Two
The Reform of Chinese Art 1949-1952

Liberation: Communists and Academics Unite

After Communist troops captured Tianjin in January 1949, the Nationalist general of Beiping surrendered.^[1] The People's Liberation Army (PLA) peacefully entered the city on January 31, 1949,^[2] and the task of bringing non-Communist artists under the control of the new regime began. The decisions made during this critical transition period irreversibly altered the lives and careers of many artists, Communist and non-Communist alike.

On March 8, 1949, by order of the military official in charge of administering Beiping, Ye Jianying, National Beiping Arts College was taken over by the military. Sha Kefu, who had served as vice-director of the Yan'an Lu Xun Academy of Literature and Arts and later as director of the College of Arts and Literature of the Jin-Cha-Ji North China United Revolutionary University, was sent as military representative to the school. A "Cultural Takeover Small Group," composed of former administrators from the same college, was assigned by the military to direct the transfer. The group consisted of vice-director Ai Qing, the art department head Jiang Feng, the art theorist and sculptor Wang Zhaowen, and the composer Li Huanzhi. They were assisted by younger Communist artists Ding Jingwen, Hong Bo, and Li Qi, who served as office administrators. The small group decided—probably on orders from Zhou Enlai—to keep Xu Beihong as director and to retain faculty at their original salary levels.^[3] The college would be funded by the Beiping Municipal Military Affairs Committee.

Communist artists from North China United University, which had absorbed the Yan'an print movement, had spent the three previous years producing pro-Communist propaganda in the Hebei countryside. They followed

the People's Liberation Army into the city and established themselves in an old church occupied by the New China News Agency. Art cadres from the liberated zone began conducting classes on principles of the new art at the National Beiping Arts College. The printmakers Zhang Ding and Gu Yuan came to Beijing from Manchuria to work in editorial positions. Their colleagues Yang Jiao and Zhang Xiaofei remained in the northeast, where they had, in 1946, helped establish the Northeast Lu Xun Academy of Arts. In September, the military affairs committee decided to formally combine the North China United University art department with the National Beiping Arts College.

Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the new People's Government from atop the imperial palace's Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen) on October 1, 1949. On November 2, the preliberation positions of the Hangzhou and Beijing academies were reversed: the Beijing school was renamed the National Art Academy and became the country's primary art college. At Xu Beihong's request, Mao Zedong personally inscribed the new name, Guoli meishu xueyuan , as a logo for the school.^[4] It may have been at this time that it attained the high administrative status it now enjoys, answering directly to the national Ministry of Culture rather than to a local cultural affairs bureau. As part of the reorganization, the music department and its director, Li Huanzhi, were removed to the National Conservatory in Tianjin. The Hangzhou academy was demoted to a subsidiary campus of the Beijing school, a status it retained until 1958.

On January 1, 1950, the new Government Administration Council changed the name of the National Art Academy in Beijing once again. For most of the succeeding period, it has been known as the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Zhongyang meishu xueyuan , hereafter CAFA).^[5] CAFA was formally dedicated on April 1, with high officials of the Government Administration Council, the Central Propaganda Bureau of the CCP, and the Ministry of Culture in attendance.^[6] As marchers from CAFA filed past Tiananmen on October 1, 1950, Chairman Mao read their banner, waved, and shouted, "Long Live the Central Academy of Fine Arts."^[7]

Establishment of the Art Workers Association, 1949

The All-China Congress of Literary and Arts Workers (Zhongguo quanguo wenxue yishu gongzuozhe daibiao dahui ) opened on July 2, 1949. It was attended by 753 cultural leaders from all parts of the country. At its conclusion on July 19, the All-China Federation of Literary and Arts Circles (Zhonghua quanguo wenxue yishu jie lianhehui ; FLAC) was founded, with revolutionary printmakers Jiang Feng, Yan Han, and Hu Yichuan elected members of the national committee.^[8] The All-China Art Workers Association (AWA, forerun-

ner of the Chinese Artists Association) was established at the same time. The chairman of the AWA was Xu Beihong, director of the National Beiping Arts College; the two vice-chairmen were Jiang Feng and the cartoonist Ye Qianyu (see appendix I).^[9] Jiang Feng concurrently held the post of secretary of the party group,^[10] thus controlling the young association.

Vice-Premier Zhou Enlai, who promoted harmonious relations between Communists and non-Communist intellectuals throughout his career, delivered an important speech at the congress on July 6. He gave theoretical guidance in five areas. First, he said, unification of all China's literary and art workers was essential. Zhou identified several different types of art workers, including those in the PLA, those in PLA-controlled areas, and those in areas controlled by the Nationalists. He urged delegates to promote a united spirit among all cultural workers in their home regions. Second, artists were to serve the people, especially the workers, peasants, and soldiers. Third, popularization was to take precedence over raising of standards. Fourth, old literature and art were to be remolded. Old contents were to be remolded first, but attention should also be paid to old forms so that contents and forms might be unified. Fifth, artists and art leaders must avoid particularism but instead consider the needs of the whole country in their art. To carry out these cultural policies, he announced plans to form popular associations such as the Art Workers Association to train artists, expand artistic activity, and undertake the remolding of art. The government planned to set up its own structures to organize arts and literature, but intended to rely on the cooperation of popular associations to implement its activities.^[11] Although Zhou claimed that the AWA and other such organizations were "masses' groups," they were in fact, as we saw in the introduction, the cultural arms of the Chinese Communist party. The art bureaucracy was thus envisioned as a two-part cooperative structure administered by the party and the government.

Next Jiang Feng presented a report on art work in the liberated zones that praised the accomplishments of Communist artists and presented concrete goals for remolding the non-Communist art world.^[12] The uninspiring prose remains stilted even in summary, and it is clear that Jiang speaks for the Communist party, not for himself. Some policies, such as the party's promotion of the outline and flat-color painting style, contradict the views Jiang Feng expressed three years earlier.

Jiang dated the most important artistic activities of the liberated zones to the post—Yan'an Talks period. Forms of art that contributed to the War of Liberation included pictorial magazines, new nianhua , serial picture stories, wall paintings, and propaganda flyers. Woodcut artists, most notably Gu Yuan, Yan Han, and Wang Shikuo, abandoned strong black-and-white contrasts that the people could not appreciate and developed lively single-outline techniques.

Hua Junwu's political cartoons were particularly successful examples of their genre. Oil painting and sculpture began developing in regions where the war had ended, as part of national reconstruction. Mo Pu and Wang Zhaowen had contributed to this effort. Notable work producing pictorial magazines was performed by other artists, including Zhang Ding.^[13] Shijiazhuang Masses Art Press (Hebei) and Northeast Pictorial were the largest-scale publishers of new nianhua . Serial picture stories (lianhuanhua ) by future administrators Shao Yu and Cai Ruohong were also well received.

Jiang then described current policies and plans. As he had mentioned, many artists had begun, presumably under the party's direction, to use the single-outline and flat-color techniques of folk painting because effects of light and shade were difficult for the workers, peasants, and soldiers to understand. He urged the continued practice of this style. Art work should take its contents from life and should be educational. At the same time, it was crucial that artists study party policies. For example, pictures representing land reform should not depict people dividing up a rich man's silver and silks; instead they should emphasize redistribution of farming tools and domestic animals, because land reform policy was aimed primarily at developing agricultural production. Similarly, in depicting assaults by the People's Liberation Army on cities, artists who emphasized smoke and flames would contradict the PLA policy of nondestructive attacks.

Jiang pointed out that the new art was still much less widespread than the old nianhua and lianhuanhua , which promoted feudal superstitions and colonial ideology. Tianjin, for example, annually printed one hundred million nianhua and yuefenpai calendar pictures. Shanghai had eighty serial picture publishers and a thousand serial picture artists. Jiang estimated that about fifteen million copies of 4,800 lianhuanhua titles were printed annually in Shanghai.

Communist art workers had two tasks, according to Jiang Feng's speech. The first was educational: to quickly train many art cadres and to remold folk artists and guohua artists to serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers. The second was productive: to use modern printing technology to issue art in large quantities for the masses. The goal was to win over the large market for older types of art.

The newly founded Chinese government's policy toward literature and the arts was published in October 1949, three months after the Congress of Literary and Art Workers met. Literature and the arts should serve the people, should inspire the political enlightenment of the people, and should encourage the people's enthusiasm for labor. Excellent works of literature and art should be rewarded.^[14] The first document issued by the newly established Government Administration Council is believed to have been an order drafted by Cai

Ruohong at the request of Mao Zedong and Zhou Yang to promote the production of modern new year's pictures (xin nianhua ). Soon after, a similar order was issued about serial picture books.^[15]

First National Art Exhibition

The first National Art Exhibition was held at the National Beiping Arts College in conjunction with the July 1949 Congress of Literary and Arts Workers. The works of 301 artists exemplified the artistic concerns of the day. A catalogue published in October divided the works into five categories: painting, woodblock prints, new year's pictures, cartoons, and sculpture.^[16] The editors strictly avoided separating Western-style painting from works executed in the traditional Chinese medium of ink on paper or silk, but more recent accounts assert that only twenty-seven of the artists—less than 10 percent—exhibited traditional Chinese paintings.^[17]

In publishing the catalogue, the stated interest of the authorities was to reveal the gloomy outlook of Old China and the brilliant future of New China.^[18] Most compositions were figural, representing such themes as land reform, anti-Japanese parades, military heroes, and industrial workers. Although many artists who had previously worked in the Nationalist-controlled areas were not particularly skilled at depicting workers, peasants, or soldiers, their willingness to participate in this patriotic activity was more important to all concerned than the awkward results of their efforts. A further goal of the exhibition was to present successful models of the new art for artists and art administrators from all over the nation.

One exception to the generally poor artistic performance of non-Communist artists was Dong Xiwen's Liberation of Beijing , a brightly colored painting in the nianhua manner (fig. 13). Dong was a professor at the National Beiping Arts College who had been hired by Xu Beihong. This work was not his first effort at pro-Communist propaganda, for he had earlier complied with the request of underground Communist students to design a woodcut handbill, "The Liberation Army Is the People's Savior," in preparation for the PLA entry into Beijing.^[19] Most such nianhua were painted by Communist artists from the liberated zones, however. Hong Bo's Joining the Army of 1947, for example, aimed at recruiting peasants for the Communist army, was a bright, cheerful composition strongly influenced by folk art (see fig. 7). And Yan Han, a veteran of the Yan'an nianhua movement, exhibited a handsome polychromatic woodcut on the theme of land reform, Down with Feudalism (fig. 14). Trained at the National Hangzhou Arts Academy in the 1930s, Yan was more fluent in Western idioms, as illustrated here, than in the folk print styles he adopted after the Yan'an Talks.

Image not available

Figure 13
Dong Xiwen, Liberation of Beijing,
1949, ink and color on paper.

Building a Party Structure in the Academies

Jiang Feng had been administrator of an artistic movement in the liberated zones that had considerable attainments. His collaborators, the printmakers Gu Yuan, Yan Han, and Hu Yichuan, among others, may have been responsible for innovations in the new art, particularly the effective way in which the aesthetic principles of folk prints were combined with revolutionary themes, but Jiang Feng certainly used his status to encourage such successful efforts.^[20] The novelist Ding Ling recalled that when Jiang Feng visited her in Yan'an his conversation was mainly about his students and issues in art.^[21] The role of educator and promoter of new art was one he would continue to play after 1949, as he abandoned his own artistic endeavors for a career in administration, teaching, and writing.

In September 1949, Jiang Feng was transferred to the National Arts

Image not available

Figure 14
Yan Han, Down with Feudalism, 1948,
woodblock print, 28 cm × 37 cm.

Academy in Hangzhou as vice-director and secretary of the party committee,^[22] a combination of administrative and CCP posts that gave him executive control of China's most prestigious art college. Jiang's southern assignment has been attributed to Xu Beihong's unwillingness to work with him,^[23] a situation probably influenced by both theoretical and personal factors. Jiang Feng disliked Xu's friend Tian Han,^[24] and his 1946 article in which he castigated the idea of bringing Western elements into Chinese painting might be viewed as an attack on Xu's Westernizing guohua .^[25]

The problems the Communist administrators faced in Hangzhou and nearby Shanghai were far more serious than those in Beijing, where the art academy staff was largely sympathetic to the Communists. Between 1949 and 1952, therefore, the task of reorganizing the key Nationalist art school, that in Hangzhou, was more challenging and probably more important than a leadership post in Beijing. In any event, Jiang retained an important party position at the Beijing academy throughout his two years in Hangzhou.

At the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, a new Communist party structure was created to replace the military administration. Although Xu Beihong remained director, the core of the party administration was a "five-man small group" consisting of veterans of the Yan'an woodcut movement. The group was headed by Hu Yichuan, secretary of the newly established Communist party branch committee; its remaining members were vice-secretary Luo Gongliu, Wang Zhaowen, Zhang Ding, and Jiang Feng, who was in Hangzhou.^[26]

Jiang Feng thus held high positions in the Art Workers Association, which oversaw the making and publicizing of art, and in the academic world, which trained new artists. The two structures were administratively distinct, though functionally related during the period 1949-1952. The Central Academy of Fine Arts was administered by the Ministry of Culture, a part of the civil government. The Art Workers Association fell under the FLAC, which was directed by the Propaganda Department of the CCP. A major distinction between the two organizations was that the AWA had very few paying jobs to offer; it was, in theory, a voluntary organization in which most members, and even its officers, received their salaries, housing, and other benefits from another work unit. Nevertheless, the AWA was crucial as a coordinating structure for national artistic activity and as an arm of the CCP. Jiang, as a key policy interpreter in both organizations, was in a position to mold the shape of China's new art, and to this task he was firmly committed. He immediately set about implementing the new arts policy outlined in his speech: training art cadres, remolding the thought of non-Communist artists, and eradicating the market for popular art of a feudal nature.

In practice, arts policy during the first decade of the PRC can be broken into two general periods. During the formative years of the new government, from 1949 to 1952, artists were required to popularize their art and to serve the people in practical ways, such as in land reform activities. In the 1949- 1950 school year, for instance, about 95 percent of faculty and students at the East China campus of CAFA (as the Hangzhou Arts Academy was then called) labored among the peasants.^[27] This period was dominated by the revolutionary ideals and aesthetics of Communist artists such as Jiang Feng. As for academic artists, they remained without much influence during this early period, even despite the new government's efforts to avoid alienating them.

From 1953 to 1957, a period that corresponds to China's first Five-Year Plan, specialization and the raising of artistic standards came to be emphasized.^[28] With the adoption of many aspects of the Soviet administrative system, Soviet painting and sculpture were now viewed as models for the new socialist art. Because Soviet socialist realism is founded on academic traditions of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European painting, there was no immediate conflict between the goals of the new art establishment and the

inclinations, training, and talent of non-Communist artists at Xu Beihong's academy.

"He Brought with Him the Yan'an Style": Jiang Feng and the Academies

The story of Chinese art in the first eight years of the People's Republic centers to a large degree on Jiang Feng and his mission of creating a new socialist art. His primary vehicle for this project became the national art academy system, and through it he largely fulfilled his goal. Because the Chinese art world remains polarized in its opinions about him, a few comments are necessary concerning the contradictions in his career. Jiang Feng was an idealistic, courageous, and hard-working revolutionary. He was a man of great selfless-ness and personal integrity, committed to improving China and the world. He was largely consistent, even uncompromising, in his beliefs and actions and inevitably found himself in conflict with inconsistent party policies.

In the Marxist view of the world that he adopted when young, the suffering of the poor, with which he was intimately familiar, was blamed on the wealthy. Land reform, the first major economic project of the Communist administration, sought to redistribute the property of the rich to the poor. As Jiang Feng applied his social, political, and aesthetic principles to the practical business of administering the Chinese art world, it was perhaps unavoidable that the new art would be built On the destruction of the old. The greater good of society was more important than the situation of any individual. Functional art was to be encouraged; all other art, and its artists, would be suppressed.

The humanitarian roots of his communism, however, were never eradicated by the system for which he worked. He could be a man of great compassion when confronted with the aspirations or misfortunes of an individual, and might help such an individual even if in so doing he diverged from party policy. One such example concerns a tragedy of the 1942 Yan'an rectification movement. Jiang Feng's younger colleague Mo Pu, who had previously worked as an educator for the New Fourth Army,^[29] was reassigned to the Lu Xun Academy in Yan'an in 1943. Upon his arrival in Yan'an he hoped to find his old friend, the artist Sha Jitong, who had gone to the Communist base in 1938. When Mo Pu arrived, the "Salvation Movement," aimed at rooting out Nationalist spies from the ranks of the Communist party, was being conducted under Kang Sheng's direction, and Mo Pu felt that it was dangerous to pursue inquiries about other people. Only at the conclusion of the campaign did he learn that his friend, who had joined the party in 1939, had been accused of being a Nationalist spy. Circumstances are not clearly described, but it is im-

plied that the pressure of the interrogation led to a mental breakdown and Sha Jitong's death in 1943.

Jiang Feng, who was very distressed by the young man's death, had learned from the autobiography in Mo Pu's file that Sha Jitong had been his friend. At the 1944 Qingming Festival, a day on which Chinese traditionally commemorate their dead, Jiang arranged for Mo Pu to collect Sha's few possessions from the hospital where he had died and urged him to locate and sweep his friend's grave.^[30] Jiang undoubtedly knew that such activity might be viewed as a criticism of the party leaders who conducted the rectification campaign, but he acted anyway.

Even late in his life one finds examples of administrative behavior in which hard-line policies and his sympathy for the individual come into conflict. During his annual CAFA convocation speech in the fall of 1981, Jiang publicly criticized the artistic activity of the painter Yuan Yunsheng, who was something of a hero to many students for his work in modernist styles. Although he opposed modern art and thus found Yuan's recent work an unsuitable stylistic influence on CAFA students, Jiang respected Yuan for his talent and his uncompromising character. He supported Yuan for a promotion and intervened at the Ministry of Culture to permit him to travel abroad.^[31]

Jiang remained throughout his life a steadfast supporter of youthful iconoclasm. One notorious example is that he arranged in 1979 for dissident artists of the Xingxing (Stars or Sparks) group^[32] to obtain shelter for their street exhibition in the Chinese National Art Gallery, and he personally approved their subsequent shows, even though their radical art was antipathetic to the party arts policy Jiang himself had helped create.^[33] He undoubtedly recognized that the young dissidents had more effectively overcome the legacy of the Cultural Revolution than had more obedient academic artists. While Jiang's hard-line policies were largely discredited in the art world of the 1980s, he is remembered with great personal respect by many of those who knew him.

Jiang Feng was admirably suited to lead the first phase of the reform of art, for he sincerely believed in the virtues of popular art. This enthusiasm was accompanied by a politically based contempt for many "high art" styles and genres that led to conflicts in the second phase, that of specialization. Jiang held a low opinion of many artists who had studied or taught at the academies during the time when he and his left-wing Shanghai colleagues were risking their lives in underground work. The college students were characterized by one member of Jiang's group as painting nothing but apples, bananas, and women's thighs.^[34] Moreover, Jiang was contemptuous of modernists, including Matisse, Cézanne, and the Chinese artists who emulated them. Writing as late as 1978, Jiang contrasted the art made by his Shanghai friends and that of

"famous masters." Rather than painting portraits of beautiful ladies, still lifes, the scenery of West Lake, dusk in Rome, and so forth, the liftists depicted unemployed laborers, elderly beggars, the slums, and factory scenes. It appears that Jiang's condescension toward the art establishment of his youth never waned and was probably a factor in his later resistance to bringing old establishment artists back into the mainstream of postliberation art. Jiang quoted approvingly the preface that Lu Xun wrote for an Eighteen Art Society exhibition in 1931. Lu Xun differentiated Chinese art as being of two kinds: the art of the oppressors and that of the oppressed. The new art in the exhibition was designed to defeat meaningless, so-called high-class art, which was intended only to impress people. Lu Xun's implicit criticism of government art policies, especially as practiced at the National Hangzhou Arts Academy, led to the preface being torn out of the catalogue by Nationalist censors.^[35]

Jiang Feng absorbed many of Cai Yuanpei's theories of art, as did most artists of his generation. Mayching Kao has described a collaboration between the idealistic Cai Yuanpei and Jiang Feng's hero Lu Xun that began in 1912. Cai believed that art had no national boundaries and that artists needed a sense of social responsibility.^[36] Artistic internationalism was no less important to Lu Xun than to Cai Yuanpei, as his publications of European and Soviet prints make clear. By the time Jiang Feng reached a position of influence, the "international" community to which China belonged had been reduced to the Soviet bloc. Nevertheless, within. the cramped confines of Chinese foreign policy, Jiang Feng, the former Esperanto student, maintained a belief that China should strive for an international art.

Mo Pu recalls that in 1949 the most serious ideological problem of the Hangzhou academy (of which he later became party secretary) was its dominance by the ideals of Chinese literati painting and Western modernism, both of which were based on "art for art's sake" and were not suitable for the post-liberation period.^[37] Although Jiang Feng strongly opposed the modern styles that dominated the art academies of Hangzhou and Shanghai, he supported other forms of Western academic art. Mo Pu remembers Jiang Feng's defense of oil painting: "I recall that in 1948 I painted an oil called Settling Accounts [about land reform].^[38] I was instructed from above that this was bourgeois art, as though the proletarian class should not paint in oils. Jiang Feng helped me out of this difficulty."^[39] Jiang's continuing enthusiasm for oil painting would be important to the development of the national academy system. An oil painter in the People's Liberation Army recalls that as the Communist forces camped outside Beijing the night before the city's liberation, Jiang exulted to the young artists, "Now we can paint oil paintings!"^[40] Unlike some Communists, Jiang Feng believed that oil painting could serve the revolutionary cause as well as woodcuts.

A description of Jiang Feng's role in Hangzhou by the French-educated professor Pang Xunqin maintains that he brought the spirit of Yan'an with him to the urban academy. He required the faculty to live on campus, even if it meant sleeping in the administration building as he did. Because students were impoverished, he urged them to raise goats for milk and to produce busts of Chairman Mao for sale. Yet in spite of what may have seemed ridiculous behavior to some urbanites, his straightforwardness of behavior and his personal concern for the students made him very close to those he valued most, the younger generation.^[41] Most important, Jiang Feng implemented Yan'an practicesin art education at Hangzhou. If the first year was typical, very little formal class work took place. The irregularity associated with Yan'an's wartime conditions was brought to the academies along with Yan'an revolutionary ideals.

According to Jiang's own report, he organized three mass art activities in the 1949-1950 school year.^[42] During the first, conducted in November, the students painted eighty nianhua . The results were poor because the students simply copied images from the old liberated zones. For the second and thirdnianhua campaigns, conducted during December and April, the students went to the countryside or to factories to collect material. The students were expected to engage in manual labor along with the workers who might become the subjects of their pictures. Jiang's assessment was that by the third assignment they had learned, through contact with workers, peasants, and soldiers, to value popularization and the principle that life is the source of art. Interestingly, Jiang felt that the Chinese painting department students produced the best nianhua because they had fewer preconceptions. In particular, they were not poisoned by modernism, as were the fifth year students in Western painting, who had entered the academy under the Nationalists in 1945. This last observation seems to have been the basis for many personnel decisions.

The preliberation director of the National Arts Academy in Hangzhou, a French-trained artist named Wang Rizhang, had fled as the Communists approached. The academy was then put under military control, with the artists Ni Yide and Liu Wei in charge.^[43] Soon after, the CCP established a party group at the academy. Jiang Feng was director, Yan Han and Mo Pu its two members. A party branch was also established, with Jin Lang as its secretary.^[44] During the two years Jiang Feng served as party leader, the French-trained sculptor Liu Kaiqu, who had close ties to Zhou Enlai, held the largely honorary post of director. The two vice-directors were the oil painter Ni Yide, whose wartime experiences had tempered his modernist inclinations, and Jiang Feng.^[45] In November 1950, by decision of the Ministry of Culture, the

Image not available

Figure 15
Lin Fengmian, Autumn Beauty, color and
ink on paper.

National Arts Academy in Hangzhou was placed under direct administration of CAFA and renamed the East China campus of CAFA.^[46]

After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the National Arts Academy had been reestablished in Hangzhou with the Chinese painter Pan Tianshou as director. The Western painting department was divided into several studios, most of which practiced modern, semiabstract styles. A former student who now lives in the United States describes the atmosphere as being very similar to an American art college in its freedom of expression.^[47] After the second year of their five-year program, students chose a studio in which to continue their studies. Lin Fengmian advocated a synthesis of Chinese and modern Western

Image not available

Figure 16
Guan Liang, Cutting Firewood at
West Mountain, 1927, oil on canvas,
46.7 cm × 53.2 cm, Chinese National
Art Gallery.

art. Although he taught oil painting, most of his work of this period was painted on Chinese paper, a practice he continued until his death (fig. 15).^[48] In his method of instruction, students were urged to paint according to their initial feeling toward the subject.^[49] Moreover, he insisted that students not emulate his work but develop their own styles. Among the other professors, Guan Liang taught a style derived from the Fauves (fig. 16); Wu Dayu taught late impressionist and cubist styles; and Fang Ganmin was influenced by cubism (fig. 17).^[50] Although the students were strictly trained in academic drawing, they were encouraged to be free and creative.^[51]

According to a current school official, Jiang Feng's new art education pol-

No image available

Figure 17
Fang Ganmin, Melody in Autumn, 1934,
oil on canvas.

icy, based on his Yan'an experience, combined theory and practice. His goal was to develop the middle- and high-level artistic talent needed to construct the new society—referred to, in the parlance of the time, as the "new democracy." Such artists would have revolutionary philosophies of life and art and would have mastered their specialties. To implement this policy, the school required students and faculty to study Marxism and Mao Zedong thought; to participate in the lives of workers, peasants, and soldiers; and to change their worldviews and artistic views. At the same time, Jiang Feng promoted creative work that reflected actual life, he reformed the academic curriculum, and he cultivated student capability in the realm of popular art.^[52]

Thought reform of the modernist artists does not seem to have been particularly successful. It is hard to see how relations between victorious revolutionary artists and the explicit targets of their early enmity could have developed

completely harmoniously. The academic artists were, according to one critic of Jiang Feng, condemned and then made to study academic drawing in classes taught by Communist artists of inferior technical skill.^[53]

It appears that many of the senior faculty, particularly practitioners of modern Western art, failed to understand or refused to accept the ideological principles of the indoctrination classes. Former administrators, most notably Lin Fengmian and Pan Tianshou, as well as senior professors were unlikely to abandon the artistic principles on which their life's work was based. Many, including Lin Fengmian, Guan Liang, Fang Ganmin, and Wu Dayu, gradually drifted back to Shanghai.^[54] Others, including the traditionalist Pan Tianshou, were reassigned to minor administrative positions but not permitted to teach. Lin Fengmian applied for permission to leave China but was refused. The State Council later paid his salary, presumably because his artistic ideas made him unemployable.^[55] Other artists continued to collect their salaries,^[56] but some lived on family funds. The vacant teaching positions were soon filled with recent graduates who had successfully mastered revolutionary styles and principles. Some students were as discouraged by thought reform as the older faculty and dropped out of school.^[57]

The "popular" art that Jiang worked so hard to promote consisted ofnianhua, lianhuanhua (comic books and illustrated story books), and propaganda paintings. The first two of these categories had been encouraged by Lu Xun as fertile areas for revolutionary development and were, as we have seen, specifically promoted by the Chinese government in 1949.^[58] In these popular forms, Jiang, as the party spokesman, advocated use of an outline and unmodulated color technique derived from traditional Chinese painting. It was claimed that the masses appreciated works painted in this style.

Hu Feng reported a slightly different, private, Jiang Feng who disagreed with the idea that the Chinese outline and flat-color technique was the only correct way of painting. This view corresponds with Jiang Feng's 1946 article in which he advocated new art based on techniques of Western realism. According to Hu, Jiang organized the translation of essays about classical European art for the students to read because he believed that foreign oil painting was valuable. Moreover, he invited Hu, a strident Westernizer, to speak at the academies in Hangzhou and Beijing in order to broaden the worldview of the students.^[59]

Jiang's most controversial stance was his position on traditional painting. Zhou Enlai, as we have seen, advocated in 1949 "uniting with all the traditional artists ... who are willing to remold themselves."^[60] The problem for traditional artists, of course, would be how the art world might define "remold." Jiang Feng strongly disapproved of the traditional ink painting associated with the Chinese upper classes but found value in other sorts of traditional pictures, such as religious murals and folk prints. Jiang's opinion in 1949 was

that traditional Chinese painting (zhongguohua ), especially ink painting, had no further potential. The only exception he made, perhaps unenthusiastically, was in the case of the party-approved single-outline and flat-color mode of figure painting. Although he acknowledged that the works of the venerable traditionalist Qi Baishi, who had admirers in high party circles, were good, he believed that Qi had come to a dead end. Jiang maintained that Chinese painting lacked any cosmopolitan quality and would become extinct in the future." Oil painting has a future; Chinese painting has no developmental future."^[61]

National Painting (Guohua) and Color-and-Ink Painting (Caimohua)

A note on terminology is required at this point. The Chinese term xihua orxiyanghua , Western painting, has been used to refer both to paintings by Westerner sand to paintings in Western media by Chinese artists. The difference between the two usages is usually clear from context, but, following Mayching Kao, we will use the term "Western art" to refer to work made by Western artists and "Western-style art" to refer to that made by Chinese.^[62]

The most commonly used Chinese term to describe paintings using the traditional Chinese media is guohua . The dictionary definition of guohua is "traditional Chinese painting,"^[63] though translated literally it means "national painting." In some contexts guohua may be an abbreviation for zhongguohua ,Chinese painting, or, less often, for guocuihua , painting of national essence.^[64]Guocuihua has had negative connotations since 1949 because of its origins in the National Essence Movement, a nativist cultural trend of the early republican period that became extremely conservative, both politically and socially.^[65] In the People's Republic of China, guohua and zhongguohua commonly refer to works painted with traditional Chinese pigments on a ground of traditional paper or silk. The terms thus describe the medium and ground of the painting rather than the style.^[66]

In practice, of course, a range of possible meanings for the term exists, which makes it difficult to translate accurately. Some painters use traditional materials to paint untraditional subjects or employ their materials in untraditional ways, combining Chinese paper with European pigments, for example, or, in recent years, making ink rubbings of paving stones or manhole covers.^[67] Socialist realist guohua painting, which we will discuss in later sections, is the best example of painting that is nontraditional in style but traditional in materials (figs. 49-53). Following common Chinese practice we will call most works executed on Chinese paper or silk with predominantly Chinese pigmentsguohua . Some Chinese paintings depict traditional subjects with traditional materials and in traditional styles (fig. 18). To the extent possible, we will reserve the more narrow English rendering "traditional Chinese painting" for such genuinely traditional work.

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Figure 18
Huang Binhong, Landscape of Shu,
dedicated to Wang Bomin, 1948, ink
and light colors on paper.

One of the notable changes in the structure of the Hangzhou academy made by the Communist administration was that the national painting(guohua ) department was combined with the Western painting department; this made its structure consistent with that of the academy in Beijing and with Soviet art schools, which, of course, had no need to teach Chinese painting. The new painting department, directed by Mo Pu, did not teach bird-and-flower painting or landscape painting, the standard genres of traditional paint-

ing. Rather, a new emphasis was placed on figure painting, with fundamental technical training devoted to drawing plaster casts of famous sculptures and human models, watercolor painting, and oil painting.^[68] The only traditional techniques taught were outline-and-color painting. Old bird-and-flower and landscape masters such as Pan Tianshou and Huang Binhong did not teach. As part of their thought reform, some of them struggled to paint the new revolutionarynianhua , using styles and subjects to which they were completely unaccustomed. Those influential enough to continue in a public role, such as the elderly landscape painter and art historian Huang Binhong (fig. 18), were pressured to modify their work to suit the new art. Huang was reportedly asked to concentrate on figure painting in his art historical research, which, if true, drastically limited the usual scope of his scholarly activity.^[69] A 1953 article reporting Huang's findings on the outline techniques used in ancient figure paintings would support this allegation.^[70]

The omission of traditional painting from the curriculum continued even after a shift in party policy began to stress more specialized training. In 1955, after Jiang Feng's departure, the art academy in Hangzhou was once again divided in terms of painting media, but rather than reinstituting the national painting department, a new color-and-ink painting (caimohua ) department was founded.^[71] The term caimohua was one favored by the Westernizer Xu Beihong to signify the new and reformed Chinese painting; it was interpreted by traditionalists as excluding purely Chinese styles.

The new department was administered by the watercolorist Zhu Jinlou and other artists with a strong Western leaning.^[72] The curriculum centered on figure painting, fine outline technique, and realistic depiction. All of these qualities were relatively unimportant in mainstream Chinese painting of the late imperial period and thus marked a new, reformist view of Chinese art. Classes were taught in drawing, watercolor, sketching, outline drawing, Western art history, perspective, anatomy, and color. Copying old masterpieces, the traditional didactic method of Chinese painting, was abolished, as was study of traditional techniques of modeling landscape forms with ink texture strokes (cun ).

The new educational policies had two immediate effects. One was that students who painted caimohua had no basis in traditional techniques. As a result, they had to reinvent methods of working with ink, brush, color, and absorbent Chinese paper, a time-consuming and not always successful endeavor. Yet by the mid-1950s, new types of figure painting had appeared. Within the academies, old forms vanished as their practitioners departed.

The second effect was that ambitious students became interested primarily in oil painting, particularly once specialization became acceptable. This trend was well established even in the prewar period. Yan Han, a student at Hangzhou in the late 1930s, switched from oil painting to traditional painting studies only because he lacked money for the expensive foreign art supplies.^[73] The

post-1949 disgrace of the traditional painting faculty and the growing knowledge of Soviet oil painting can only have strengthened the trend toward work in oils. Li Keran later blamed student disinterest in guohua on the leadership.^[74] In an article written during the thought reform campaign of 1951 and 1952, Jiang Feng himself complained about student attitudes at CAFA. He did not lament the fate of traditional painting, but he rued the students' abandonment of the Yan'an spirit. He pointed out that recent graduates lacked enthusiasm for popular work (nianhua , comics and illustration, propaganda posters) and that the entire graduating class requested admission to the graduate program in oil painting. Jiang quotes one extreme student as saying, "I would rather pedal a pedicab than do popularization work."^[75] In keeping with Jiang's view, however, at least one promising graduate of the East China campus, Ding Bingzeng(b. 1927), was assigned to illustrate comic books for a Shanghai publisher rather than engage in painting.^[76]

Strife arose in the relations between Jiang Feng and non-Communist faculty during Jiang's tenure at Hangzhou. Such a situation was probably inevitable, because the academy's preliberation strengths were in precisely those areas that Jiang and many Communists considered decadent: modernist Western painting and traditional Chinese painting. The discord was probably aggravated by mutual contempt between Jiang, the self-educated worker, and the literati-artists that made "class struggle" a daily reality. Whatever the cost, Jiang Feng was largely successful in remolding the academy's artistic approach in line with socialist culture.

The Closing of the Shanghai Academies

One of the most potentially important administrative decisions in which Jiang Feng participated was the plan to move the East China campus of CAFA from Hangzhou to Shanghai within two or three years after liberation.^[77] This was, apparently, to be achieved at the expense of the private academies that had flourished in the latter city during previous decades. In 1949, the most important art school in China's primary art center was the privately run Shanghai Art Academy. The school was directed by Liu Haisu, who had founded it in 1912, when he was only sixteen. Convinced that Chinese art was in an extreme state of decline, Liu's mission to rescue it led him to seek to "discover... the treasures of art history of our country ... [and] to assimilate ... new art from abroad."^[78] After a visit to Japan in 1919, Liu became very interested in Cézanne and Matisse. The most notorious art world event of the 1920s was Liu Haisu's battle with the government over the acceptability of employing nude models for life drawing.^[79] Liu journeyed to France in 1929, whereupon his brushwork came to resemble that of Van Gogh (fig. 19). Upon his return to China, he became the leader of the Shanghai art world, a position he enjoyed

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Figure 19
Liu Haisu, Qianmen in Beijing, 1922, oil
on canvas, 64 cm × 80 cm.

throughout the 1930s and 1940s.^[80] He was enthusiastic about modernist experiments in Europe between the world wars and hoped to bring China into the international art scene.^[81] Graduates of his influential academy taught art in schools all over China.

A second important private art school in preliberation Shanghai was the Suzhou Art Academy, founded in 1922 in nearby Suzhou by Yan Wenliang. Yan studied painting in Europe between 1929 and 1931, his travels coinciding with those of Liu Haisu. Beginning with his trip to Europe, Yan painted in the impressionist style (fig. 20). While in Europe, moreover, Yan assembled a collection of plaster casts of famous European sculptures, which he shipped home for use in his drawing classes at the academy. The branch campus of his school, established in Shanghai in 1938, continued to function on a somewhat irregular basis between 1941 and 1945. In 1946, at the conclusion of the Pacific war, both the Shanghai and Suzhou campuses were reopened.

Both private schools continued to operate in the years immediately following the liberation of Shanghai, but changes were soon to come. In 1951, for

Image not available

Figure 20
Yan Wenliang, Autumn in Changfeng
Park, 1972, oil on canvas, 37 cm ×
25 cm.

example, Yan Wenliang was sent to attend weekly thought reform and Marxist study sessions run by the Shanghai branch of the Art Workers Association. The next year, as part of a national reorganization of art schools, both academies were moved out of Shanghai.^[82] Shanghai Art Academy, Suzhou Art Academy, and the art department of Shandong University thus became the East China Arts Academy in Wuxi. This move left Shanghai without an art College—though, as we have seen, Jiang Feng and Mo Pu viewed this situation as temporary.^[83]

Liu Haisu was appointed director of the new institution, which removed him physically from the Shanghai art world. At the time, the authorities may have justified the move as constructive, but in practice it led to the destruction of the two influential private academies. Some faculty were unwilling to leave Shanghai, and those who did, like Liu Haisu himself, eventually ended up as teachers in the art department of the Nanjing Academy of Arts. Many professors found employment elsewhere. The ideological threat that Liu Haisu and his school might once have posed was thus eliminated.

Yan Wenliang, more sympathetic than Liu Haisu to realism, and by all accounts a more flexible personality altogether, was transferred to the post of vice-director of the East China campus of CAFA. Yan had found a job as a painter of theatrical backdrops in Shanghai, and he initially refused the position in Hangzhou. Peng Boshan, then a vice-director of the East China Cultural Department, persuaded him that his services as an educator were still needed. So he accepted the Hangzhou position, commuting from Shanghai to teach the ideologically unproblematic subjects of perspective and color theory.^[84]

With the removal of the private Shanghai art schools, the way was cleared for the Hangzhou school, now functioning as a model of revolutionary education, to move into China's artistic hub. Selection of a suitable campus delayed the move beyond the two or three years originally planned by Hangzhou administrators. The operation may also have been slowed when the academy came under the political control of the Zhejiang provincial committee of the CCP in 1952, which appointed a party committee to run the East China campus^[85] —an administrative change that opened the possibility for regional competition between Zhejiang and Shanghai on the matter. Nevertheless, the land acquisition was complete and construction in progress by 1957, when Jiang Feng and Mo Pu were purged from the art leadership. Their purge will be the subject of a later section, but one result was that the East China campus of CAFA did not move to Shanghai. The grounds are now occupied by the Shanghai Conservatory, and the city that had dominated Chinese art since the late nineteenth century remained, in the end, without an art academy.

Jiang Feng at the Central Academy of Fine Arts

After two years at Hangzhou, during which he set up an administration to continue his revolutionary work, Jiang Feng returned to Beijing in August 1951 to assume the position of vice-director of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The artistic atmosphere in Beijing, with its emphasis on realistic painting, was much better suited to Jiang Feng's inclinations, as we shall see. Upon Jiang Feng's departure his protégé, Mo Pu, replaced him as party secretary and vicedirector of the branch campus. In 1953, Ni Yide was transferred to a teaching post at CAFA in Beijing and was replaced as vice-director by Yan Wenliang. Most party administrators who had gone with Jiang Feng to Hangzhou remained there, however.^[86]

As we have seen, CAFA retained the preliberation staff of the National Beiping Arts College. Like the academy in Hangzhou, many new instructors had been added from the old liberated zones, including Ding Jingwen, Hong Bo, Li Qi, Luo Gongliu, Zhang Ding, Wu Lao, Cai Yi, Hu Yichuan, Yan Han, and Wang Shikuo.^[87] Most important, as in all Chinese institutions a parallel

Communist party administration had been established beside the academic administration. Thus the old director, Xu Beihong, who was in declining health, gradually became less important. Probably because Xu had support in high places (most notably from Zhou Enlai) and because the differences inartistic outlook were small, the union of party and nonparty workers, at least superficially, was more successfully accomplished at CAFA than at Hangzhou. Nevertheless, real power in the academy was wielded by the "five-man small group" of party administrators, dominated by Hu Yichuan, party secretary between 1949 and 1951, and Luo Gongliu, his vice-secretary,^[88] both of whom had studied at the national academy in Hangzhou. In 1951, Jiang Feng became party secretary and vice-director and assumed control.^[89]

Jiang Feng retained a strong influence in Hangzhou, both through his personal authority and by right of his administrative position at the main campus of the combined colleges. In September 1953, upon the death of Xu Beihong, Jiang Feng became acting director of CAFA, thus formally ending the fiction of joint nonparty-party administration of the academy. Hu Yichuan, apparently on the losing side of a power struggle, became director of the newly established South-Central Art Academy in Wuhan and left Beijing in the same year.^[90]

In the period 1949-1952, with popular work its primary emphasis, CAFA did not expand the three specialties of painting, sculpture, and applied arts it had offered before 1949. As in Hangzhou, it retained a shortened three-year wartime curriculum. In addition to regular students, the academy gave advanced instruction to Communist art cadres during the first two years after liberation. Some classes were as brief as six months. Others lasted a year and a half, training artists for propaganda work in parts of southern China that were newly or not completely liberated.^[91] The young artists Hou Yimin, Lin Gang, Hong Bo, and Wu Biduan, whose works we will view in other contexts, volunteered to work as journalists on the Korean front after they completed their courses.^[92]

The studio art classes consisted of two types: chuangzuo (creation) andxizuo (studies). Chuangzuo emphasized subject matter and composition, the question of how one produces a finished work of art to serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers. Ideology and art would come together in the finished work. Creation was taught by experienced revolutionary artists from the old liberated zones, particularly Wang Shikuo, Luo Gongliu, Yan Han, and Hu Yichuan. Younger faculty from the liberated zones included Wu Biduan, Li Qi, Lin Gang and Deng Shu.^[93]

Xizuo , the second form of instruction, was considered less important. The classes emphasized technique and were taught by specialists from the preliberation academy. The instructors included Wu Zuoren and Ai Zhongxin, both oil painters; Li Keran, who taught drawing and nianhua ; Ye Qianyu, a cartoonist who taught Chinese painting; and Dong Xiwen, an oil painter who taught

drawing. The foundations of a unified academy style were laid by CAFA's postliberation staffing. Both groups, the revolutionaries and the academic realists, found it possible to accommodate themselves to the growing influence of Soviet socialist realism.

The emphasis of the art academy system between 1949 and 1952, as Jiang Feng's 1949 speech foreshadowed, was to train large numbers of art cadres as quickly as possible. Many artists who were students during the 1949-1952 period feel that their technical training was insufficiently rigorous because they spent so much time participating in political movements. The painting students who graduated in 1953, for example, executed only three oil paintings in their three years of study. Their graduation project was a nianhua painting.^[94] Nevertheless, these early CAFA graduates became an important force in the Chinese art world, and remain So at the time of this writing. Many of those who were assigned to provincial posts upon graduation became highly influential in provincial branches of the artists association, in publishing houses, and in academies. Later complaints notwithstanding, technical training seems to have been adequate for those who continued to paint. Some graduates remained at the academy for more advanced training after party policy shifted from popularization to specialization in 1953. Most important, the lifelong connections forged among the students created a nationwide administrative network bound by personal ties. Graduates of CAFA under Jiang Feng's direction, in short, became the core of China's new art establishment.

Hong Bo, who worked closely with Jiang Feng in the party administration of CAFA, summarized Jiang's art policies in an essay written soon after Jiang's death in 1982. Jiang, he said, stressed the revolutionary function of art and thus advocated its popularization. He opposed elite art aimed at a limited audience of superior people. As the national art leader after 1953 (a role we will discuss further in chapter 3), he promoted values associated with Soviet socialist realism. Jiang Feng believed that art should be based on significant subjects that reflect the socialist revolution and the construction of the new state. He valued oil painting, on the grounds that it was good for depicting real life and revolutionary struggles. He also believed that Chinese painting should be reformed, that China should absorb the best of European arts and literature, and that realistic drawing should be integrated into Chinese painting so as to redevelop ink painting.^[95]

New Nianhua

The most prominent genre in the academies during the early 1950s was, not unexpectedly, new nianhua . A special issue of Renmin meishu (People's Art),the AWA journal, published in April 1950, was devoted to reproductions of new works and reports from various parts of China on nianhua production.

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Figure 21
Hou Yimin and Deng Shu, Celebrating
the Thirtieth Anniversary of the CCP,
1951, ink and color on paper, new year's
picture.

In May, the Ministry of Culture issued its first list of prize-winning newnianhua .^[96] The inaugural issue of Meishu zuotan (Art Seminar), the journal of the East China campus of CAFA, reported that 150 new nianhua by academy artists were presented for a special viewing at the East China Cultural Department in Shanghai in November 1950.^[97] A feature on nianhua for foreign consumption appeared in the January 1952 issue of China Pictorial . The titles of well-publicized works were political: Celebrating the Thirtieth Anniversary of the CCP (fig. 21), Successful Harvest, Chairman Mao's Representatives Visit the People of an Old Revolutionary Base, A Victory Celebration on the Korean Front, Model Workers and Peasants at Beihai Park (fig. 22), and ANew-Style Marriage Celebration (also published as The Bride Speaks , fig. 23).

The term nianhua can be applied to almost any picture sold at the end of the Chinese lunar year, when the populace traditionally cleans house and replace sworn-out images of folk deities and decorations. Single- or multiple-sheet sets of woodcut pictures were the most common traditional nianhua , but cities such as Shanghai saw the rise of mechanically reproduced posters as

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Figure 22
Li Keran, Model Workers and Peasants
at Beihai Park, 1951, ink and color on
paper, new year's picture, 111 cm ×
169 cm.

replacements. Jiang Feng sought to expand the use of modern printing after 1949. Creators of most revolutionary nianhua of this period, beginning as early as the late 1940s, painted with crisp black outlines and relatively flat, bright color. Water-based pigments, either Western-style gouaches and poster paints or traditional Chinese colors, were applied to stiff Western-style paper; the designs were then mechanically reproduced. In support of this trend, authorities in the art academies mandated that student nianhua paintings must use the single-outline and flat-color technique, despite protests that such work was not art.^[98]

Although some theorists sought to inspire national pride by tracing the roots of the technique to China's classical tradition of Tang and Song figure painting,^[99] the influence of more recent folk pictures is stronger. Many such works were themselves influenced by Western pictorial conventions. Prominent

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Figure 23
Yan Han, The Bride Speaks, 1951, ink
and color on paper, new Year's picture.

among the sources for the new style was the craft of portrait painting, which had, from the seventeenth century through the early twentieth, combined carefully shaded facial features with much less descriptive treatment of clothing.^[100] Another unmistakable source was the Yangliuqing nianhua tradition, an urban form of new year's picture that was based in part on figure painting of the Qing court. Yangliuqing nianhua , produced near Tianjin, often incorporated traces of Western perspective in their complex architectural elements (fig. 24).With the new nianhua , however, the traditional woodcut style was radically altered to include far stronger aspects of Western perspective, Western figural arrangements, and newly dramatic gestures.

A particularly well known nianhua by a CAFA artist is Lin Gang's ZhaoGuilan at the Heroes Reception (fig. 25), which depicts a model worker meeting Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai at a well-publicized reception in 1950.^[101]

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Figure 24
Anonymous, The Capital's Forbidden
City at the New Year, late Qing dynasty,
woodblock print, Yangliuqing new year's
picture, 58 cm × 105 cm.

Although the twenty-one-year-old artist did not attend the event, he was allowed to sketch in the reception room where it was held at Zhongnanhai, the governmental compound in central Beijing, so as to portray its architecture accurately. Lin painted the original 1951 version in gouache on stiff drawing paper, a technique he undoubtedly practiced during his time as a student at North China University. He made the version reproduced here in 1952, when he was asked to enlarge the picture on silk for an exhibition in India. He was assisted in transforming his propaganda poster into a Chinese painting byguohua teachers at the academy. The original version, which the artist considered superior to the copy, no longer survives. The palace setting and outline technique of the work evoke old Chinese figure paintings, but the vanishing-point perspective, complex figure groupings, and modern dress are significantly different from the organizational principles of most old Chinese nianhua or figure paintings.

Prints such as Celebrating the Thirtieth Anniversary of the CCP (see fig. 21), by Hou Yimin and Deng Shu, go far beyond any previous degree of Westernization in their complex display of postures and gestures. One is tempted

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Figure 25
Lin Gang, Zhao Guilan at the Heroes
Reception, 1951, ink and color on silk,
new year's picture, Central Academy of
Fine Arts Exhibition Hall.

to call the melodramatic arrangement of figures in this work un-Chinese, for it is stylistically rooted in Soviet realism. Conventions of gesture and pose come from Raphael or Michelangelo by way of Paris and Leningrad. Nevertheless, the work has conceptual, if not visual, parallels with traditional Chinese art. The depiction of opera plots had been popular for nianhua and woodcut illustrations throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties; this work replaces known dramas with a political performance.

Other celebrated nianhua artists were older faculty at CAFA, such as Li Keran and Yan Han, or Yan'an veterans who worked for publishing concerns or the FLAC. On September 5, 1952, the People's Daily published the prize list of the Ministry of Culture for new nianhua of 1951 and 1952.^[102] The two first prizes were awarded to artists at CAFA, one to Lin Gang for Zhao Guilan and another to Deng Shu for a work entitled Preserve Peace . Two of the four second prizes went to older Yan'an veterans: Yan Han, who taught in the

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Figure 26
Ye Qianyu, May All the Nationalities
Unite, 1951, new year's picture.

academies at Hangzhou and Beijing during this period, won for his The Bride Speaks ; and Gu Yuan, who worked at the People's Art Press, won for hisChairman Mao Speaks to the Peasants . The other two winners were the military artist A Lao and the illustrator Zhang Biwu. Among the thirty-three third-prize pictures were Deng Shu and Hou Yimin's Thirtieth Anniversary ,Li Keran's Model Workers and Peasants at Beihai Park , and Ye Qianyu'sMay All the Nationalities Unite (fig. 26).

Oil Paintings in the Palace Museum

As we have seen, many of the modernist oil painters simply dropped out of public life and out of the Chinese art world. Articles in the AWA journal Renminmeishu , such as "Realism Is the Progressive Method of Artistic Creation," made clear the modern patriotic way of painting.^[103] Many oil painters who supported the new government and new arts policies devoted themselves to "popular art" for publishing houses. Articles on Soviet posters and propaganda pictures began appearing in print as early as 1950.^[104] In 1951, artists devoted

themselves to propagandizing for land reform.^[105] With a few exceptions, the emphasis on popular art meant that most artists did not paint many oil paintings.

With the 1951 establishment of a new Central Museum of Revolutionary History in the western part of the old imperial palace,^[106] Jiang Feng's view that oil paintings might have a patriotic function was accepted. Oil portraits of Chairman Mao had already been installed at Tiananmen and in other public buildings.^[107] Articles appeared in most major art publications on how to improve the quality of official portraits.^[108] By 1952, the Soviet art academy curriculum and art exhibition system had come under close scrutiny by Chinese art administrators, who intended to adapt them for use in China.^[109]

As part of the new museum installation in 1951 and 1952, artists from all over the country were commissioned to paint large history paintings of the most prominent moments in the history of the Communist party. Cai Ruohong, who worked at the Ministry of Culture, and Luo Gongliu, a professor at CAFA, organized the artistic activity. Two governmental agencies, the Ministry of Culture and the Cultural Relics Bureau, which administered the palace grounds, served as sponsors. Among those who painted were faculty of the old National Beiping Arts College Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren, and Dong Xiwen; their new colleagues from the Communist territories, Luo Gongliu (fig.27), Wang Shikuo, and Hu Yichuan; and painters from the Shanghai publishing houses, including Li Binghong. Dong Xiwen's The Founding of the Nation (see fig. 29) was a particularly highly regarded painting from this group, as we will discuss in a later section. In 1955, the Museum of Military History began assembling monumental oil paintings under similar circumstances. The new history paintings are usually quite large—230 by 400 centimeters for TheFounding of the Nation —and based on nineteenth-century European or more recent Soviet styles. Oil painting commissions for such public buildings became highly prestigious. According to an administrator of these projects, establishment of the new museums led to a revival of oil painting all over China.^[110] It was, as well, a concrete and decisive step away from Western modernism.

Publishing Houses and Popularization

Functional distinctions between institutions such as the Art Workers Association, the academies, the publishing houses, and other arts units were unclear between 1949 and 1952, since all arts organizations produced nianhua and other art for the masses. The AWA was ostensibly a popular organization, and its members usually had regular jobs in another unit. The three highest officers of the AWA, Xu Beihong, Jiang Feng, and Ye Qianyu, were concurrently

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Figure 27
Luo Gongliu, Tunnel Warfare, 1951, oil
on canvas, 138 cm × 167.5 cm, Chinese
National Art Gallery.

administrators at the academies in Beijing and Hangzhou. Both the AWA and the publishing houses undertook educational activities, while the academies spent an inordinate amount of time in the organization and production of functional art, to say nothing of their involvement in unrelated political work such as land reform. The rewarding of excellence in art, a function one would expect the AWA, as a professional organization, to assume, was undertaken by the government, specifically the Ministry of Culture. The Ministry of Culture awarded prizes for superior nianhua in 1950 and 1952.^[111]

A 1950 chart published in the Renmin meishu as part of a report on the national production of nianhua shows that practical sponsorship of art in the early period was assumed by a variety of work units, including local branches of the FLAC and AWA, pictorial magazines, and publishing houses, depending upon the locale (chart 3). In one particularly isolated area, western Gansu, the Dunhuang Research Institute, an archeological organization, took responsibil-

ity for local production. The Ministry of Culture itself directed nianhua production in Beijing.^[112] The 1950 national nianhua exhibition was jointly organized by the party structure, through the Shanghai branch of the AWA, and the civil government, through the Shanghai Municipal Cultural Bureau.^[113]

While nianhua production absorbed the energies of most artists, particularly those in the academies, another form of popular art, lianhuanhua , was being promoted outside the academies. Lianhuanhua , or linked picture stories, had flourished before liberation in China's urban centers. They had been particularly popular in Shanghai, where they reached a wide audience through the practice of renting them to borrowers from stalls or mats on the street.Lianhuanhua possessed a particularly Chinese form before 1949; printed very cheaply, most were small books, about three by five inches in size, horizontal in format, and with one picture per page. Although some artists used balloons for dialogue, in the Western manner, the majority relied on lengthy captions written above, beneath, or beside the pictures to tell the story (fig. 28).^[114] After 1949 the literary possibilities of the genre were reduced by censorship, but the artistic quality improved. Lianhuanhua expanded to include work well beyond the genre of comics, including high-quality illustrations.

In 1950, the Ministry of Culture's Arts Bureau founded a new publishing house, Masses Pictorial Press (Dazhong tuhua chubanshe ), under the direction of Cai Ruohong. It was mandated to issue popular art publications, such as new year's pictures and serial picture stories. Soon after, Cai, writing under the pseudonym Zhang Zaixue, compiled the text for Jimao xin (Urgent Letter),a work illustrated by the Beijing artist Liu Jiyou and published by Masses Pictorial. The work became a model for writers and artists elsewhere.^[115] In 1951, People's Art Press was founded in Beijing. It absorbed Masses Pictorial Press and began publishing a popular magazine, Serial Pictures (Lianhuanhuabao ), and serial picture books.^[116]

Shanghai was China's publishing center in the preliberation period and the nation's principal producer of serial picture books. Like other parts of China, Shanghai was under military administration during the years immediately following liberation. Marshall Chen Yi was appointed mayor, and the cadres as       signed to reorganize the Shanghai art world were largely drawn from the New Fourth Army. In June 1949, Chen Yi and his assistants met with 152 non-Communist cultural figures, including the artists Liu Kaiqu, Pang Xunqin, Zhang Leping, and Chen Yinqiao, to reassure them. Chen further urged CCP cultural workers not to question the patriotism of non-Communist intellectuals, for they had taken a pro-Communist stand by remaining in China. That such exhortations were necessary might indicate that abuse of artists and intellectuals by Communist functionaries had occurred.^[117]

Former New Fourth Army art cadres, as part of their reorganizing work, soon went to work as supervisors at the presses. Indeed, many artists who

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Figure 28
The Serial Illustrated Romance of the
Three Kingdoms (Lianhuan tuhua san
guo zhi), Gu Bingxin collection.

became prominent got their start in the 1950s at one Shanghai publishing firm or another. An important goal of the Shanghai publishers during this decade was to produce new, revolutionary comics for an audience of housewives, workers, and children. These works contrasted sharply with preliberation comic books, which have been characterized as being filled with ghosts, superstitions, pornography, and violence, and as being low class and coarsely executed.^[118]

A young revolutionary artist named Gu Bingxin (b. 1923) was assigned in 1949 to the Creation Research Center of the Shanghai AWA.^[119] In August 1950, he went to work for a consortium of 190 private publishers called the Joint Bookstore (Lianlian Sudan ), under the direction of the AWA. Although the publishers were still private, the consortium controlled the distribution of their wares; this enabled the AWA and the Communist party to approve the contents of publications sold.^[120] Gu was assigned to a section of the company called the Serial Pictures Design Committee, charged by the AWA with regulating the artistic and didactic quality of the new lianhuanhua . The committee's specific mission was to censor the contents of serial picture books, to reform the stock of preliberation books still being sold by merchants, and to direct

production of new lianhuanhua— in short, to replace undesirable preliberation books with better ones. One important change introduced by the Communists was that artists no longer wrote their own stories. Instead, text editors prepared captions, which were then presented to the artists for illustration. Gu Bingxin and a colleague, Luo Pan, directed the art section; two other cadres were responsible for censorship of contents.^[121] Early liberation-era lianhuanhua contained edifying stories of land reform, the Korean War, items from the news, or themes taken from the plots of movies, plays, and novels.^[122] The most prestigious were those based on Chinese or Soviet literary themes; American and Western European stories were largely avoided.

Preliberation serial picture artists were self-taught or had learned their craft by working for older artists in a master-apprentice relationship.^[123] Communist administrators considered most of the older serial picture artists to be poorly trained. In 1951 and 1952, the Shanghai Municipal Cultural Bureau and the Shanghai branch of the AWA conducted special serial picture study classes with the aim of reforming, regularizing, and raising standards of lianhuanhua production. Gu Bingxin led the 1952 sessions. "Raising of standards," a phrase from Mao's Yan'an Talks, in this context meant raising both technical standards and ideological level. The two or three hundred artists who studied drawing techniques and the principles of Communist thought in these classes were of three types. The first were the old comic book artists, the second were young art enthusiasts, and the third were painters who had previously worked in other media, such as oils or Chinese painting, but who could not make a living as artists under the new regime.

In general, the old artists, who were accustomed to being paid only a few Chinese cents per page, worked at great speed but without finesse. For them, raising technical quality meant more careful execution. Intensive political indoctrination was also needed to teach them what new subjects to depict and how to switch from the beauties, demons, and bandits of ancient times to more edifying modern themes. Changes in subject matter from mythological and imaginary stories to modern ones mandated rethinking many conventions of narration, including gesture, costume, and setting. There were a few notable exceptions to this generalization about old artists. Zhao Hongben (b. 1915), for instance, was a top illustrator in preliberation Shanghai who had worked underground for the CCP since 1947. In addition to being a Communist, he had been strongly influenced by American comic books such as Prince Valiant and Tarzan ,^[124] so was well equipped to work in the new styles, which required skill in Western drawing.

Artists who were young at the time, such as Wang Guanqing (b. 1931), Yao Youxin (b. 1935), and He Youzhi (b. 1922), recall their own easy and enthusiastic acceptance of ideological and stylistic indoctrination, in contrast to

the struggles many of their elders suffered.^[125] For them, the challenges were mainly technical—how to improve their drawing skills.^[126] A career in illustration was the only future the teenage artists in the class saw for themselves.^[127]

For more traditional Chinese painters in their thirties or forties, whose numbers included Lu Yanshao (b. 1909), Ying Yeping (b. 1910), and Cheng Shifa (b. 1921), the only way to reenter the art world was to undergo retraining as book artists.^[128] Artists who attended the class were given jobs in publishing firms in Shanghai or in other parts of China. Traditional-style artists beyond their mid-forties, of whom there were many in Shanghai, were not included in this study session, and their social and economic status remained a problem until well into the 1950s.

In the summer of 1952, the Shanghai publishers were reorganized into two new publishing houses, both under the directorship of Lý Meng, a veteran of the New Fourth Army. The state-owned publisher, East China People's Art Publishing (Huadong renmin meishu woodblock ), was formed in August. This enterprise became the Shanghai People's Art Press in 1954. It included an inhouse studio (chuangzuo shi ) with several sections. The lianhuanhua group, which expanded to include book illustrations as well as comics, was directed by Gu Bingxin and Cheng Shifa. The staff artists included Ding Bingzeng, who was chosen by the publisher from the graduates of the Hangzhou academy, and Yao Youxin, a young artist from the 1951 and 1952 Shanghai classes.^[129] The second section, which included propaganda, oil, and new year's painting, redirected the energies of traditional and Western-style painters for the goal of popularization.^[130]

During the same period, many private publishers were consolidated in a joint public-private enterprise whose function was to publish lianhuanhua exclusively. This reorganized firm opened on September 1, 1952, and was called New Art Press (Xin meishu chubanshe ). Its chief editor was Li Lu (b. 1921), who had made woodcuts and lianhuanhua for the New Fourth Army. It absorbed the Communist artist Zhao Hongben and many professional illustrators who had attended the Shanghai classes. Zhao Hongben had incorporated the small left-wing press he ran before 1949 into the editorial section of the official New China Bookstore in 1950. In 1951, the artists were moved to the art section of the East China People's Press (Huadong renmin chubanshe ), which employed about twenty artists and several lianhuanhua text editors. Zhao became director of the art creation section of the New Art Press.^[131]

New Art Press, unlike the state press, had a board of trustees. Nevertheless, in addition to sharing its director with the state press, its manager was appointed by the East China News Publishing Bureau, its paper was supplied by the government, the prices of its books were fixed by the state, and its publications were distributed by the state via the New China Bookstore. The government decided how its earnings were to be allocated: one-fourth each to the

state, the private investors, employee benefits, and employee salaries. By verbal agreement, the state press had first choice in publishing illustrated versions of best-selling short stories.^[132]

According to one artist from this group, the procedures of the lianhuanhua studios of the two publishing houses were different. Artists who worked for the private New Art Press continued a relatively rapid production rate of five to ten drawings per day, reduced from a top speed of twenty to thirty a day in the pre-1950 period.^[133] Academically trained graduates from Hangzhou who were assigned to the government publishers in 1952 and 1953, by contrast, were extremely slow, producing, by one unsympathetic estimate, as few as thirty to forty drawings a year.^[134] In the mid-1950s, artists in both organizations were given quotas of one finished drawing per day. The per page fee for illustrations was raised substantially from preliberation standards,^[135] which enabled many comic book artists to attain such levels of affluence that their wives chose not to work.^[136] In the first few years of the PRC, lianhuanhua artists received both monthly salaries and payments for completed projects. Such payments have been abolished and reintroduced several times over the succeeding decades in accordance with national economic trends.^[137]

One of the private Shanghai publishers, Masses Art Press (Dazhong meishu chubanshe ), was founded immediately after liberation by an employee of the prestigious Commercial Press. Somewhat surprisingly, a stockholder was the East China campus of CAFA. The press hired Jiang Feng and several other revolutionaries to edit a lianhuanhua series that included both new Shanghai publications and reprints of lianhuanhua from the liberated zones. Among the latter were works by Yan Han, Cai Ruohong, and Shao Yu.^[138] State presses in other regions, such as Shenyang's Northeast Pictorial Press (later Liaoning Art Press), Hebei's Masses Art Press (later Hebei People's Art Press), and Tianjin People's Art Press similarly concentrated on serial picture stories in the early 1950s.^[139] Artists and writers throughout the nation threw themselves into production of lianhuanhua , an activity that flowered during the subsequent decade.

The Problem of Guohua

A problem that neither the Art Workers Association nor the Ministry of Culture addressed between 1949 and 1952 was the fate of Chinese painters who were too old or too traditional to be reformed. According to Jiang Feng, speaking in the fall of 1953, Shanghai and Beijing national guohua research associations were founded "after liberation ... [so that guobua would] be improved by proceeding from reality ... [and] by describing real people and

events."^[140] There is no evidence that such associations enabled artists to make a living, and one traditional painter has characterized the New National Painting Research Association as "empty."^[141]

Immediately before, and even during, the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, wealthy collectors sought primarily traditional-style Chinese paintings. Unfortunately for guohua artists, many of the most affluent citizens of Shanghai, who were also the most important patrons of art, fled the Communist takeover. Some artists continued to sell art locally and abroad,^[142] but the traditional market was largely destroyed. The only alternative market, the art publishers, commissioned Western-style, realistic works. To make matters worse, the principal arts administrators were woodblock printmakers, some of whom disliked guohua .

Whatever the personal predilections of the arts leaders, be they Jiang Feng or local Shanghai leaders, administrative policies were completely in line with party policy.^[143] The propaganda magazine China Reconstructs summarized the new art in the summer of 1951:

The decorative arts, for which China has long been famous, are now being used in the service of the people. Artists are not compelled to paint in any particular manner but there is a great demand for the types of pictures which can be made available to everyone and enjoyed by all. And so artists, whose sensitive emotional life has also been stirred by patriotism, have answered the call for paintings depicting the struggles of the people, their endurance and their triumph. These themes appear in three forms, the big coloured prints, the bold outlines of the woodcuts, and the continuous picture-story for which all ages have developed an insatiable appetite. Here is the "comic-strip" technique being used for raising the cultural level, not for debasing it as in the West.... Even a casual observer, like ourselves, can see that these popular types of art come from gifted artists who serve the people gladly.^[144]

It is clear that an artist would be significantly more likely to attain recognition if his or her work depicted the prescribed themes in one of three media: nianhua , woodcuts, or lianhuanhua .

It may have seemed as though government policy was to eradicate all other forms of art. By 1952, however, there was tacit acceptance within the party that both guohua and oil painting might be useful to the regime. Guohua survived initially because important political figures remained convinced of its value and because its destruction might adversely affect the United Front, Mao's policy of enlisting educated non-Communists to help the new regime. Even so, explicit ideological justification for the promotion of guohua was not developed until several years later. Chen Yi, the mayor of Shanghai, is credited

by guohua artists with trying to mitigate their financial plight. A classical poet who had studied art in France, he is said to have been particularly supportive of guohua exhibitions, and purchased many paintings himself.^[145]

The welfare of guohua artists in Shanghai was a particularly acute problem because of their large numbers. In spite of annual exhibitions, many of the artists still had no reliable means of support. In 1952, two sections of a mandatory six-month political indoctrination class were held for old artists. Most of the graduates of the first class were assigned jobs, some as patterned cloth decorators at textile factories, but those in the second class were not given job assignments and remained impoverished.^[146] The situation in Beijing, a smaller guohua center, was no better, as the bird-and-flower painter Yu Feian complained several years later.^[147]

Guohua artists who held teaching posts before liberation were usually more fortunate. Fu Baoshi, who had returned to Nanjing from Chongqing after the war, retained his post as an instructor in the arts department of Nanjing University. He moved, with the other painting professors, to the newly founded Nanjing Normal College in 1952, which the previous year had accepted a class of seven painting students. Unlike teachers at the art academies, Fu Baoshi and his colleague Chen Zhifo insisted that all students study guohua , and that it be taught according to traditional methods. During the first two years, the students copied old paintings, instruction manuals, and their teachers' works. Only in the third year, possibly in response to external pressure, did they begin to work intensively in drawing. Even though the students were required to render plaster casts of European sculptures, Fu insisted that their drawings be executed with a Chinese brush in the outline style. Moreover, he did not require the exercises in shading and modeling form that were still standard in the national art academies.^[148] Opposition to the academic practices of guohua painters would become a major issue in the art world of the late 1950s.

The Making and Remaking of a Cultural Icon: Dong Xiwen's the Founding of the Nation

One very effective method used by Chinese art authorities to encourage particular styles of art after 1949 was to give public recognition to paintings that they deemed successful. The publicity might take one or more of several forms. The work might be mentioned or praised by an important party leader in a published speech or in an official journal. It might be selected for display in a local or national exhibition, and, even better, it might be given an award at such an exhibition. Of particular prestige, it might be designated for reproduction

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in one of the nation's propaganda journals, in a special art album, in an official art journal, in the newspaper, or as a poster. In truly exemplary cases, a single work might receive all these forms of recognition; as a result, it would become better known in China than any single art object might be in the West, except possibly one of such artistic and religious interest as Leonardo's Last Supper .

One of the most important documents for the definition of the new art was the text of a speech Jiang Feng delivered to the newly reorganized Chinese Artists Association (previously called the AWA) on September 25, 1953. We will discuss it further in the next chapter, for the structure of his discussion marks a significant transition to new policies. Subsequently reprinted in the official journal of the FLAC, Wenyibao (Literature and Arts), and in the inaugural issue of the CAA journal Meishu (Art) in 1954, Jiang's speech lauded specific works that had been made since liberation, thus codifying the history of Chinese art between 1949 and 1952 (chart 4).

All three of the oil paintings Jiang Feng praised in 1953 were produced as special commissions for the newly established Museum of Revolutionary History, and all were by faculty at CAFA. Luo Gongliu's Tunnel Warfare (fig. 27) and Wang Shikuo's Off to the Army were completed in 1951. Jiang Feng is said to have been personally responsible for helping Dong Xiwen obtain time and studio space to create his Founding of the Nation (fig. 29), which was completed the following year.^[149]

Dong's painting, which depicts Chairman Mao atop Tiananmen as he proclaims the establishment of the PRC, was useful as a piece of propaganda, but its greatest importance to the art world was its elevation as a model of

Image not available

Figure 29
Dong Xiwen, The Founding of the
Nation, 1952-1953, oil on canvas,
230 cm × 400 cm.

party-approved oil painting. Most Western viewers do not find it admirable; art history students have been known to roar with laughter when slides of it appear on the screen. Michael Sullivan, a writer sympathetic to modern Chinese art, dismisses it as a mere piece of propaganda. Nevertheless, the image became so ubiquitous that even the most iconoclastic Chinese art historians of the 1980s, Zhang Shaoxia and Li Xiaoshan, praise its composition and color and conclude that it was successful in the context of its time.^[150] Why are Chinese views and ours so different?

The reasons for the painting's strong official support and its strange subsequent history typify the difficulties encountered by even the most dedicated of Communist artists in satisfying the shifting demands of the Chinese Communist party. In 1953, Jiang Feng asked Ding Jingwen, a CAFA administrator, to arrange a personal inspection of new CAFA paintings by Chairman Mao.^[151] Ding had served as one of Mao's bodyguards during the last stages of the War of Liberation and knew Wang Dongxing, who headed Mao's security apparatus.^[152] According to Ding Jingwen's recollection, Wang helped Ding and a companion, the artist Dong Xiwen, arrange a special exhibition of twenty or thirty paintings by various CAFA artists at Zhongnanhai. The show was planned so that Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and other government leaders could see it during breaks in meetings then under way. Included were works by Xu Beihong, Qi Baishi, and Jiang Zhaohe; Lin Gang's new version of Zhao Guilan ; and Dong Xiwen's The Founding of the Nation . The viewing was photographed by Hou Bo, the New China News Agency photographer who documented Mao's activities, and published in propaganda magazines. The official photograph of the event shows Mao, Liu, Zhou Enlai, and Dong Xiwen gazing at Dong's canvas. A traditional plum blossom painting by an unidentified artist is visible in the background.^[153]

This was the only art exhibition Mao is known to have viewed after 1949.^[154] According to Ding, Mao returned from his meetings three times during the course of the day to study the artworks. He liked Dong Xiwen's painting very much, and commented that the portrait of Dong Biwu was rendered with particular accuracy. This, presumably, was a joke, since Dong Biwu is depicted in the second row, behind the large figure of Zhu De, and only his notable mustache and jaw are visible. Such a good-humored response by China's supreme leader must have satisfied the hopes that led Jiang Feng to dispatch the creator of The Founding of the Nation to personally represent CAFA at the showing.

The Founding of the Nation was widely reproduced in September, including on the front page of People's Daily ,^[155] and became an icon of the new Chinese art. A monumental history painting in the grand European tradition, it hung in the Museum of Revolutionary History. Published in poster form, it functioned as a new nianhua , becoming party-approved interior decoration for

the home. A photograph in an English-language propaganda magazine shows a model family listening to their radio in a tidy sitting room. On the wall hangs a large poster of The Founding of the Nation .^[156]

In Dong Xiwen's original execution, and as Mao Zedong saw it, the work focuses on Mao, who reads his proclamation into two microphones atop Tiananmen. Five doves soar into the sky to his right. Directly to his right, beneath him on the square itself, are ranged honor guards and representatives of patriotic organizations holding banners and red flags. Their orderly ranks recede into the upper right, beyond the prominent new flag of the PRC, toward a vanishing point that is roughly aligned with Qianmen (Front Gate), at the southern end of the square. Immediately behind Mao, at the eastern end of the square, is a yellow gate that was subsequently torn down. Enclosed by the eastern and southern gates, the people over whom Mao ruled were as well ordered pictorially as they were by the architectural space of the imperial city and, by implication, by the new government. A second axis of recession proceeds to the left, past the assembled dignitaries, along the edge of a silk rug, and down the row of red columns. Thus Mao Zedong stands alone in the triangular space created by the intersection of two lines of perspective.

Behind Mao are ranged, in a line directed toward Qianmen, the six vice-chairmen of the Central People's Government, in order of rank. The row proceeds from General Zhu De at left to General Gao Gang at far right. Other notables in the front row are the imposing figure of Liu Shaoqi; Madame Song Qingling, widow of Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen); Li Jishen; and the bearded Zhang Lan. Zhou Enlai, who served in a number of key government posts, including premier and foreign minister, is prominent in the second row. Beside him are Dong Biwu, who headed the Political and Legal Committee of the new government; a man whose face is obscured by Liu Shaoqi; an unidentified bearded man; and Guo Moruo, head of the government's Culture and Education Committee.^[157] Behind Zhou Enlai stands Lin Boqu.

Dong Xiwen attended the ceremonies but was probably standing down on the square. His painting of the figures, in any case, would have been based on photographs of the event. Although those that have been published are constricted close-ups of small groups of men rather than the wide-angle view Dong Xiwen has constructed, it is probable that Dong had access to unpublished file photos of the event. Dong may also have made sketches at the site, as Lin Gang did for his nianhua of Zhongnanhai. Even with the aid of photographs, the organization of so many figures in a painting was a complex undertaking. The two axes of recession, eastward and southward, cross at Mao's position in good classical European style, while the repeating curves of lanterns, carpet arabesques, chrysanthemum flowers, and even cumulus clouds soften the otherwise geometrical effect. The striking red lantern above Mao's head further emphasizes his centrality.

Many elements of the composition may be attributable to the photographs on which it was based or to conventions of European history painting. Nevertheless, the work has been praised as exemplifying the "nationalization" (minzuhua ) of oil painting. One convention, that of the cut-off lantern above Mao's head, is clearly Asian in origin, and was presumably borrowed from a well-known print by Hiroshige.^[158] A Chinese artist sees the influence of cloud forms from Dunhuang paradise scenes in the glorious sky above Mao's head.^[159] The striking, even bilious, color contrasts seem to have more to do with nianbua than with oil painting. The bright reds, pinks, blues, and yellows of the 1952 oil evoke crudely printed rural woodcuts. The reference is made explicit by black outlines around many of the forms, including the pillars at left and the stone railing at right. Black outlines are fundamental to Chinese woodblock printing, including nianhua , and to much of traditional Chinese figure painting. The bright, flat sky and black outlines come as close as a realistic oil painting might to the single-outline and flat-color mode required by the CCP of nianhua artists. Dong's innovation was to combine such coloristic and formal experiments with a Soviet-style composition.

The recognition garnered by the artist for this work was extraordinary. Beyond the political benediction bestowed upon it by Mao, it brought stylistic qualities that had been associated by the party with popular art to the previously elitist medium of oil painting; it could then serve as a theoretical wedge for Jiang Feng's promotion of the idea that realistic oil painting was politically desirable. Yet despite successful efforts by the artist and the arts administrators to satisfy the largely unspoken aesthetic inclinations of Mao Zedong, political circumstances endangered The Founding of the Nation less than a year after Mao saw it.

In 1953, Gao Gang, the bespectacled figure to Mao's immediate left in the painting, was appointed chairman of the State Planning Council. By February 1954, only five months after The Founding of the Nation received widespread publication, Gao Gang was purged from government. By the spring of 1955 he had died by suicide.^[160]

The Second National Art Exhibition of 1955, intended to display the accomplishments of Chinese artists in the first six years of the new regime, was to be a landmark event for leaders of the Chinese Artists Association. For bureaucrats who had earlier supported The Founding of the Nation , and especially for those who had solicited its canonization by Chairman Mao himself, the absence of Dong's work from the exhibition would have been unthinkable. But could the portrait of a traitor be displayed? The only possible solution, from a bureaucratic and political point of view, was to expunge Gao Gang's image from the painting. An installation photograph of the Second National Exhibition published in May 1955 focuses on The Founding of the Nation , which had been duly revised.^[161]

Image not available

Figure 30
Dong Xiwen, The Founding of the
Nation, revised ca. 1955.

Dong's politically based alteration of the painting presented compositional difficulties. In the original painting Mao had been encapsulated in a space bordered on the left by Gao Gang and on the right by two microphone stands. The artist replaced Gao Gang by enlarging a pink chrysanthemum and completing the partially visible palace gate behind him (fig. 30). Unfortunately, this change opens up the space to the sky, unbalances the composition, and destroys the centrality of Chairman Mao. Dong found a solution to the compositional imbalance by adding two more microphones to the right. Thus, the broad expanse of space to Mao's left is countered by an impressive array of technological equipment to his right. The result is not completely satisfactory, for the microphones dominate the center of the picture in an awkward, empty way, and the expanded space around Mao reduces his stature. This version of the painting was the one exhibited in Moscow in 1958 on the occasion of the first joint exhibition of art from twelve socialist countries.^[162] It is the version most commonly reproduced today, though the painting no longer exists in this form.

We will jump ahead in our narrative to follow the painting's buffeting by subsequent political winds. During the early years of the Cultural Revolution Dong Xiwen was, like most professors, harassed by the Red Guard and representatives of the Cultural Revolution administration. He was first ordered to replace Mao's disgraced heir Liu Shaoqi, the tall figure to the left of Madame Song, with his new protégé, Lin Biao. While Dong had earlier complied with the political need to remove a person from his composition, he was unwilling to add a person in a historically inaccurate position. Of course, during the Cultural Revolution he would not have been able to refuse such a request directly; but the final assignment he accepted was to remove Liu Shaoqi without adding another figure.

This was no easy task, however, since Liu Shaoqi was one of the most prominent figures in the painting. In a tricky reformulation of the center of the composition, Liu Shaoqi's head was reduced in size and transformed into that of Dong Biwu, who originally stood beside Zhou Enlai. The torso was modified slightly so that the figure now stood behind Song Qingling, rather than in front. The legs were shortened, as necessary to push the figure into the second row. Finally, the gap left by Liu's missing feet was repainted to match the carpet pattern. Though this solution was ingenious, the result is odd. The new Dong Biwu does not recede into the second row as intended. Instead, he appears as a leering, glowing figure, a strangely malevolent character in the midst of an otherwise stately group (plate 1).

Dong's last revision was a failure. It is difficult to know whether the outcome was unintentional, to be attributed to the excessive psychological stress of the Cultural Revolution, or whether Dong Xiwen was passively resisting the political pressure by rendering the painting unexhibitable. For both aesthetic and political reasons, it cannot be rehung in the museum in its present state.^[163]

The saga did not end with the artist's terminal illness. In 1972, as order was restored to the art world following the chaotic first phase of the Cultural Revolution, it was decided to refurbish the Museum of Revolutionary History. The authorities mandated that Lin Boqu, the white-haired gentleman at the far left, must be removed from the composition before The Founding of the Nation could be hung. Dong, too ill to paint, refused to allow anyone else to touch his work. As a result, two artists from CAFA, Zhao Yu and Jin Shangyi, were enlisted to make an exact copy of Dong's painting that incorporated the iconographic changes.^[164]

By the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1976, Dong Xiwen had died of cancer. With the accession of Deng Xiaoping in 1979, the museum display was again reorganized to restore historical accuracy and to recognize the political rehabilitation of Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and other targets of the Maoists. Dong's painting, now lacking Liu Shaoqi, was once again politically inappropriate. The government respected the wishes of the artist's family, who

Image not available

Figure 31
Copy by Zhao Yu and Jin Shangyi after
Dong Xiwen, The Founding of the
Nation, 1972, with revisions ca. 1980,
oil on canvas, Museum of Chinese
Revolutionary History.

insisted that Dong's own work must not be repainted by another artist. Artists were therefore hired to revise the Zhao Yu-Jin Shangyi copy.

The Founding of the Nation that now hangs in the Museum of Revolutionary History is the transmuted replacement, largely painted by Zhao and Jin (fig. 31). It no longer resembles any of Dong's original versions: Liu Shaoqi and Lin Boqu have reappeared; a previously unidentifiable figure in the back row now looks vaguely like the young Deng Xiaoping; a dark-haired man with glasses occupies Gao Gang's spot; and four microphones flank Mao Zedong. Even so, the painting remains the most famous example of Dong Xiwen's art and is still widely reproduced.

The Founding of the Nation was technically and stylistically an appropriate monument of its time. Its most prominent stylistic qualities, including garish color and crisply outlined figures, were those of the new popular art. Jiang Feng praised it in 1954 for being rich with the distinguishing features and breadth of spirit of national painting.^[165] At the same time, it made effective use

of Western conventions of perspective and figural organization, which linked it to the art of the Soviet Union. It sums up the years of popularization, yet foreshadows the technical specialization of the subsequent era. Jiang Feng reported in 1954 that it had been reproduced fifty-six thousand times in a three-month period. Its continuing popularity may be partial validation of Jiang Feng's theory that the people will adjust their taste to whatever they are accustomed to seeing.

Artists Serve the People

In general, Chinese intellectuals welcomed the fall of the Nationalist government, which was corrupt and ineffective. Nevertheless, some artists were afraid, owing to both pre-1949 propaganda and accurate reports that people labeled as landlords were treated very harshly by Communist land reform teams. The traditional painter Qi Baishi (1863-1957), who held a largely honorific faculty post at the National Beiping Arts College, told Xu Beihong that he expected the Communists to kill him if he did not flee.^[166] The poet Ai Qing, along with Jiang Feng and Wang Zhaowen, paid a visit to the aged Qi Baishi in 1949.^[167] Although Ai Qing later described the encounter as though it were a pleasant social event, the three men had been instructed by the military to direct administrative transfer of the National Beiping Arts College to Communist authorities.^[168] They wore military uniforms, and they probably had at least a pretext of official business in their call on an artist none had previously met. The three Communist administrators were accompanied to Qi Baishi's home by Li Keran, Qi's friend and student; even so, the artist was extremely frightened to see three soldiers at his gate. In introducing themselves, however, Ai Qing, who was a great enthusiast of Qi's work, told the old artist how much he had admired a Qi Baishi painting that hung in the classroom where he studied art. Moreover, both Wang Zhaowen and Ai Qing had studied under Lin Fengmian at Hangzhou; as they discussed their common interest in Lin Fengmian's work, the old artist gradually overcame his misgivings. Once he realized that these Communist soldiers were art lovers, he quickly painted gifts for each of them. Ai Qing was particularly pleased with his picture, which may have been a 1949 painting dedicated to him that was published several years later; if not the same, it was at least very similar.^[169] Jiang Feng liked his painting, too, but was never as enthusiastic about Qi Baishi's work as was the poet. In keeping with the military discipline of the time, they later paid the artist for his work. Mao Zedong was similarly inundated with paintings and calligraphy by guohua artists, whose motives ranged from patriotism to panic.

Through the efforts of Xu Beihong, Ai Qing, and others, Qi Baishi received

the protection of the Communist authorities, even if he were too old (or disinclined) to reform his world view. He was not required to learn the new art and continued painting in the traditional manner. Indeed, his enduring health and productivity became an important part of the Communist party's public relations program over the next eight years. Mao Zedong, who was otherwise relatively uninterested in pictorial art, became an enthusiast of Qi Baishi's paintings and acquired at least five works by this fellow Hunanese in the early years of the PRC.^[170]

Other artists, more optimistic about the new government, willingly bent their artistic activities to its needs in the first years after the founding of the People's Republic. Preceding sections have discussed officially approved paintings from the early 1950s. The styles and subjects of the official art were, as we have seen, extremely limited. This uniformity in artistic expression is all the more striking when one considers the extremely varied backgrounds of the artists who made the pictures.

This phenomenon raises questions about the responses of individual artists to political demands upon their art. To what degree and for how long were artists willing to submit to official requirements? If willing, to what extent did they possess the technical versatility and intellectual detachment needed to succeed? At what point might unreconcilable conflicts between the demands of party discipline and individual expression arise? Of many possible examples, we will briefly introduce five artists, Hou Yimin, Dong Xiwen, Li Keran, Yan Han, and Shi Lu, whose careers we will follow in subsequent periods as well. During the early 1950s, their work briefly converged in a single party-sponsored propaganda style. In later decades, they developed their artistic talents in different media and different expressive modes.

We will not discuss the generation of Xu Beihong (1895-1953), Liu Haisu (b. 1896), Lin Fengmian (1900-1991), and Yan Wenliang (1893-1988) in detail, for they were largely uninvolved with the new art. Xu Beihong, the artist best suited temperamentally and stylistically to the Communist artistic order, fell ill in 1951 and died two years later.^[171] Yan Wenliang was valued as a technician and taught color and perspective theory at Hangzhou until the Cultural Revolution. He published a book on perspective in 1957.^[172] The effects his apolitical landscape paintings (fig. 20) may have had on students were largely counteracted by classes in creation, which were taught by faculty who better understood the new political order.

One surprising aspect of Yan's influence was the development of an underground landscape painting movement in Shanghai during the early 1970s, at the height of the Cultural Revolution's promotion of progovernment figure painting. With art schools closed since 1966, young artists had no choice but to teach themselves.^[173] Most began with pamphlets on how to paint portraits of Chairman Mao, but some moved on to copying prohibited reproductions of

European Painting and to plein air sketching. Yan Wenliang was liberated from the investigatory incarceration of the Cultural Revolution authorities in 1969 and spent time in subsequent years painting by himself.^[174] He attracted many young followers when it was discovered that he painted in the park and that he sometimes gave technical pointers to young artists who worked nearby. Thereafter, he quietly welcomed enthusiastic teenage artists to his apartment, where he showed them the landscapes he had painted in France and Italy forty-five years before. The odd result of his kindness was that romantic and impressionist styles of early-twentieth-century France became synthesized into a new regional Shanghai style. It was practiced by Yan himself, a few of his elderly students from the Suzhou Art Academy, and many self-taught artists of the "lost generation," those born in the 1950s who had been denied formal schooling by the Cultural Revolution (fig. 32). Yan Wenliang was made a director of the national CAA in 1981, at the age of eighty-eight.^[175]

Liu Haisu and Lin Fengmian, whose artistic principles were the explicit targets of Communist art policies, left China after the Cultural Revolution. Although they were given honorific titles in the mid-1950s, the art they might have produced during the three decades with which we are concerned, 1949 to 1979, was exhibited infrequently and with little fanfare. Much of it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Thus, all were best known for their early work, transformed into historical figures while still in their fifties. The new art was the art of younger men.

Hou Yimin

We first mention the youngest of our five artists, Hou Yimin (b. 1930), only to emphasize the great importance accorded very young painters by the Communist regime. Hou, a native of Gaoyang county in Hebei, enrolled in the newly reestablished National Beiping Arts College in 1946, at the age of sixteen. He joined the underground Communist party cell at the school and in 1949 became its secretary. His family background was sufficiently prosperous that it marred his later party career with the label "bad class background," in spite of his early political activism.

In December 1948, when it became clear that Beiping would soon fall to the Communists, the eighteen-year-old artist set about organizing academy students and faculty, including Dong Xiwen, Zhou Lingzhao, and the printmaker Li Hua, to make pro-Communist handbills. The propaganda pictures were secretly printed at Xinminbao (New People's Gazette) and distributed after the Nationalist surrender.^[176] Hou remained at the academy to participate in the art cadre classes, and then became an instructor. During this period he produced several model nianhua . The ambitious Celebrating the Thirtieth Anniversary of the CCP (fig. 21), as we have seen, was painted in collaboration

Image not available

Figure 32
Han Xin, Landscape, 1972, gouache on
paper, 11.8 cm × 8 cm, collection of the
artist.

with Deng Shu, his future wife, and won a prize in the 1952 Ministry of Culture competition. Hou Yimin and Deng Shu exemplify the new art not only in the style and content of their ambitious picture but also in their very lives. Hou was an academically trained young artist. His wife was a veteran of North China University's propaganda work who studied in the art cadre class at CAFA after liberation. Both became instructors at CAFA. In their painting they combined academic training with revolutionary zeal; in their lives they might represent the merging of the society of the liberated zones with the intellectuals of China's cultural centers. Such marriages were not exceptional; the young revolutionary Lin Gang, for example, married Pang Tao, daughter of the prominent French-educated art professor Pang Xunqin.

Beyond his famous collaborative picture, Hou Yimin made several pictures about coal miners.^[177] Such projects were the result of trips to experience real life required of all academic artists, during which Hou spent time living and working in mining districts. In the period between 1949 and 1952 the careers of young nianhua artists like Hou Yimin had only just begun, so we will postpone discussion of his emergence as a Soviet-style history painter until chapter 3.

Dong Xiwen

The oil painter Dong Xiwen (1914-1973) was a native of Shaoxing, Zhejiang,^[178] who came from an educated and moderately prosperous household. His father, an enthusiast of Chinese antiquities, often took his son with him to view works of art. Dong Xiwen studied for a year at the private Suzhou Art Academy after completing high school. In 1934, at the age of twenty, he transferred to the National Hangzhou Arts Academy. By the time he graduated, the Japanese had invaded China's coast and the academy had set up temporary facilities in the western city of Kunming. After graduation he spent six months at the Hanoi Art Academy, on a government scholarship, absorbing French colonial culture. Upon his return, which was prompted by insufficient funds, he supported himself through various editing and writing jobs in Guizhou and Chongqing. Dong was fascinated with an exhibition of hand-painted copies of ancient murals he had seen in Chongqing. In 1943, he and his wife joined four other pairs of artists from the Hangzhou academy in an expedition to Dunhuang, the Buddhist cave temple site in remote Gansu province. The Dunhuang caves are famous for well-preserved murals painted between the fourth and thirteenth centuries. The young artists devoted the next two and a half years to studying and copying the ancient religious murals. Dong became interested in the aesthetic possibilities for modern artists that the ancient murals suggested, and particularly in the decorative and self-expressive potential of the elongated Northern Wei figure styles (fig. 33).

Chinese figure painting is generally considered to have reached its height of naturalism during the Tang and Song periods. Instead of such models, however, Dong chose more ancient forms that might be described as primitive. His compositions of the late 1940s are characterized by a decorative and gentle abstraction of the human figure; his colors tended toward lyrical pastels. His Kazak Herdswoman of 1948 (fig. 34), with its limited palette of pale colors, simplification of human forms, and stylized draperies, adapts ancient Chinese conventions to modern expressive purposes.

There is a striking parallel between Picasso's study of African sculpture, which inspired his abstractions of the female form, and Dong's enthusiasm for prenaturalistic Chinese art, from which emerged his new style. Cross-cultural influence has been a significant component of modern art in the West. The unnaturalistic aspects of non-European art, be it African sculpture or Japanese prints, appealed to European artists seeking freedom from the Renaissance pictorial conventions on which European academic art was based. As a graduate of the Hangzhou academy, with its many French instructors, Dong was undoubtedly familiar with the aesthetic foundations of modern European art, even if not up-to-date on its latest developments.^[179] Dong managed to find the artistic stimulation of unfamiliar aesthetic standards within the enormous geographical and temporal span of Chinese art.^[180]

Dong Xiwen was one of the young instructors recruited to the National Beiping Arts College by Xu Beihong after the war. Once his conceptual breakthrough occurred during his trip to Dunhuang, his primary aesthetic goals became the creation of a distinctly Chinese style of oil painting. Theoretically, his art made a symmetrical pair with Xu Beihong's late work: Xu painted Westernizing styles with Chinese tools; Dong tried to Sinicize oil painting. Both sought a synthesis of Eastern and Western art.

Many students who entered the academy at which Dong Xiwen taught in 1948 expected to complete a five-year curriculum. The two-year fundamental course exposed students to all media but concentrated most heavily on drawing;^[181] only after completion of this basic curriculum was the student allowed to select a major. Xu Beihong participated in some of the beginning classes, for he attached great importance to drawing skills as an indicator of artistic potential. Thus, even students intending to concentrate on traditional painting were still subjected to the Western-style academic drawing requirement. Dong Xiwen was responsible for a significant part of the fundamental drawing curriculum. He, like the best-trained of his fellow academic artists, went on to become an important member of the post-1949 teaching staff at CAFA.

In late 1948, Dong began making art in support of the Communist cause. Hou Yimin, in his role as underground CCP organizer at the Beiping college, had solicited pro-Communist poster designs from sympathetic faculty before

Image not available

Figure 33

Cave 249, Mogao Caves, Dunhuang,
Gansu, Western Wei period, polychromatic
mural (detail).

the city's liberation. Dong, along with Li Hua and others, participated in making such flyers. He also prepared portraits of Mao Zedong and Zhu De for the auditorium where the first National Congress of Literary and Arts Workers was held. He witnessed Mao's proclamation of the new People's Republic of China and, on December 8, 1949, joined the Communist party.

On the occasion of the First National Art Exhibition, Dong Xiwen demonstrated both his technical virtuosity and his interest in brightly colored folk art. His Liberation of Beijing (fig. 13), one of the liveliest of the works exhibited, makes use of broad, flat areas of bright color to strengthen and simplify a complex crowd scene. Tanks, military trucks, and cannons pass under Beijing's city gates, welcomed by the banner-waving populace. In the distance, construction cranes tower over the ancient architecture, suggesting the dawning of a new era.

The stark contrasts of flat colors, the black outlines, and the anecdotal quality of the picture evoke, no doubt intentionally, folk prints. As we have seen, such sources were avidly studied by Communist artists, who rejected upper-class art forms for political reasons. Dong's interest in the Dunhuang

Image not available

Figure 34
Dong Xiwen, Kazak Herdswoman, 1948,
oil on canvas, 163 cm × 128 cm, Chinese
National Art Gallery.

wall paintings, which combine primitive beauty and abstract strength, meant that his aesthetic interests tallied remarkably well with the simplified art of the early Communist political program. Nevertheless, the linear, modernist rhythms of his Kazak Herdswoman remain evident in the bare tree branches of this work, which appear to dance in happiness with the people of Beijing.

Dong Xiwen was, in the late 1940s, an artist of substantial originality and potential. He had reached a point in his development at which his experiential, intellectual, and artistic concerns came together in an easy and innovative way. The Founding of the Nation , painted at the conclusion of the Communist thought reform and rectification campaign at CAFA, marks the last step in this development. Just as he had earlier integrated primitivist wall painting aesthetics into a work inspired by Western modernism, in the 1952 painting he combines elements of Chinese folk art with Soviet realism. It was his success at synthesizing different types of art that led to his great reputation as a master of oil painting in the national style. Unfortunately, The Founding of the Nation was the end of such experimentation. His painting was overwhelmed by the antimodernism of Communist aesthetics and, perhaps, by the pressure of his sudden fame. Dong's early approach reappears, somewhat watered down, in the works of his students.

Li Keran

Li Keran was born in 1907 in Xuzhou, Jiangsu.^[182] As a child he liked to draw and was given painting manuals by the parents of a classmate. At the age of thirteen, when he was playing with friends on top of the city wall, he spotted a group of elderly men who were painting. He often went to watch them work and became the student of one old artist, Qian Shizhi. Three years later Li passed the entrance examination for the Shanghai Art Academy. After completion of the program in 1925 he became an elementary school teacher in Xuzhou. In 1929, he took the graduate entrance examination for the newly opened National Hangzhou Arts Academy. Lin Fengmian, the school's founding director, admitted him on the basis of his examination results, even though his transcripts showed inadequate formal academic preparation. Once enrolled, he studied oil painting and drawing with a French professor and was exposed to most schools of modern Western art. He joined the Eighteen Art Society at the academy, contributing two modernist oils to the 1931 Shanghai exhibition for which Lu Xun wrote his ill-fated preface.^[183] The Nationalist authorities cracked down on the Eighteen Art Society the following year; Lin Fengmian, who hoped to appoint Li Keran an instructor at the academy, urged him to concentrate on completing his degree. Instead, he dropped out of school and became an instructor at an art school in his hometown. He attained national

Image not available

Figure 35
Li Keran, Landscape of Xuzhou,
ca. 1937, oil painting.

recognition for his work in oils by exhibiting a gently Fauvist landscape in the Ministry of Education's Second National Exhibition of 1937 (fig. 35).^[184]

After the Japanese invasion of Xuzhou in 1938, Li went to Xi'an, then Wuhan, and eventually Chongqing, where he worked under Zhou Enlai and Guo Moruo in the wartime propaganda effort. In 1942, their office was disbanded by the Nationalist authorities as part of an anti-Communist campaign. Li thereupon concentrated on improving his Chinese painting. His favorite artists were the seventeenth-century individualists Shitao, Kuncan, and Zhu Da, all of whom had devoted themselves to art in a time of political chaos. Most of his paintings of this period depict water buffaloes, a subject about which Lu Xun and Guo Moruo had both written. Li saw the buffalo, in its different aspects, as an image for human life. His first solo exhibition was held in Chongqing in 1943.

He resumed teaching in 1943 in Chongqing. Three years later he accepted Xu Beihong's invitation to join the faculty of the National Beiping Arts Col-

lege, where he taught Western watercolor painting. In a curriculum heavily oriented to training in Western realistic styles, one year of Chinese painting was required of all students, although further study was available on an elective basis.^[185] Li Keran admired the landscape painting of Huang Binhong (see fig. 18), an elderly faculty member at the academy, and is said to have studied with him. He continued to work on his guohua in Beiping under Qi Baishi's tutelage.

After the Communist reorganization of the academy in 1950, Li was assigned to teach outline-style guohua and modern new year's painting. His own prize-winning new year's picture, Model Workers and Peasants at Beihai Park (fig. 22), one of the rare landscape pictures in this genre, is a thematic preview of the area in which Li Keran was to make his name, Chinese landscape painting. Like all nianhua of the period, it was painted in the outline and flat-color mode. Even though the national emphasis on nianhua during this period came in subsequent years to be considered excessive, Li's 1951 Model Workers was included in the Chinese submission to an important Soviet-bloc exhibition in 1958.^[186]

Li's landscape paintings in ink, which became most original after the death of Qi Baishi, earned him a national reputation. Unlike Dong Xiwen, who was skyrocketed to fame by a single painting, Li Keran developed his artistic style and renown more steadily. He maintained his personal vision in spite of political circumstances, having the good fortune to ride several political waves that benefited his art, but avoiding those that might damage it. By 1954, it seems, artistic integrity came before politics.

Yan Han

With the reorganization of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1950, the students acquired a new set of mentors. One such faculty member was the Communist printmaker Yan Han. Yan was born in 1916 to a poor village family in Donghai county, Jiangsu. As an elementary school student he learned to draw by copying nianhua and illustrations in old novels such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms . Either he was exceptionally enterprising as a youngster or else he had training that is not documented in his biography, for he entered the prestigious National Hangzhou Arts Academy in 1935. According to Yan, the academy under Lin Fengmian's direction emphasized modern, Western art. Artists who had returned from France showed students slides of current trends. Most instructors considered Cézanne to be the founder of modernism, and some of them, such as Wu Dayu, taught a Cézanne-like style. Yan Han was instructed in Western painting by Fang Ganmin, a French-trained cubist. During the last part of his stay in Hangzhou, Yan began studying Chinese painting under Pan Tianshou, primarily in order to economize on art supplies. He re-

calls that Pan was very traditional, teaching the students by requiring them to copy old paintings. Pan's chosen models spanned the Yuan, Ming, and early Qing periods, the era in Chinese history when literati art was at its height.

Yan Han moved inland with the academy after the Japanese invasion in 1937 but during the summer of 1938 abandoned his studies to join the Communist troops at Yan'an. He joined the Communist party in October. After three months of training at the Lu Xun Academy of Arts, he was assigned to the academy's woodcut team, headed by Hu Yichuan. The team went to the headquarters of the Eighth Route Army in the Taihang Mountains, where military leaders of the Long March, including Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, Yang Shangkun, and Deng Xiaoping, were fighting. Because metal plates were in short supply, woodblocks were used to produce many publications behind the lines. It was not until the artists adapted images from Chinese folk religion to Communist doctrines, however, that they were truly able to propagandize among the peasantry.^[187]

One of the earliest groups of propaganda new year's prints was made in late 1939 or early 1940 for the lunar new year. It included door guardians by Yan Han, in which the folk gods (fig. 36) were replaced by soldiers of the Eighth Route Army (fig. 37). Despite the revolutionaries' diligent efforts, it was discovered that only peasant printmakers were able to print the outline block with the accuracy and speed necessary for commercial-scale production.^[188] After mastering this traditional technology, the work team subsequently began moving from place to place to make and distribute prints. Yan Han was left behind, under Yang Shangkun's direction, to run the woodblock factory. His portrait of Peng Dehuai, made in 1941, is evidence of his journalistic responsibilities (fig. 38). He also produced serial picture stories. In 1943, the artists in the factory returned to Yan'an, probably to participate in the cadre rectification following Mao's Yan'an Talks. They shared their experience with the artists of the Yan'an woodblock factory and continued working, now under Jiang Feng's direction.^[189]

After the 1942 Yan'an Talks, party discipline was strengthened and arts policies became more centralized. One of the thrusts of the post-1942 woodblock print movement was continued concern for the proper means of reaching the desired audience. A typical example of journalistic woodblocks of the pre-1942 period was Li Shaoyan's series illustrating his travels with the Eighth Route Army (fig. 39). The artist, who served as secretary to General He Long, based his techniques and many of his compositions on Soviet prints reproduced in Lu Xun's history of Soviet woodcuts, which he carried with him on his journey. The results are often quite dramatic and beautiful, but they are in a style that appealed to urban intellectuals familiar with Western art, not to the simpler folk of the Chinese countryside.

Since most of the people of northern China were poor peasants, it was

Image not available

Figure 36
Anonymous, Door Guardian, Hebei
province, one of a pair, polychromatic
woodblock print, new year's picture, Bo
Songnian collection.

Image not available

Figure 37
Yan Han, Protect Our Homes, 1939-1940,
pair of woodblock prints, published
by Lu [Xun Literature and] Arts
Woodcut Team, Chinese Historical
Museum.

considered necessary to modify the European-oriented styles practiced by most woodcut artists accordingly. Yah Han, Luo Gongliu, Hu Yichuan, and others who made revolutionary new year's pictures had already adapted folk styles to the new Communist iconography. Door guardians might then convey not the protective power of the gods but the importance of the anti-Japanese war. In the post-1942 period, artists such as Gu Yuan and Luo Gongliu went on to create narrative prints in a new style that was more in tune with peasant tastes. German expressionist styles of the early 1930s were rejected, but Soviet realist art was modified as well. Rather than making heavily shaded, often rather somber prints, Gu Yuan carved away most of his block in the traditional Chinese manner, leaving behind only outlines set against a flat ground (fig. 40).^[190] Jiang Feng, as we have seen, had ventured into this style by 1942 (fig.5). Yan Han carved a new version of his PLA door guardians in 1944 that is much more closely related to folk styles than are his earlier images (fig. 41).^[191]

After the Japanese surrender, Yan went south with his comrades to Zhang-jiakou, Hebei. After two and a half years of civil war and land reform

Image not available

Figure 38
Yan Han, Portrait of Peng Dehuai, 1941,
monochromatic woodblock print, collection
of the artist.

Image not available

Figure 39
Li Shaoyan, The Fourth Division in
Northwestern Shanxi, 1946, from The
120th Division (Eighth Route Army) in
Northern China series, no. 23, monochromatic
woodblock print, collection of the
Chinese Artists Association, Sichuan
Branch.

Image not available

Figure 40
Gu Yuan, Protect Our People's Troops,
1944, hand-colored woodblock print,
collection of the artist.

Image not available

Figure 41
Yan Han, 1944, polychromatic woodblock
prints, pair of new year's prints.
Above, left: Win the War of Resistance,
Chinese National Art Gallery.
Above, right: Army and People Cooperate,
Colgate University, Picker Art
Gallery.

propaganda work, he marched into Beiping with the People's Liberation Army. He participated in the National Congress of Literary and Arts Workers in July 1949, and was elected a member of the FLAC. In the fall of 1949, when Jiang Feng went to Hangzhou to reorganize Yan's alma mater, Yan Han accompanied him as part of the new administrative team. Rather than remaining in Hangzhou, as many of the Communist administrators did, Yan Han returned to Beijing in the summer of 1950 to accompany an art exhibit to the USSR. Soon after he returned he was assigned to lecture at CAFA. His responsibilities included teaching the principles of Mao's Yan'an Talks on Literature and Arts and "creation" classes in which the students applied such ideas to their finished art.^[192]

Yan Han's best woodcut from the 1949 national exhibition is based on his

land reform activity in Hebei. Down with Feudalism possesses a pictorial beauty that belies its didactic intent (fig. 14). Rather than working in the simplified style of the liberated zones, Yan Han returns to a classical European mode of composing a print. A fortresslike north Chinese architectural compound dominates the picture, its monolithic strength softened by complex effects of light and shade on its masonry and roof tiles. The variegated tones of the deep sky against which it is placed further strengthen the effect. Only after this aesthetic impression has been absorbed do we concentrate on the more intellectual activity of reading the picture's story. As one peasant seals the doors of the castle in preparation for future redistribution of the wealth within, the landlord and his family are led away by the peasants who previously worked his land. Onlookers wave red banners—"Down with Feudalism," "Land to the Cultivators." The insubstantial yet brightly colored revolutionary banners are well balanced against the solid architectural structure erected under the old society, thus making not only a pleasing composition but also a statement about the difficulties overcome by the revolution against the established order.

Yan Han's works, while faithfully following the party art policies of each succeeding period, consistently rank among the most pictorially satisfying of those produced by artists of the old liberated zones. Moreover, from his earliest works he displays extraordinary technical facility and a broad range of stylistic capabilities.

Artists such as Dong Xiwen and Li Keran initially contributed to the post-liberation art academies by instructing students in technique. Communist veterans such as Yan Han, however, taught a second and equally important component: ideology. The "creation" classes for which he was responsible correspond most closely to the thesis projects or graduation exercises in an American art school, where the student is expected to demonstrate the technical and conceptual maturity developed through academic study by independently creating a body of art. The similarities end here, however, for in China "creation" was not merely an artistic statement but a political one, and the emphasis was not on individuality but on contribution to the common good. Yan Han's job, therefore, would have included advice on compositional and technical matters, as well as on choice of a suitable topic and style.

The choice of subject, particularly the effectiveness and political correctness of its didactic message, was the most important element in determining whether a work would gain acceptance in the art world of the time and whether it would be awarded a passing mark by the academy. In the early PRC years, for example, a revolutionary artist steeped in the principles of Mao Zedong's Yan'an Talks would be expected to promulgate those ideas, which were perceived as having overwhelming political significance. Only slightly less important was appropriate choice of style. If the party administration had declared that popularization of art was its goal, as it did in the early PRC period,

the creation teacher would stress that popularization meant adopting specified artistic forms—such as new year's pictures, propaganda pictures, and comic books.

Yan Han exemplified the new policies in his own work as well. As part of the new year's print movement of the early fifties he produced a prize-winning piece of propaganda for women's rights entitled The Bride Speaks (fig. 23). Rather than undergoing an arranged marriage, the subject of Yan Han's painting has presumably chosen her own spouse. In the old marriage customs, when dowry and other gifts were often specified by contracts between parents, the bride's face was covered and she was an anonymous and sometimes unhappy participant in what amounted to an economic exchange between two clans. Yan's bride and groom, by contrast, take their vows according to the new marriage law beneath a portrait of Chairman Mao. Yan's didactic image, which was probably aimed at peasants, is painted in the party-mandated outline and bright-color style, with only slight touches of Western realism.

Shi Lu

We have thus far paid slight attention to the contributions of artists outside the main urban areas of Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. However, as distant parts of China came under control of the People's Liberation Army, art propaganda workers found themselves demobilized in various provincial cities. The printmaker and Chinese painter Shi Lu is typical of the many young artists who joined the Communist revolution and then played an important role in implementing the new policies in China's smaller cities. Born in 1919 of a landholding family in Renshou county, Sichuan, Shi Lu (né Feng Yaheng) studied guohua in Chengdu between 1934 and 1936 at the Oriental Art Academy (Dongfang meishu zhuanke xuexiao ), a school run by his older brother.^[193] After his graduation he worked as an elementary school art teacher. In 1938 he enrolled in West China Union University to study history and sociology. He left home permanently in January 1939 and made his way to the liberated zone. After training, he worked with a drama troupe doing propaganda. In 1940 he became leader of the art group of the Northwest China Cultural Work Team. His duties included painting, theatrical backdrops, propaganda, and cartoons. In 1943 he participated in rectification at the Central Party School's Third Section, after which he worked for two years making popular art in the Culture Association of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region. He joined the party in 1946, participated in land reform in 1947, and became an editor of the Masses Pictorial in 1948. For a time he headed the art group of Yan'an University's arts and literature department. He attended the 1949 Congress of Literary and Art Workers in Beijing.^[194] By 1950 he had moved to Xi'an, where he was responsible for the Art Work Committee of the Shaanxi-

Gansu-Ningxia Border Region Culture Association, worked as director of the Northwest Pictorial Press, and succeeded in bringing his efforts to organize new year's picture production to the attention of national authorities.^[195] He was selected vice-chairman of the Northwest Artists Association in 1950 and became one of the two most important art leaders in this western Chinese city.^[196]

Although his early artistic training was in Chinese painting, he learned to make woodblock prints in the liberated zones. He exhibited both landscape and figurative subjects in the First National Exhibition. His Down with Feudalism (fig. 42) is similar in subject and composition to Yan Han's work of the same title (see fig. 14). If anything, Shi Lu's picture is constructed more as a Chinese painting might be, with architectural elements ascending vertically, like mountain peaks, to the very top of the composition. His attempts to convey three-dimensionality are not always successful, as in the terraced entrance on the lower left side of the picture, but such minor defects are rendered inconspicuous by his attention to masonry, which covers most of the picture's surface with pleasing linear rhythms. Although the peasant horde sweeping up the steps is essential to the picture's intelligibility, the work succeeds because of its abstract juxtapositions of textures, tones, and angles.

Shi Lu's Mao Zedong at the Heroes Reception , an interior scene with figures, was more typical of art displayed at the First Exhibition (fig. 43). The subject of Mao Zedong expressing his appreciation to his supporters was painted by many artists in the early 1950s, as Lin Gang's nianhua illustrates (see fig. 25). Shi Lu's ambitious print possesses a certain awkward, primitive charm, but in this work he is unable to compensate for his lack of facility in rendering figures by supplying interesting surface textures. He set for himself daunting problems in perspective. Dozens of figures sit at tables in a long, narrow room. The receding wall on the left is hung with four pictures, one after the other; at right a row of windows has been pulled open, creating a potential chaos of lines receding at different angles. The technical difficulty is increased because the figures are carefully shaded with fine lines. The artist has observed and attempted to reproduce the cheerful grimace into which the faces of some old Chinese peasants settle in repose. This homely descriptive touch, seen at both left and right, is so obvious as to give the composition an almost comical aspect. Chairman Mao, just barely recognizable, exposes his teeth in a slightly less ludicrous fashion as he listens to an excited old peasant describe his good deeds. The point of view the artist adopts is both original and effective, emphasizing the closeness between Chairman Mao and the old soldiers, but the artist lacked the technical skills to execute his conception. Hindsight informs us that socialist realism was not a style with which Shi Lu ever became entirely comfortable. Although he had quite a bit of critical success in the 1950s with pictures as awkward as this, it was not until he returned to traditional painting

Image not available

Figure 42.
Shi Lu, Down with Feudalism, 1949,
woodblock print, 31.5 cm x 22 cm,
Chinese National Art Gallery.

Image not available

Figure 43
Shi Lu, Mao Zedong at the Heroes
Reception, 1946, woodblock print.

in 1959 that he found his own voice. Unfortunately, such pictures as this, in which landscapists strove somewhat unsuccessfully to paint monumental figures, made up a large part of the First National Exhibition.^[197]

Shi Lu's career as a regional arts administrator typifies an important way in which revolutionary artists were supported after 1949. It provided a living wage, in return for which the artist organized and participated in official art activities, such as exhibitions, publications, and propaganda work. Such artists also served as role models and educators on the local level, promoting a unified national art that ultimately superseded any preexisting regional artistic traditions. For example, Shi Lu himself painted a well-received nianhua during the popularization movement of the early 1950s (see chart 4). Administrators in Shi Lu's position also supervised local submissions to national exhibitions, thus ensuring that the artists whose works were seen nationally were those who upheld the unified party standards.

The assignment of revolutionary art workers to provincial centers presented them with both opportunities and disadvantages. Because the official art

journals, first Renmin meishu and later Meishu , and the party newspaper, Renmin ribao (People's Daily ), were published in Beijing, the activities of artists who worked in Beijing were often reported with great detail in the national press, whereas comparatively little was heard from the provinces. As one result, the faculty and students of the Central Academy of Fine Arts were inordinately important in defining the national standards for the new art between 1949 and 1957. Artists in the provinces, by the same token, were often in the position of reacting to new art rather than defining it. Nevertheless, the party directive to learn from actual life led artists in the provinces to develop, over time, a sensitivity to the geography and local color of their new homes that unavoidably flavored their art. In a later chapter we will investigate Shi Lu's blossoming as the leader of a new regional school and then as an eccentric individualist.

Painters who supported the Communist cause were extremely varied in social background and artistic approach. They ranged from children of wealthy landlords to offspring of the poor. They were oil painters, guohua artists, and printmakers. Some joined the Communists early on and others not until 1949. After liberation they became publishers, administrators, and art professors. Yet for a brief time immediately following the Communist victory, they worked in common styles for a common purpose.