The Black Painting Exhibitions

Zhou Enlai, always sensitive to China's world image, requested in 1971 that the hotels and railway stations defaced by Red Guard slogans and pictures be redecorated.^[145] The foreign visitors who were invited to China during the diplomatic thaw of the 1970s were to be shown an elegant, orderly image. The paintings should be in national, contemporary styles. They were to display China's ancient cultural history and artistic standards and to be both simple and bold. For these purposes, landscape painting was not to be considered one of the "four olds."^[146] Similar works were to be prepared for export, to earn needed foreign exchange. To this end, talented older artists were to be freed from captivity.

In Shanghai, artists produced almost two thousand such paintings. According to a leading Shanghai arts administrator, Cultural Revolution leaders Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan personally inspected and approved the results.^[147] Art organizations nationwide began similar projects. Shi Lu, for example, provided thirty paintings to the Tianjin Foreign Trade Administration for export.^[148] Yan Han produced a lovely series of flower prints in the multiblock shuiyin technique for the Beijing Hotel and the International Club (fig. 126).

The following year, 1972, many artists who had been condemned by the Red Guard as counterrevolutionaries were rehabilitated.^[149] This liberation, after six or seven years of inactivity, yielded an outpouring of high-quality paintings. Stimulated by the thaw, guohua artists such as Shi Lu and Li Keran painted some of the most beautiful landscapes of their careers. Shi Lu's Mount Hua (fig. 127), depicting a famous site of his region, is a superb example; Li Keran's Landscape of the Pure River Li (fig. 128), painted three years later, is nevertheless typical of a new style that dominated his work of the period. The oil painter Pang Xunqin produced a lovely, rather decorative still life (fig. 129). Tragically, however, the artists once again became the victims of political factionalism. As Zhou Enlai grew ever weaker from cancer, Jiang Qing and her allies sought to position themselves for the succession battle. An ideological campaign against Confucius was launched in late 1973, its real target being Zhou Enlai.

In every part of the cultural world, a nationwide target was selected for the Anti-Confucius campaign, which attacked Western values as well as the ancient Chinese classics.^[150] The cinema establishment, for example, singled out an insufficiently flattering documentary about China by the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, who had been invited to visit the country in 1972, as an object for virulent attack.^[151] Yet Gao Jingde and his assistants failed to find such a target in the art world, which was, after all, under their own direction.

Image not available

Figure 126
Yan Han, Spider Plant, 1972,
polychromatic woodblock print, collection
of the artist.

No convenient foreigner was at hand. According to an anti-Jiang Qing article of 1977, which may have been written by Gao's repentant assistants, in late 1973 Wang Mantian wrote a secret letter to Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing, and Yao Wenyuan reporting on the artistic activity in the fields of foreign trade and foreign affairs.^[152] Another knowledgeable source maintains that

Image not available

Figure 127
Shi Lu, Mount Hua, 1972, ink on paper,
courtesy of Cemac Ltd.

Image not available

Figure 128
Li Keran, Landscape of the Pure River
Li, 1975, hanging scroll, ink and color
on paper, 100 cm × 69 cm.

Image not available

Figure 129
Pang Xunqin, Still Life, 1973, oil on
canvas, 61 cm × 50 cm, Chinese National
Art Gallery.

Yao Wenyuan himself supplied the target for the art world.^[153] In any event, the art leadership's initial inability to find a target for the Anti-Confucius campaign was overcome, thanks to intervention from higher up.

At an expanded meeting of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee held on January 2, 1974, Yao attacked a catalogue published by the Shanghai Foreign Trade Administration.^[154] The pamphlet, Zhongguohua (Chinese Paintings), contained nonpolitical paintings by Lin Fengmian, Li Keran, Pan Tianshou, Cheng Shifa, Fu Baoshi, Ya Ming, and many other famous guohua painters, as well as some pre-1949 paintings. Yao cited one example as particularly dreadful, a 1973 painting of a rooster entitled Welcoming Spring .^[155] The rooster's bulging eyes and upraised tail were, to Yao, clear evidence of its anger—anger directed against the socialist system.

After further investigation, this heinous publication was linked to the interior decoration of the Beijing Hotel and International Club. Wang Mantian gathered many of the works in Beijing for a black painting exhibition and series of criticism meetings held in February and March. The preface to the exhibition stated, "The production of these black paintings received the open encouragement and support of certain people"^[156] —an outright attack on Zhou Enlai. The leadership extremists interpreted the paintings in ways that made them appear actively dangerous rather than simply apolitical. Li Kuchan's picture of eight ragged lotus leaves, for example, was attacked as a criticism of Jiang Qing's eight model operas. The movement, once launched, was expanded to included unpublished works. Huang Yongyu was reported to authorities in Nanjing for a painting of a winking owl he gave to his friend Song Wenzhi.^[157] His image was interpreted, probably with justification, as a display of dissatisfaction with the regime.^[158] It was confiscated and sent to Beijing for the exhibition. As the Black Painting Movement proceeded, the masses were encouraged to express ever more far-fetched criticisms. Yan Han's print of a spider plant (fig. 126), or diaolan (hanging orchid) in Chinese, allegedly accused the Cultural Revolution of "hanging the gentlemen." This bizarre theory was derived from traditional symbolism in which the orchid represented the upright educated gentleman.^[159]

The totalitarian means by which Jiang Qing maintained artistic orthodoxy may be seen in Yan Han's experience, which makes sense only if one assumes that Yan had been a subject of investigation for some time. He recalls that one spring day, soldiers from the art academy, of which Jiang Qing was then director, arrived at his door to bustle him off to the academy for a neibu , or restricted, exhibition of black paintings. Two other old artists were present, Li Keran and Wu Zuoren. All three were required to read lengthy confessions, and articles about the traitorous artists were subsequently published in major newspapers.^[160]

A former official recalls that he advised Wang Mantian to limit the scope

of the movement.^[161] Indeed, he said, an expansion might well reflect on their own leadership if local authorities found black artists among those they had previously exhibited. Local art authorities, however, oblivious to the real target of Yao Wenyuan's attacks, continued to jump on the bandwagon. Although some artists in Shanghai believe that local authorities acted on their own initiative, many of the latter claimed afterward that the late and little-lamented Wang Mantian made them do it.^[162] Official accounts report that she sent underlings to eight or nine provinces and cities, including Shanghai, Nanjing, Xi'an, and Ji'nan, to organize their activities.^[163]

The Shanghai black painting exhibition was organized by the propaganda department of the Municipal Party Committee soon after the Beijing show. In late February, party authorities attacked the pamphlet Zhongguohua as satisfying the needs of imperialism, revisionism, and counterrevolution. On March 6, the policy of promoting nonpolitical guohua was attacked as fawning for foreign exchange. On March 20, the Shanghai newspapers Jiefang ribao and Wenhuibao began what was to be a two-month assault on the catalogue.^[164] It was against this background that the exhibition was held.

The organizers of the neibu exhibition cast their net widely; they included paintings by artists of various ages and specialties, ranging from Zhu Qizhan, Feng Zikai, Lin Fengmian, and Wu Dayu, all elderly artists from the Shanghai Painting Institute (formerly known as the Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting), to the nineteen-year-old Han Xin, an amateur oil painter who had been reported to the authorities by a cultural palace administrator. In one particularly ironic example, the monumental oil painting project commissioned earlier by Jiefang ribao to win Jiang Qing's favor, the Yellow River series, now backfired. When exhibited in Beijing in 1973, the paintings, disappointingly, had attracted only moderate interest. Now, one of the works, by Xia Baoyuan, a young Shanghai Art School graduate, was ruled to be a black painting, because the faces of the figures were too white, like those of dead people. At the other extreme, the unemployed Ha Ding, who had made his living producing factory paintings for cheap Hong Kong galleries since the forced closing of his private studio, was mortified to have his potboilers publicly exhibited and criticized for their lack of political content.

Guohua painters were particularly vulnerable. Pan Tianshou was attacked posthumously for a painting he had given to a Shanghai official. Chen Dayu's rooster, Welcoming Spring , was displayed prominently near the entrance to the black painting exhibition. An important focus of criticism was Cheng Shifa, for he exemplified everything the movement aimed to destroy. His work was not only apolitical, but it also sold well abroad. Calendar pages from Hong Kong and other reproductions of his paintings in foreign hands covered the walls of the exhibition. At the criticism session, he was attacked for unhealthy inscriptions, for formalistic images, and for catering to foreign buyers. While the

Image not available

Figure 130
Cheng Shifa, Girl and Deer (dedicated to
James Cahill), 1973, ink and color on
paper, James Cahill, Berkeley, California.

sweet picture of a girl playing with a deer that we reproduce (fig. 130) was presumably unknown to his attackers, it is typical of the Cheng Shifa work that Jiang Qing found unhealthy. The painting, which is similar to one published in the infamous Zhongguohua catalogue, was given to an American professor in 1973.

In March, Wang Mantian's representatives arrived in Xi'an to organize a black painting exhibition. According to one report, they found their work much easier than it had been in Beijing, for the Xi'an artists naively wrote inscriptions on all their paintings. Held in late March, the Xi'an exhibition included sixty revisionist and counterrevolutionary paintings by twenty artists. Zhao Wangyun, Shi Lu, He Haixia, and Fang Jizhong were prominent targets. After a criticism meeting in which a thousand people participated, every locality was ordered to continue criticizing black paintings. Newspapers published many articles laying out charges against the counterrevolutionary artists. He Haixia was attacked for a painting called Moonlight at Yanling , which was in-

scribed as having been painted on a trip with Shi Lu and Li Qi. Zhao Wang-yun's paintings were castigated as "black mountains and black streams."

Denunciations of Shi Lu became particularly pronounced once a cache of thirty export paintings was found in Tianjin. A team was immediately organized to investigate him, and the old charges of his leading a "wild, weird, chaotic, and black" school of painting were revived. His feisty poem of 1963 (see p. 296) had been seized by the Red Guard and was now declared by Wang Mantian to be a "Counterrevolutionary Manifesto." Only recently liberated to serve as a consultant for local submissions to the national exhibition, he was once again labeled a counterrevolutionary.^[165]

The fundamental issue behind the Black Painting Movement was Zhou Enlai's contention that China should have two standards for art, one for domestic and one for foreign consumption. This view was not new, for Zhou had long served as a bridge between the CCP and the outside world; the double standard in art was in fact a natural extension of his United Front policy, with which he sought to maintain a highly civilized and moderate facade for the Chinese Communist party. Given such a formulation, Jiang Qing and Wang Mantian were left to hold their annual socialist realist art exhibitions for the masses, while institutions under Zhou Enlai's direction would produce mildly nationalistic or pleasantly apolitical paintings for the rest of the world. While such an approach has its own political logic, to Jiang Qing it appeared that Zhou Enlai had usurped the only territory over which she had unquestioned authority: the cultural sphere. The paintings were not commissioned through the culture group of the State Council; instead, Zhou simply activated the foreign affairs and foreign trade bureaucracies to carry out his ideas. Attacks against him, however, focused not on this power struggle, but on his fundamental policy. Jiang Qing and her allies simply rejected the need for dual artistic standards.^[166]

For most black artists, the years after 1974 were difficult. Daily self-criticism sessions at their work units were mandatory. Because the artists had been branded as criminals, all but their most faithful friends shunned them. When their protector, Zhou Enlai, died of cancer on January 8, 1976, Mao sent no condolences to his widow.^[167] A demonstration held to commemorate him in April drew hundreds of thousands of people; nevertheless, it was put down and condemned, allegedly because bad people had taken control. Mao Zedong himself lived until September 9, 1976; within weeks of his passing, the Gang of Four—Jiang Qing, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen, and Zhang Chunqiao—were arrested. The great exhibition of Cultural Revolution art planned for the fall of 1976 did not take place.