"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.

Image not available

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

Image not available

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.

Image not available

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

Image not available

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.