Red Guard Art

The Central Academy of Fine Arts succeeded in attracting national attention for its propaganda work at the height of the movement. A People's Daily report of February 23, 1967, records that "rebel artists" of CAFA had drawn propaganda pictures based on Mao's quotations, "a new event in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and a great initiative of the fine arts circle."^[74] The following day a foreign reporter described lines of workers at post offices and other public institutions waiting to purchase a "news sheet caricaturing thirty-nine targets of the Cultural Revolution."^[75] This poster fits the description of an elaborate cartoon designed by Weng Rulan, an advanced undergraduate in the CAFA guohua department.^[76] The version reproduced here (fig. 115) bears the title "A Crowd of Clowns" and was issued by a transitory Red Guard group, the Preparatory Office for the Struggle Peng [Zhen], Lu [Dingyi], Luo [Ruiqing], and Yang [Shangkun]'s Counterrevolutionary Revisionist Group.^[77] At the time the poster was made, this organization occupied offices in the municipal government complex,^[78] a situation no doubt resulting from the January overthrow of the city government.

According to the artist, the poster depicts the first thirty-nine high-ranking targets of the Cultural Revolution in the order they were purged from government. The figures are caricatured so as to reflect their personal quirks and political position. The artist, whose father was a professor of history, established her iconography by discussing the purged leaders with her father's friends,

most of whom were idly passing time at home after having been purged themselves. They were able to supply colorful anecdotes that helped the young artist understand the significance of the purges, and gave her hints about the bestknown foibles of individual leaders.

One of the many ironies of the Cultural Revolution is that the young people used by Mao for his own political ends were products of the very system they overthrew. Weng Rulan, for example, was at the time a twenty-two-year-old Beijing native educated in New China. Her father was a specialist in the Yuan dynasty who taught at Beijing Normal University, and her mother taught at the National Minorities Institute. Weng Rulan was recognized for her artistic talent as a child; when she was eleven her work was included in an exhibition of children's art sent to Yugoslavia and published in China.^[79] In 1956, at the age of twelve, she was accepted at the CAFA middle school, the most prestigious of the nation's specialized art boarding schools.

During Weng Rulan's six years in the middle school, she pursued a curriculum that included regular high school classes but emphasized technical training in art. Many of her teachers were the best graduates of the CAFA college and graduate programs. Her middle school class was part of a short-lived experiment in full implementation of Soviet arts education, for it admitted students directly from elementary school. The administration, however, found that the young students presented special difficulties that the staff could not handle and the following year reluctantly returned to a shorter four-year course. Otherwise, the fundamental curriculum remained largely the same until the Cultural Revolution.^[80]

A younger artist who studied at the middle school from 1963 to 1968 remembers the curriculum as follows. In the first two years, the course work was roughly evenly divided between art courses and regular academic work.^[81] By the third year, the balance had shifted so that art occupied about 75 percent of class time. Specialized subjects such as calligraphy, oil painting, and Chinese painting were taught according to a daily rotation. Drawing and watercolor painting, which in turn required a solid understanding of form and color, constituted the core of the students' technical training. Instruction in drawing followed the Chistiakov system, proceeding from the depiction of geometric objects in space, such as spheres, cubes, and cones, to drawing plaster casts of famous sculptures, and finally to rendering the human form. At mandatory evening study halls the students usually practiced their drawing, sometimes posing for one another.^[82] According to the former director, at least 90 percent of the graduates went on to college, presumably at an art school.

Weng Rulan graduated from the CAFA middle school in 1962. Examinations for admission to CAFA were not conducted in that year, but faculty from the college personally selected students they wished to see enter the five-year CAFA college program. Weng was chosen as a student by Ye Qianyu, chair-

Image not available

Figure 115
Weng Rulan, "A Crowd of Clowns,"
1967, poster, detail (opposite),
collection of the artist.

man of the guohua department, and thus became a guohua figure painter. Much of Ye Qianyu's work is very linear, and Weng became a specialist in the outline style.

By the time the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Weng had completed four years of her five-year guohua major, had undergone ten years of professional art training at CAFA, and was thoroughly steeped in the principles and history of Communist art. The complex composition and amusing caricatures of "A Crowd of Clowns" are very much a product of that careful training. In her cartoon can clearly be seen the legacy of her teacher's style (fig. 48), whose figures include slightly squared shoulders and knees and lively variations in line width, a stylistic heritage she did not reject even though Ye Qianyu was an early target of the Red Guard.

The composition of "A Crowd of Clowns" has many possible models within the academy. One that comes immediately to mind is a nianhua by

Hong Bo, former party secretary of CAFA, which was well known after its publication in the catalogue for the 1949 national exhibition (fig. 7). Twentyfive north Chinese peasants and Communist cadres parade across Hong Bo's picture in celebration of heroes of the civil war. They are arranged in a serpentine fashion, so as to leave space for each figure. Members of the varied group travel by foot, horse cart, and horseback, are garbed in peasant style or blue cotton work clothes, and carry slogan-emblazoned banners, drums, folk trumpets, and cymbals.

Just as preliberation woodcuts reworked the established iconographic forms of folk art to help Mao Zedong in propaganda battles of the 1940s, so Weng Rulan manipulated icons of early Communist art to attack the CCP's ousted leaders on Mao's behalf. The first of the thirty-nine figures in "A Crowd of Clowns" is Lu Dingyi, director of the CCP Propaganda Department and minister of culture. \ beats a broken drum that emits noises such as "dogmatism," "pragmatism," and "simplification." Wu Han, Liao Mosha, and Deng Tuo, who had been attacked for criticizing Mao in their writings, follow. Deposed viceminister of culture Xia Yan blows a trumpet that sounds "The 30s"; he stands alongside Zhou Yang, whose own trumpet urges "The Wang Ming Line" Literature of National Defense," and "Oppose Lu Xun." Each figure is labeled and satirized. The playwright Tian Han wears a Peking opera robe, the collar of which is embroidered with the word "antiparty." General Luo Ruiqing, whose leg is in a cast, is carried in a basket. (Luo broke his leg the previous year in an unsuccessful suicide leap from a building.)^[83]

Wang Guangmei, Liu Shaoqi's wife, rides a bicycle in the high heels, sheath dress, and jewelry for which the Red Guard ridiculed her.^[84] A book, The Sayings of Chairman Liu , rests on the front of her bicycle, and a pile of hats on the rear. The hats are labeled "counterrevolutionary, true rightist," "false leftist," "antiparty type," and so forth. Marshall He Long stands behind her, depicted with exaggerated emphasis on his hairy chest, arms, and mustache. He wears Peking opera flags on his back that bear the "If the father's a hero" slogan, and thus is portrayed as a 'supporter of the "bloodlines" Red Guard group. Following in sedan chairs are Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and their supporters. Deng plays bridge with cards that read "king" and "work teams."

The ridicule of purged party leaders had a venerable history by the time Weng made her poster. Her work, in fact, treats her subject much more mildly than some humorless cartoons of 1955, which portray the disgraced Hu Feng as a thoroughly evil tiger or villain. Nevertheless, "A Crowd of Clowns" makes a statement relevant to Red Guard factionalism as well as to high-level politics. Trailing behind the last purged leader are a ragged line of small figures carrying the tattered flags of rival rebel groups: West Guard, East Guard, United

Action Committee (UAC), Red Flag Army, and so forth.^[85] These groups were all associated with the slogan "If the father's a hero, the son's a real man; if the father's a counterrevolutionary, the son's a bastard." The flags on He Long's back that bear this slogan are thus an intentional irony, for his son was a UAC leader.^[86] In this way the young Red Guard activist was attacked with what amounted to his own slogan, for once his venerable father had been condemned, he had no choice but to assume the bastard label himself. According to Gao Gao and Yan Jiaqi, the conflict between the UAC, a group composed largely of children of high officials, and other Red Guard groups, who had overthrown these same officials, reached its height on about May 29, 1967, at anniversary celebrations for the founding of the Red Guard.^[87]

Not only was Weng Rulan's placard made available to workers in Beijing, but it was also posted throughout the city's diplomatic district. It was even mailed to foreign purchasers of Chinese books and periodicals, the source of the version reproduced here. Such wide distribution marked a great publicity victory for the Red Guard faction with which the artist was affiliated.

Many of the published works from the early years of the Cultural Revolution were painted for one of the many Red Guard-organized exhibitions. Some former Red Guard artists have even suggested that the organization of Beijing exhibitions was factionalized, with specific Red Guard groups taking charge of each. The idea seems reasonable in light of the extreme animosity that developed between the groups, though most former Red Guard claim that loyalty to Chairman Mao outweighed factional attachments. For important exhibitions, then, competing factions might cooperate. The important May 28 exhibition at the Chinese National Art Gallery opened during the worst struggles for control of the Red Guard Congress, but no traces of the factional conflict appear in Art Storm .

The Red Guard, inspired by the cult of Mao Zedong and guided by Jiang Qing, set out to construct a new pictorial history for the People's Republic of China, one that dramatized Mao's revolutionary role and minimized that of most other Communist leaders. A publication of the period asserts: "It is Chairman Mao who points the correct direction for the revolutionary literary and art workers. It is Comrade Jiang Qing, courageous standard-bearer of the great Cultural Revolution, who persists along Chairman Mao's revolutionary line in literature and art and leads the proletarian revolutionaries in these fields in creating model revolutionary productions for the stage."^[88]

One well-publicized exhibition of the period was "Long Live the Victory of Chairman Mao's Revolutionary Line," which opened at the Chinese National Art Gallery on October 1, 1967, and subsequently toured the nation. Sixteen hundred works were exhibited, of which 60 percent were by workers, peasants, and soldiers.^[89] Presumably, then, 40 percent of the works were by professionals. Chairman Mao' s Heart Beats as One with the Hearts of the Rev-

olutionary Masses (fig. 110), an oil painting prepared for this exhibition, is believed to have been painted primarily by CAFA faculty and students aligned with the Revolutionary Alliance/Red Flag group.

An event that proved unexpectedly significant for artists nationwide was "Mao Zedong's Thought Illuminates the Anyuan Worker's Movement" (Mao Zedong sixiang guanghui zhaoliang Anyuan gongren geming yundong ), a didactic exhibition that opened in October 1967 and for which the Cultural Revolution icon Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan was painted (fig. 116).^[91] The exhibition was organized at the Museum of Revolutionary History by the national labor union. Most of the historical displays were prepared by professors of party history and students from People's University and Beijing University. A small group of artists was invited to prepare paintings of the seven journeys Chairman Mao made to Anyuan. These artists have been associated with the Sky faction of CAFA and CAAC by participants and observers sympathetic to that group.

The political purpose of this activity was more explicit than in the preceding exhibition, for the show was part of an intensified campaign to discredit Liu Shaoqi. As Art Storm indicated some months earlier, the purge of Mao's chosen successor meant that history paintings such as Dong Xiwen's Founding of the Nation , with its prominent image of Liu Shaoqi, and Hou Yimin's Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan Coal Miners were inappropriate for display. The exhibition in fact sought to redefine the iconography of China's revolutionary history by replacing Liu with Mao as the primary organizer of the important 1922 coal miners' strike.

Many of the most enthusiastic Red Guard were not yet mature artists, and the tasks they set themselves were sometimes quite difficult. Yet because most of the works were collaborative, in the collective spirit of the time, assistance from professionals was usually available. In many cases, an older, more experienced artist would advise a Red Guard artist. The vast majority of works published during this period, like Weng Rulan's placard and the posters by Sun Jingbo and Jiang Tiefeng, did not even bear the artists' names. Personal reputation was considered unimportant in the idealistic fervor of the time.

One remarkable exception to the convention of anonymity was Liu Chunhua's oil painting Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan (fig. 116). Liu Chunhua, a college student at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, had graduated from the Lu Xun Academy of Art middle school in Shenyang. Although not trained as an oil painting specialist, he was thoroughly schooled in the fundamentals of drafting and color and had received some recognition for his pencil drawing while still in middle school. He was assigned to prepare one of the seven portraits of Mao for the historical exhibition, depicting the young Mao's earliest visit to Anyuan in 1921.

The paintings for the exhibition were created in a collective studio set up

in the museum. A fellow participant has described with some sympathy Liu's intense anxiety as the exhibition date drew close and he remained unsatisfied with his image. Indeed, he was still working in the gallery when the exhibition opened, and later complained that spectators stepped on his palette. It is widely rumored that Liu's work was collaborative, having been heavily retouched by older artists, especially one Soviet-trained professor. The alleged ghost-painter, who was then working in the museum on a mural project organized by the State Council, emphatically denies such stories, pointing out that Liu's middle school art training was completely adequate to his task. And in fact, although the young artist received a great deal of advice from fellow artists and exhibition organizers, the painting was entirely executed by his hand.^[92]

The painting's pedigree would not inspire such interest if it were not for the official response it received. Jiang Qing saw a photograph of the work in 1967 as part of an application to publish it. She requested that a viewing be held at Zhongnanhai, after which she decided it was a suitable model for Cultural Revolution art. The following year, People's Daily distributed a color reproduction nationwide. Parades and festivals were organized to commemorate the publication, with pretty girls in new blue overalls dancing in front of multiple reproductions of the picture.^[93] By the fall of 1968 it was institutionalized as a model painting and copied by aspiring artists throughout China. Interestingly, very few artists outside the artist's Red Guard faction and the rather small group then employed on projects in the historical museum recall seeing the painting at the time it was first exhibited. With the publicity blitz of 1968, however, almost every Chinese with even the remotest interest in art became aware of Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan .^[94] The artist believes that nine hundred million copies were eventually printed.^[95]

Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan appears to express the young artist's veneration for Chairman Mao. At any rate, it became a useful contribution to his cult, for it possesses clear devotional appeal. The radiant, youthful Mao Zedong stands contemplatively on a mountain path, looking as though his destination was St. Peter's Pearly Gates rather than a coal mine. Indeed, the classically schooled artist claims to have taken his inspiration from a Raphael Madonna. The practical business of revising the standard historical account by replacing Liu Shaoqi with Mao Zedong as the mastermind of the famous strike might present difficulties even if the young artist believed, as he did, in the ideological accuracy of the newly simplified history. This work avoids concrete problems concerning who did what when by severing the genre of history painting from its mundane ties to an identifiable physical setting. It doesn't matter where Mao is or what he is doing, for the transcendent nobility of his cause and character are clear.

A more immediate source for the composition than Raphael might have been contemporary Chinese oil painting in the Soviet manner. The artist Jin

Image not available

Figure 116
Liu Chunhua, Chairman Mao Goes to
Anyuan, ca. 1967, oil on canvas.

Shangyi had earlier adapted the portrait genre to the demands of history painting with his Mao Zedong at the December Conference of 1961 (fig. 75), in which Mao appears against a plain red background. His Long March of 1964 similarly portrayed Mao against an extremely generalized landscape ground.^[96]Long March was widely exhibited and studied by young artists until, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, it was criticized and suppressed for its inadequately bright colors. In the spring of 1966, Jin completed another portrait, Chairman Mao at Lu Shan (fig. 117),^[97] commissioned for an exhibition in Albania. The work was widely reproduced and copied during the early years of

Image not available

Figure 117
Jin Shangyi, Chairman Mao at Lu Shah,
1966, oil on canvas.

the Cultural Revolution. As in Liu's work, Mao is depicted alone, against a panoramic landscape. Thus, although Liu Chunhua's composition and concept may have sources in European and Soviet art, they are most closely related to those of such well-known Chinese artists as Jin Shangyi.

Although Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan was affirmed by Cultural Revolution authorities as an icon of the new art, its links to earlier academic art stand out more than do its innovations. Features of Liu's work that became characteristic of Cultural Revolution art include Mao's exaggerated eyebrows, his smooth face, and the artificially arranged clouds, which allow nature to

echo Mao's movements.^[98] Yet all these may be found in earlier art. Characters in Railroad Guerrillas (fig. 47), for example, have similar fierce eyebrows, Jin Shangyi's portraits have equally smooth surfaces, and The Founding of the Nation has kindred artificial cloud formations. As Zhang Shaoxia and Li Xiaoshan note, it is a rather ordinary picture,^[99] though fairly successful for a student work.

By the end of the Cultural Revolution, it had become conventional to speak of portraits and pictures of Chairman Mao in religious terms, as though they actually embodied a god. Zhang and Li refer sarcastically to Liu Chunhua's picture as a "divine image" (baoxiang ). An elderly in-law of mine was severely criticized for having lined a chicken cage with a newspaper image of Chairman Mao.^[100] To remove a formal portrait from the wall was referred to as "inviting the portrait of Chairman Mao to descend."^[101] The festivities surrounding publication of Liu Chunhua's painting in 1968 appeared to deify the image of Chairman Mao, that is, to treat it as though it were inhabited by the divinity himself. In one of the many ironies of artistic life in China, Wu Guanzhong, a French-trained professor at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, was required to "improve" his art and ideology by copying Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan , a work painted by one of his students.^[102]

As Maurice Meisner has observed, by 1968 the cult of Mao had shifted from the iconoclasm of the Red Guard movement, here exemplified by the work of Weng Rulan, to the production of icons.^[103] Liu Chunhua's Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan , so prominently published in the second half of 1968, was the most important pictorial manifestation of this trend.

The nature of art exhibitions in the capital reveals a similar development. According to Red Guard recollections, in 1967 there was an exhibition called "The Accomplishments of the Military Struggles of the Red Guard" (Hong-weibing zhandou chengji zhanlan ). The subjects of the displays included Red Guard ransacking people's homes, Red Guard criticizing and humiliating people for political incorrectness, and Red Guard expressing solidarity with the third world, including pictures of Red Guard with Africans and people of other nations. Other exhibitions were held to criticize specific government leaders. By early 1968, when a show referred to as the "Red Sun" Exhibition was held at the Chinese National Art Gallery, the subject had shifted decisively to heroic moments in the biography of Chairman Mao.^[104]