 94). Pale ink gives the impression of a spring drizzle obscuring distant mountains. The work has the flavor of a guohua painting, an effect created, in part, by carefully varying the tones of diluted ink applied to the block. The accidental quality of the technique thus makes each print vary slightly from every other.

Wu Fan's best-known work is Dandelion , executed in 1959 (fig. 95).^[209] A peasant girl, presumably sent by her family or commune to gather grass, has put down her empty basket and hoe to play with a dandelion. The piece won first prize at an exhibition in Leipzig and may be the most frequently reproduced of all Chinese prints. Most of Wu Fan's colleagues, including Li Shaoyan and Li Huanmin, attempted prints in the shuiyin technique in 1958 or 1959, and even Xu Kuang sought shuiyin effects in some editions of his oil print Awaiting the Ferry . Although Wu Fan made several standard socialist works, his lyrical shuiyin prints define his personal style, one in which drama is removed from his subjects and replaced by an introspective calm.

Ellen Laing has observed that the calligraphic lines of the carving and the simple color scheme of Dandelion recall Qing-dynasty books and stationery, as does the shuiyin technique itself.^[210] These characteristics run through Wu Fan's later prints, even those that differ most obviously from traditional compositions and themes. His Small Bus Station of 1964 depicts a pretty young ticket seller from a long-distance bus taking a drink as she waits for passengers

Image not available

Figure 95
Wu Fan, Dandelion, 1959, polychromatic
woodblock print, 54.6 cm × 36.5
cm, collection of the Chinese Artists
Association, Sichuan Branch.

Image not available

Figure 96
Wu Fan, A Small Bus Station, 1964,
polychromatic woodblock print,
34.6 cm × 16.3 cm, collection of the
artist.

to board (fig. 96). As in his earlier prints, black and gray are the predominant tonalities, but this print also includes touches of the bright red that characterizes art of the Cultural Revolution era. The theme is similar to those of Wu's earlier prints—the small pleasures of the laboring life—but he has focused the composition in a more heroic manner by emphasizing the diagonal lines of recession that encircle his figure. By 1964, a more uniform revolutionary style was enforced nationwide, as we will explore further.

Sichuan prints between 1949 and the Cultural Revolution thus run the gamut from the Yan'an-style woodcuts of Li Shaoyan and Niu Wen, to the Soviet-inspired academic propaganda prints of Li Huanmin and Xu Kuang, to the more evocative pictures of the Hangzhou-trained individualist Wu Fan. Although Sichuan prints are stylistically diverse within permitted limits, they do share common themes. Tibetan subjects may be most distinctive, but scenes of everyday life in the region, be they images of mountain agriculture or life on

the River, all touch on local concerns. In 1960, Li Shaoyan and Wu Fan were named to the directorate of the national Chinese Artists Association (appendix 2). The success of the group was based on three factors: the energetic leadership of a well-connected leader, Li Shaoyan; strong provincial support; and a core group of skilled artists. Without the conjunction of these factors it is unlikely that any individual would have emerged to prominence.

The Prints of the Great Northern Wastes

The woodblock print movement of Heilongjiang shares several characteristics with other regional art. Its rise to national fame was made possible by strong support from local authorities, by favorable attention from national arts administrators, and by the political circumstances associated with the Great Leap Forward. The works themselves are filled with local color, both literally and figuratively. What is unique about the Heilongjiang printmakers is their youth and the circumstances of their artistic activity, for they constitute an extreme example of transplanted artists developing a new regional style.

In March 1958, one hundred thousand demobilized soldiers were sent to the virgin forests of China's northeastern border, an area that came to be known as Beidahuang, the Great Northern Wasteland. The primary purposes of this relocation were to solve the soldiers' employment problems and to promote agricultural development.^[211] In keeping with the mandate of the Great Leap Forward, it was claimed in a 1960 slogan that the Great Northern Wasteland had been converted into the Great Northern Granary (Beidahuang, beidacang ) in only three years.^[212] Beyond these economic goals, some settlements were envisioned as contributing to national defense and to social stability.^[213] Increasing tension with the Soviet Union was of course the primary military concern behind moving settlers into the border areas. As for social stability, that reference pertained not only to issues of employment but also to the rightists who were sent to work alongside the soldiers in Beidahuang.^[214]

Organization of the demobilized soldiers lay in the hands of the local agricultural reclamation bureau, which retained many aspects of its military origins. Soon after arriving in Heilongjiang, the regional authorities made inquiries of their superiors at the Agricultural Reclamation Ministry in Beijing about initiation and administration of cultural activities. Permission was granted to organize personnel for the purpose of publicizing the production and construction projects in Beidahuang. By the following year, almost five hundred people had been assigned to various art, drama, film, and cultural work teams, an organizational structure modeled on that of military districts. From the beginning, Beidahuang printmakers received strong support from the highest levels of regional government.^[215]

In late 1958, the leading arts administrator of the region was Zhang

Zuoliang (b. 1927), a Shandong native. Zhang had joined the Eighth Route Army in 1944 and subsequently worked for the military as a propagandist. In 1952 he was appointed an art editor of Beijing's Jiefangjun huabao (Liberation Army Pictorial).^[216] Zhang volunteered to move to the border region in early 1958; immediately upon his arrival in Heilongjiang that March he was assigned to organize publications and propaganda in the area.

The most important artist in the border region was the young printmaker Chao Mei (b. 1931), who had recently been transferred to Heilongjiang from Harbin. Though originally sent to do farm labor, upon Zhang Zuoliang's request in late 1958 Chao was assigned to the newly established Beidahuang Pictorial Publishing House. Chao Mei, also a Shandong native, had grown up in Nanjing. He joined the People's Liberation Army in 1949 and, like Zhang, worked in art propaganda. During the 1950s he was an art cadre at the Harbin Military Engineering Academy.^[217] After their relocation to Heilongjiang the two young men oversaw an active print movement. Indeed, prints by Zhang Zuoliang and Chao Mei came to represent the new territory.^[218]

In September 1958 it was decided to publish two new propaganda periodicals, Beidahuang Literature and Arts (Beidahuang wenyi ) and Beidahuang Pictorial (Beidahuang huabao ), which, moreover, would boast reproductions of original prints on their covers. The earliest such images were collaborative works, most frequently designed by Zhang Zuoliang and executed by Chao Mei.^[219] Their standard format was a dramatic steppe or forest landscape altered in some way by human activity. Beidahuang Literature and Arts first appeared in November 1958,^[220] and Beidahuang Pictorial , a glossy publication modeled on Beijing's China Pictorial and originally intended for national and possibly international distribution,^[221] in July of the following year; both were under Zhang's direction. The latter, however, ceased publication after one issue, probably because of the region's economic difficulties.

Chao Mei's Beidahuang prints were grabbed up for publication in national magazines soon after he began making them. His Sea of Grain , for instance, which depicts wheat fields being harvested by tractor, was reproduced in the April 1959 issue of Banhua (Prints ),^[222] and his Golden Sea was selected for the August issue.^[223]Golden Sea depicts two figures wearing striped knit shirts, the informal uniform of the Chinese navy, standing in front of a vast wheat field. The theme of both works is the agricultural success of the demobilized troops. Golden Sea was reproduced in a 1959 anthology intended to record the best prints of new China's first decade.^[224] Thus the Beidahuang printmakers were deemed historically significant by the national art establishment within the first year of their activity.

In September 1959, the regional authorities decided to devote more financial resources to art for the purpose of mounting an exhibition. Administration of the project was assigned to the Beidahuang Pictorial Publishing House, with

Zhang Zuoliang as director and Chao Mei as vice-director. Zhang Zuoliang began to assemble artists from among the soldiers and other immigrants who had been assigned to work in the fields;^[225] individuals whose talent came to his attention were removed from the agricultural labor force, fed and housed by the local government, and assigned to make art. Even amateur artists, such as the young oil painter Hao Boyi (b. 1938), were given the opportunity to develop their talents as printmakers. Such local bureaucratic support for artists was undoubtedly an important element in the high productivity, high standards, and critical success of the group.

Works by the Heilongjiang printmakers appeared in the northeastern regional exhibition held in Harbin in September 1959. The exhibition was attended by Hua Junwu, chief of the national CAA secretariat, and the Beidahuang artists received favorable critical attention in Meishu .^[226] Hua Junwu came forward as a strong advocate of the group and, in his role as chief of the art and literature section of the People's Daily , was responsible for much of their favorable publicity.^[227] The exhibition opened at the National Art Gallery in Beijing the following April. In October 1959, prints by Zhang Zuoliang, Chao Mei, and their colleague Xu Leng were exhibited at the Fourth National Print Exhibition, the first time Beidahuang art had appeared in a national show. The Second National Military Exhibition of February 1960 and the National Art Exhibition of June 1960 included works by Zhang, Chao, and other Beidahuang printmakers. As evidence of their rising status, Zhang and Chao served as delegates to the Third National People's Congress in July.

Beidahuang suffered great natural calamities that severely diminished harvests in the fall of 1960. Zheng Kangxing, a high-ranking propaganda official at the time, recalled in 1988 that the weather reduced the Great Northern Wasteland to true desolation.^[228] Despite local criticism, however, party authorities continued to provide financial support for artists and other cultural workers throughout the famine and near economic collapse of 1959-1961.^[229]

During the latter part of 1960 and most of 1961, the printmakers were sent to live in Harbin, where they were assigned to decorate the Eastern Mansions, a hotel, with prints. This support presumably gave them adequate nourishment and time to complete works exhibited in the Second Northeastern Provinces Art Exhibition, held in October, and prepare for their greatest national triumph. The exhibition "Artworks from Beidahuang," which opened at the National Art Gallery on November 12, 1960, was cosponsored by the Chinese Artists Association and the local government, the Peony River Reclamation District. A national symposium was held in conjunction with the exhibition.^[230] The next summer a second exhibition under the same sponsorship was held at the National Art Gallery.^[231] An anthology of Beidahuang prints was published in 1962,^[232] and the group remained active and nationally visible until 1966.

Image not available

Figure 97
Chao Mei, Black Soil Steppe, 1960,
polychromatic woodblock print,
36.2 cm × 26.4 cm.

Chao Mei was the group's most influential artist, both because of the national reputation he developed and because many other Heilongjiang artists emulated his style. A typical example of his work is Black Soil Steppe of 1960 (fig. 97). Here the artist adopted a very low viewpoint, as though he were lying on the ground, in order to accentuate the dramatic expanse of earth and sky before him. The thick, tangled grasses and wildflowers in the foreground are juxtaposed against the dark gray earth of the newly tilled soil. Above them has been rendered a deep blue early-morning sky. The visual appeal of the work comes from the vastness and beauty of the natural environment, especially the chromatic and textural contrasts between the purple, white, and deep green steppe grasses and the rich black soil from which they grow. The political message of the image is that human labor, particularly labor aided by mechanization, is praiseworthy: the beauty of the deep black soil would remain invisible if the land had not been tilled; such glorious sights would remain unseen if the land had not been settled.

Image not available

Figure 98
Valentyn Lytvynenko, Ode to Hunting,
linoleum print, 37 cm × 47 cm.

Chao Mei's work of the late 1950s and early 1960s is highly reminiscent of contemporary Soviet art. The similarities between the landscapes of Soviet Asia and northeastern China make such stylistic affinities natural, even in the absence of political factors. Yet in addition, both the USSR and China encouraged or mandated settlement of their border areas by citizens from the nation's heartland.^[233] The Siberian settlers and the Heilongjiang farmers thus embodied many experiential and political parallels that made Soviet art an obvious reference for Beidahuang artists.

One of many possible Russian counterparts to the prints of the Beidahuang artists, and particularly of Chao Mei, was published in a 1959 issue of Banhua .^[234]Ode to Hunting , by a Soviet artist who visited China in late 1958 and early 1959, is a romantic image of small human figures camping in a lonely forest (fig. 98). Against the evening sky appear in silhouette a pair of migrating geese and bare tree branches. The drama of the dusk is accentuated by the reflection of sky and trees in a foreground pond. The work is pervaded by a

lonely calm in the face of the wild winter landscape. Compositions in which the loneliness and beauty of the natural scenery envelop the human figures are fundamental to many Beidahuang prints as well. A second element that Chao Mei shares with Soviet artists is his low point of view. An extreme example of this device may be seen in Zhan Jianjun's Five Heroes of Mount Langya (fig. 73). A 1961 oil by V. N. Basov, Greetings, Earth , depicts a cosmonaut standing in an early spring wheat field.^[235] The viewer, as though lying on the ground, sees a low horizon and a very tall human figure. This perspective device increases the drama of the landscape scene by making foreground elements seem larger and the distant elements farther away.

The Beidahuang prints were funded by authorities who justified their production largely on the basis of their propaganda function. Pointing out the beauties of the new environment and the significance of their work might, it was felt, improve the settlers' morale. Indeed, such propaganda was believed to provide spiritual sustenance for the farmers. A second aspect of Beidahuang propaganda was aimed at a national and even international audience. The purported agricultural successes of the northeastern resettlement attested to the value of the Great Leap Forward, and the romanticized view of farm work conveyed by Chao's beautiful landscapes occasionally lured young people from other parts of China to migrate to Beidahuang.^[236]

In 1962 the Chinese Artists Association sent Chao Mei and several other Beidahuang artists on a sketching trip to Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan). The results of their journey were exhibited in Beijing the next year and were part of a nationwide propaganda campaign to resettle Han Chinese in this predominantly Muslim border area.

One of Chao's best-known prints, Apricot Orchard (fig. 99), was based on his Xinjiang experiences. For this print, in contrast to Black Soil Steppe , he adopted a greatly elevated point of view, so that no horizon line is visible. Instead, the female fruit pickers and their donkeys are completely ringed with heavily laden apricot branches. Colors and textures are simplified for dramatic effect. The yellow soil from which the trees grow is contrasted with the black shadows under them. Densely textured foliage and fruit emerge into the sunlight from the flat shadows. The exoticism of the inhabitants is suggested by their long veils, but the small scale of the figures prevents them from appearing threateningly foreign. While the subject of the picture is not only agricultural abundance but also backbreaking labor, the visual beauty of the picture negates all hardship. Here, Chao Mei's work would seem to combine revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism in yet another way.

The factors that lay behind the rise to national prominence of the Beidahuang printmakers range from international politics to personal ambition. Settlement of Heilongjiang occurred in the context of deteriorating Sino-Soviet

Image not available

Figure 99
Chao Mei, Apricot Orchard, 1962,
polychromatic woodblock print,
58.5 cm × 43 cm.

relations, including border disagreements, the grandiose economic schemes of the Great Leap Forward, and the exile of intellectuals marked as "rightists" in the ideological campaigns of 1957 and 1958. The strong tradition of cultural activity as a part of military propaganda within the People's Liberation Army opened the door to developing woodblock print artists. As in other provinces and locales, emphasis on regional artistic expression led to support of the artists by local authorities and recognition by national arts leaders.

Prints of the Beidahuang artists appeared on the national stage primarily because local and national leaders encouraged the production of propaganda. Their ideological approach was fitting to the Great Leap era, when their movement first emerged on the national scene. The romantic appeal of Chao Mei's landscapes, however, was suitable to a less ideological era as well; this stylistic trait permitted his work to maintain some measure of popularity, even when its political value had receded.

The Xi'an School of Guohua Painting

A second major regional school of guohua to appear during the early 1960s was centered in Xi'an and was often referred to by Chinese critics as the Chang'an group, from the Tang-dynasty appellation for the city. The Xi'an school ultimately transcended the regionalism of the Nanjing painters to produce at least one remarkable individualist, Shi Lu. Unlike the Nanjing school, which emerged against a background of high-level patronage of known talent, this group of painters seems to have come to national attention primarily through the intensive efforts of Shi Lu, the new chairman of the local branch of the Chinese Artists Association. Whereas Fu Baoshi's reproduction albums bear prefaces by Guo Moruo, Shi Lu's are introduced by a much less influential figure, the critic and CAA official Wang Zhaowen, who in 1983 admitted that his contacts with the artist had been professional, sporadic, and relatively recent.^[237] Shi Lu's emergence in the late 1950s, then, seems to have occurred without the benefit of influential pre-1949 political or social contacts. It seems, in short, to have been the emphasis on professionalism and quality mandated by the 1961 reevaluation of cultural policies that gave the Xi'an artists their opportunity.

In Nanjing, the primary art administrators were the older, well-established guohua artist Fu Baoshi and the young, ambitious military man Ya Ming. This pairing of experience and revolutionary fervor was important in Xi'an as well, but there it was differently constituted. The senior artist in Xi'an, who, like Fu Baoshi, played the role of artistic mentor and model to younger artists, was Zhao Wangyun. Like Fu, he was an early practitioner of the new guohua , depicting contemporary society by means of his sketches from life. A marked difference between the situations in Nanjing and Xi'an was that Zhao Wangyun was purged in the anti-rightist campaign, leaving the younger Shi Lu as the dominant administrator on the local art scene.

Zhao Wangyun was, between 1954 and 1957, chairman of the Xi'an Branch of the Chinese Artists Association^[238] and a director of the national CAA. Many Xi'an artists, including Fang Jizhong and Huang Zhou, had studied with him, were recruited by him, or had worked alongside him in the Chinese Painting Research Society. In spite of his post-1957 invisibility, his stylistic influence remained strong among the other artists in Xi'an.

Zhao, the largely self-taught son of a poor family, had become famous in the 1930s for his guohua sketches of rural life.^[239] After his work had been serialized in Beijing's major newspaper, Dagongbao , he was approached by the warlord Feng Yuxiang, who proposed a collaboration in which Feng would provide poems to accompany Zhao's guohua sketches. The results appeared in 1934 in a book entitled Zhao Wangyun saishang xiesheng ji (Zhao Wangyun:

Sketches from the Border).^[240] The two men collaborated on similar projects until about 1940, when the journal they published, Resistance Pictorial (Kangzhan huakan ), was shut down by the Nationalist government. Zhao's work appeared in the 1937 national art exhibition.

In 1943 an exhibition of sketches Zhao had made in travels around northwestern China was held in Chengdu. Zhou Enlai purchased one piece, and Zhao presented him with a second as a gift. Guo Moruo wrote a poem in praise of Zhao's innovative style, which he termed "neither Chinese nor Western, but created by the heart."^[241] Six years later Zhao was arrested by Nationalist authorities in Xi'an because the painting he gave Zhou Enlai had been seized during a raid on a Communist office.

Zhao remained incarcerated for over two months, until the Communists took Xi'an in May 1949. Upon his release from jail he reportedly urged his painting students to join the Communist army. Zhao was sent by the regional military government as a delegate to the 1949 Congress of Literary and Arts Workers in Beijing. When the Northwest Art Workers Association was founded in 1950, he was chosen vice-director; his job assignment was to direct the regional Cultural Relics Office.^[242] For the next several years he devoted himself to museum administration and archeological work. Between 1950 and 1953 he was responsible for establishing the new Chinese government's control over the ancient Buddhist cave temples near Dunhuang, Gansu; for organizing the Northwest Historical Museum, forerunner of the current Shaanxi Provincial Museum in Xi'an; and for organizing the excavation and display of artifacts from the neolithic village at Banpo, near Xi'an.

Zhao's applications to join the Communist party were not accepted, but on party instructions he engaged in United Front activities, joining the Democratic Alliance in 1952. With the greater formalization of artistic activity following the Second Congress of Literary and Arts Workers of 1953, Zhao resumed painting and organized a Chinese painting research society. He was elevated to the position of chairman of the Xi'an branch of the CAA and became a standing director of the national CAA. He was selected as vice-chief of the provincial Cultural Bureau in 1955.^[243] His work was exhibited in the national guohua exhibitions of 1953 and 1956. He and Shi Lu were honored by a government-funded trip to Egypt in 1956, which resulted in the exhibition and publication of the two artists' travel sketches.^[224]

The following year, Zhao was ousted from his positions for extreme right-ism; according to a former colleague, he was classed only as an "internal rightist," which presumably protected him from some of the public humiliation suffered by Jiang Feng and others. Although he continued to participate in some artistic activities, he had no administrative influence and remained under a political cloud until shortly before his death. Shi Lu, chief of the Northwest

Pictorial magazine and a fellow vice-chairman of the Xi'an branch of the Chinese Artists Association, assumed Zhao's titles and by the conclusion of the Anti-Rightist campaign had emerged as the spokesman for Xi'an artists.

Shi Lu was the runaway son of a wealthy landowning family in Sichuan. He had received an excellent traditional education, including training in Chinese painting at an academy run by his elder brother. His youthful inclination to participate in the anti-Japanese resistance coincided with an unwelcome arrangement of marriage by his family. He consequently left home, assumed the name by which he is now known, and became involved in Communist propaganda activities in various parts of China's north and northwest, especially Shaanxi. He began making woodcuts in the mid-1940s.^[245] His acquaintance with the critic Wang Zhaowen, who subsequently became, in effect, his sponsor, writing various articles explaining or praising his work, dates to a series of lectures Wang delivered in the early 1940s to the art group of the Northwest Cultural Work Team, which Shi Lu headed.

After the liberation of Xi'an, Shi Lu, like Zhao Wangyun, was sent as a delegate to the First Congress of Literary and Art Workers. He exhibited several prints in the First National Art Exhibition, which had been prepared to coincide with the congress. Over the next several years he made trips to China's northwestern border regions, during which he took the opportunity to sketch. He also wrote poetry and screenplays. With the growing emphasis on specialization by 1953, Shi Lu gave up printmaking and returned to the traditional Chinese media. His efforts to develop a new and politically useful form of guohua were rewarded by national recognition for his Beyond the Great Wall , completed in 1954 (fig. 53).

Shi Lu's rendering of the human figure, which we first saw in figure 43, remained awkward, hackneyed, or even bizarre throughout most of his career. This weakness mars Beyond the Great Wall , in which the figures gesture emphatically and somewhat indecorously, as they might in a Flemish painting.^[246] Nevertheless, the concepts behind it were extremely important to the Chinese art world. The critical recognition the painting received was probably based more on the artist's goals than on his success in attaining them. As might be expected, the subject matter of Beyond the Great Wall is politically appropriate. Minority tribesmen react with joy at the sound of a train roaring toward them on tracks cut through the crumbling Great Wall. The picture thus propagandizes for success in bridging the physical and psychological boundaries dividing the Han people from the national minorities.

In style and format the work attempts a new form of internationalism. It is a landscape painting executed on Chinese paper, with Chinese pigments, but it is large and horizontal, meant to be displayed like a Western easel painting. Even the most traditional elements of the painting, the mountains, are not ex-

ecuted in traditional Chinese style. Shi Lu did not rely on conceptualized, conventionalized cun , or ink texture strokes, for modeling the physical relief, but used ink in a very empirical way. In the mid-1950s, Shi Lu clearly sought a new, more realistic way of painting.

Zhao Wangyun and Shi Lu's colleague He Haixia views the Egyptian trip of 1956 as a turning point for both artists. The two spent an extended period of time sketching together, an experience that produced profound mutual artistic influences. Their travel sketches were exhibited in Beijing in the same year. Some of Shi Lu's sketches are lyrical landscapes that may foreshadow his later success in that genre. Though executed in the traditional media of ink and color on Chinese paper, other sketches resemble Western watercolors more than traditional Chinese paintings,^[247] a trait they share with the works of Li Keran and Zhang Ding during this period.

After Shi Lu succeeded to the chairmanship of the local CAA branch in 1958,^[248] he came to national prominence as an administrator, a theorist, and a painter. Among Shaanxi artists, he served as spokesman for the Great Leap Forward; on the national scene, he was quoted as an art authority. A symposium held in the fall of 1959, in tune with Zhou Enlai's May 3 speech, investigated ways to raise cultural standards among artists. The group, which included Wang Zhaowen, Fu Baoshi, Ye Qianyu, Hua Junwu, Wu Zuoren, and Shi Lu, exhorted the young to develop their cultural level by reading more books and learning to carve seals, write calligraphy, and compose poetry.^[249]

Shi Lu's report on the achievements of Shaanxi artists during the Great Leap Forward exemplifies the artistic line of the period yet foreshadows his later independence.^[250] First, he reiterates such standard cultural doctrines as praise for the thought of Chairman Mao, emphasis on the primacy of politics in art, rejection of truth as the highest standard of art,^[251] and repudiation of forms of realism associated with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European capitalism. Shi Lu's conclusion is that such erroneous forms should be replaced by Mao's combination of revolutionary romanticism and revolutionary realism. Much of this dogma may of course be found in literary theory of the post-1957 period and, as D. W. Fokkema has shown, is an implicit rejection of Soviet literary doctrines.^[252]

Having thoroughly digested contemporary cultural theories, Shi Lu applied them to art. He praised new trends in art during the Great Leap Forward, including an emphasis on the contemporaneity (shidaixing ) of painting's subject matter. According to Shi Lu, depictions of actual life during the Great Leap Forward and revolutionary history paintings exemplified new trends. Classical art forms were to be continued and reformed. Four particularly important facets of art during the period were, in his view, the steadily rising standards of political thought, the nationalization of art forms, the popularization of art,

and the strengthening of local color in art. In keeping with the high-level retreats from Soviet influence, Shi Lu saw these traits as evidence of the independence and maturity of China's socialist art.

National forms and local color are particularly important developmentally both to Shi Lu's own painting and to the work of artists under his direction in Xi'an. Another issue that he addresses is the distinction between genre or style (huazhong or yangshi ) and subject matter (ticai ). Within the genres of figure painting, landscape painting, and bird-and-flower painting, Shi Lu said, the artist may depict various different kinds of subjects—thus implying that none of the traditional genres is intrinsically superior to others for modern purposes. In so stating, he makes his opposition to the emphasis on figure painting so prominent in critical literature of the early 1950s fairly clear.

Shi Lu's best-known works of the Great Leap period are his Fighting in Northern Shaanxi (plate 3) and Watering Horses at the Yan River ,^[253] both painted in 1959. The former, as we have seen, was painted for the new Museum of Revolutionary History, while the latter was commissioned for the Shaanxi hall of the new Great Hall of the People. Although these two paintings made Shi Lu a star, it was not until the cultural atmosphere eased in mid-1961 that the contributions of the Xi'an artists were acknowledged as forming a uniquely creative regional school. Furthermore, as Shi Lu's own paintings became more individualistic, his theoretical defense of his art became less compromising. While he remained central to the regional school, he ultimately developed a distinctive individual approach to art.

The Chinese painting research studio of the Xi'an branch of the CAA flourished during the Great Leap Forward. Its library and facilities were the envy of Beijing artists, an indication that it enjoyed substantial financial support from local authorities. In 1961, the group held an exhibition of their "studies" (xizuo ) in Beijing. Many of the pictures were completed works of art, but attention was brought to their experimental character by the group's disinclination to call them "paintings" or "creations." This exhibition was a turning point, for it marked official recognition that a regional guohua school existed in Xi'an.

A symposium chaired by Wang Zhaowen, and attended by Xi'an artists Shi Lu, Fang Jizhong, Li Zisheng, He Haixia, and Kang Shiyao, brought further attention to the group.^[254] (Although paintings by the rightist Zhao Wangyun were displayed, he did not attend the conference.) Wang Zhaowen praised the group for its regional characteristics. Other CAA officials and Beijing painters mentioned their attention to the national tradition, their lively intellectual atmosphere, their study of poetry and other arts, and their close involvement with rural life.

What other artists found most noteworthy, however, were the strange new techniques the artists were using. Color was applied sparsely, yet it appeared

rich. More important, pigment was used to texture the landscape or describe waves in water, thus breaking a taboo in traditional landscape painting. In older painting, the foundation strokes used to frame the landscape and to model the mountains, as well as the traditional texture strokes, cun , which gave form and volume to the mountains, were usually executed in ink. As a 1959 painting by the Shanghai artist Wu Hufan (plate 9) demonstrates, color might be added to a landscape only when it was almost complete. Ye Qianyu compared Shi Lu's innovative use of earth-toned pigments to the work of the Nanjing painter Song Wenzhi, who applied green pigment instead of ink textures to his Sichuan landscapes. Several Shi Lu paintings of 1960 and 1961 exemplify this technical innovation, including On the Road to Nanniwan (fig. 100), Going Upstream at Yumen (fig. 103), and Autumn Harvest .^[255] In all, strokes of an earthy red-brown pigment have been substituted for some of the ink strokes that would normally outline and model the forms.

Critics of the exhibition were generally approving, though the unanimity they expressed in response to the Nanjing exhibition of 1961 was lacking. Some painters, such as Ye Qianyu, praised the boldness of the Xi'an painters but continued to criticize their wildness, disorder, and shallow technical foundation. Furthermore, several artists believed that although a regional style was evident, the artists did not present sufficiently varied individual styles. Indeed, mutual influence was so strong during this period that motifs such as tangled branches, techniques such as colored cun, and general compositional types are difficult to attribute to a single artist.

The Xi'an painters included artists of varied backgrounds. He Haixia, who displayed an extremely conservative landscape in the 1937 National Exhibition,^[256] was a pupil of the brilliant painter and forger Zhang Daqian, who fled China after liberation. He Haixia, in fact, freely admits to having worked as a forger himself,^[257] a claim that only reaffirms the strength of his traditional training. Zhao Wangyun's early work, in contrast, concentrated on figure painting in a sketchy and abbreviated style. Shi Lu, as we have seen, attempted to make socialist realist pictures using the traditional media. He was the ranking party bureaucrat in the group and, by virtue of his administrative function, might seem to have brought the least to their artistic goals. He Haixia recalls, on the contrary, that Shi Lu contributed a great deal, supervising their work closely and even supplying his own compositions to artists who found themselves unable to fulfill official thematic requirements. In interviews, however, some younger Xi'an artists present a different view, suggesting that Shi Lu plagiarized the compositions of his colleagues. Whatever the truth of the matter, Shi Lu's surviving work supports the view that he was an important participant in the Xi'an stylistic breakthrough; and although commonalities of style among artists in the group make clear that the collaborative development of the new style was a complex process, it appears that Shi Lu, in

Image not available

Figure 100
Shi Lu, On the Road to Nanniwan,
ca. 1960, ink and color on paper, 67 cm ×
67 cm, Chinese National Art Gallery.

equal parts artist and bureaucrat, was the driving force behind the new Xi'an painting.

Two striking compositional types emerged in the work of Xi'an painters during this period. In one, exemplified by Shi Lu's On the Road to Nanniwan (fig. 100), mountains covered with autumnal trees fill the surface of the picture. The trees have a ragged, unkempt, natural appearance. Shi Lu's potentially rather bleak image is enlivened by the red pigment used to describe cliffs and foliage and by the purposeful file of soldiers making their way through the

Image not available

Figure 101
Zhao Wangyun, Returning Herder in an
Autumnal Forest, 1961, ink and color
on paper, 46.8 cm × 69 cm, Chinese
National Art Gallery.

landscape. This landscape style is indeed wild and disordered, as Ye Qianyu suggested, but such qualities should be considered virtues rather than flaws, for they give a sense that the forces of nature permeate the living landscape. A similar feeling is conveyed by the best ancient paintings from the same region of China. In Shi Lu's painting one detects, further, the psychological presence of the artist. His originality of vision renders technical questions secondary.

While Shi Lu's version of this style and compositional type, first published in 1961, is particularly successful, it is possible that he did not invent it, since it also appears in the work of Zhao Wangyun and Fang Jizhong. Zhao Wangyun's similarly composed landscape, Returning Herder in an Autumnal Forest (fig. 101), however, completely lacks the determined optimism of Shi Lu's painting; in fact, it would be fair to say that it lacks the officially praised virtue of revolutionary romanticism. The picture, even more wild and chaotic than

Image not available

Figure 102
He Haixia, Yumen Gorge on the Yellow
River, 1959, guohua, ink and color on
paper.

Image not available

Figure 103
Shi Lu, Going Upstream at Yumen,
1961, ink and color on paper.

On the Road to Nanniwan , is quite desolate. A single human figure walks across a clearing toward broken, leafless trees. Shi Lu and Zhao Wangyun share a somewhat unsystematic, individualistic use of the brush. Indeed, the tangled tree branches seen in Zhao's work became a characteristic feature of much Xi'an work. Only He Haixia completely eschewed this textural chaos.

A second compositional type characteristic of the Xi'an artists was one developed to describe the cliffs of the Yellow River gorges. He Haixia, who

worked in the Municipal Sanitation Bureau from 1951 to 1956, was hired by the Xi'an branch of the CAA in 1956.^[258] Three years later, in 1959, he painted an image of the Yumen Gorge in which rowboats struggle against the river's mighty current (fig. 102). The artist looks down on his scene from high above, emphasizing the drama of the human confrontation with nature. His composition is very tidily rendered, with all the trees, rocks, and texture strokes bounded by the contours of the cliffs. Although he tries to minimize his references to old painting, he instinctively adopts foliage forms associated with the seventeenth-century master Shitao. This work, typical of He Haixia's painting of the period, displays greater technical discipline than that of Shi Lu or Zhao Wangyun.

Shi Lu himself tried the same composition two years later (fig. 103). His work is more dramatic than He Haixia's precisely because of his tenuous technical control. The edges of his forms—the boat, the cliff, and the stone path on which the boat pullers trudge—all bleed insubstantially into the paper, much as the river itself appears to do. The artist's precarious technique lends a measure of drama to the scene by equating human constructions and solid landscape forms with the wild water. He adopts a lower viewpoint than did He Haixia, so that the viewer, closer to the struggle, feels greater empathy with the struggling boatmen. He Haixia believes that Shi Lu had the most acute sense of observation of all the Xi'an artists, a theory that this work would support.

Despite occasional subtle differences of hand, the early innovations in Xi'an painting appear to have been communal rather than individual in origin. The group's works went on tour in 1962, which gave Shi Lu, Zhao Wangyun, Li Zisheng, Fang Jizhong, and the Beijing painter Li Qi an opportunity to travel to Nanjing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. They viewed paintings at the Shanghai Museum, an event that He Haixia considers the second turning point in Shi Lu's painting. An album by the late-Qing bird-and-flower painter Xugu was on display, and Shi Lu immediately recognized an affinity between the earlier master's technique and his own aesthetic explorations (figs. 104 and 105). Xugu's work, which typically depicts fish, small animals, vegetables, trees, and flowers, is constructed of dry, sharp outlines and rich washes of color. His angled brush stops and starts many times in one stroke, energizing his line and his pictorial surface. There is in his work a sense of barely controlled linear chaos. Colors are mixed in unusual ways, with green and tan washes bleeding together, or ink and rusty red pigment overlapping to compose a form. Shi Lu absorbed this style and during the next two decades made it his own.

During a long illness in 1963, Shi Lu composed an illustrated treatise on painting, most of which was destroyed when the Red Guard raided his home in 1966 and 1967. Three chapters of the unpublished manuscript, however, were hidden by a young art student, Ling Hubiao, who later collaborated with

Image not available

Figure 104
Xugu, Squirrel, 1895, album leaf, ink
and color on paper, Shanghai Museum
of Art.

Shi Lu to publish them. In the chapter on brush and ink, Shi Lu writes o Xugu's painting:

I look at a Xugu painting of a plum [tree], and its angles are all squared off. Why? He took their uprightness, constancy, and righteousness as his brush intention, absorbed their snow-weighted and ice-sealed manner as his brush principle, borrowed the patterns of their crossing fissures and grids as his brush method, and attained the beauty of their spirit consonance and life motion as his brush flavor. Thus we recognize that brush and ink are the host and guest, weaving a painting's threads of life.
If a painting has brush and ink, its ideas are alive; without brush and ink, its thoughts are dead. If a painting possesses my thought, it has my brush and ink, if it lacks my thought, it will be a slave of ancient men's

Image not available

Figure 105
Shi Lu, Spring Shoots, 1973, album leaf, ink
and color on paper, 35-3 cm × 45.8 cm.

and nature's brushwork.... Thought is the inspiration for brush and ink. If you rely on living ideas to do it, one [method] will produce ten thousand variations. If you rely on dead [methods] to do it, ten thousand will be the same.^[259]

Shi Lu's manuscript makes clear that his revolution in art had departed the realm of gentle regionalism and now demanded an imaginative individualism. Distortion or abstraction of form was justifiable for expressive purposes. His call for self-expression evokes not Mao or Stalin, but the two iconoclasts who

lie behind his pseudonym: the seventeenth-century painter Shitao and the early-twentieth-century writer Lu Xun.

As it later became clear, lack of individualism was not a problem from which Shi Lu suffered. Even at the 1961 conference, ostensibly called to seek suggestions for the improvement of Shaanxi painting, he felt obliged to defend stylistic characteristics that others believed to be faults. Wildness, in his view, was the antithesis of scholarly elegance, and was preferable.^[260]

This view was not universally appreciated, and by 1963 Shi Lu's work was mocked by some critics as "wild, weird, chaotic, and black."^[261] Shi Lu responded to this apparent insult sarcastically, making "wild, weird, chaotic, and black" a kind of personal motto. He wrote in a 1963 poem:

People may scold my wildness, but I'm even wilder.
Collecting the ordinary, I make marvelous pictures.
People rebuke my weirdness, how weird am I!
Disdaining to be a slave, I think for myself.
People say I'm chaotic, but I'm not chaotic—
The method that has no method is the strictest method.
People mock my blackness, but I'm not too black.
If black will startle the mind, I can move the soul.
"Wild, weird, chaotic, black"—not worth discussion.
You have a tongue, I have a heart and mind.
Life gives me new ideas, and I paint its spirit.^[262]

With his 1963 illness Shi Lu entered a period of personal and artistic development that was crucial to his painting but filled with psychological suffering. A scandal about a love affair made him a target of the leftist political campaigns launched in 1963. Beyond the personal turmoil it may have caused, this weakness threatened his leadership position in both the party and the art community. He sought to make an artistic comeback in 1964 with his monumental Ferry to the East , prepared for the National Military Exhibition. In this work Shi Lu sought to demonstrate his newly invented brush techniques, which involved building human forms from angular strokes of black or pink-orange paint.^[263] When the painting was reviewed by CAA leaders Hua Junwu and Cai Ruohong, however, they failed to appreciate his abstraction of the figure. Cai Ruohong reportedly made the tactless, if aesthetically justifiable, comment that Shi Lu had skinned all the people he painted. The disappointment of his failure to satisfy the official critics, combined with personal and physical problems, is believed by one colleague to have been the first step on a difficult psychological journey. On the way, Shi Lu produced his most original paintings; but by its end, he was freed from the constraints of party policy by madness.^[264]