Three
From Popularization to Specialization

In China as a whole, 1953 was marked by preparation for the first five-year economic development plan, with a focus on industrialization and technological improvement.^[1] In September, the Soviets agreed to provide a broad range of technical assistance to China. The conclusion of the Korean War in the same year eliminated the perceived need for artists to make military propaganda, thus pointing to a shift from the wartime foundations of the new Chinese art. Renewed concern with the technical quality of art, moreover, seems to have accompanied the nationwide interest in Soviet technology. The year 1953, therefore, marked an important transition from a rigid emphasis on popularized subjects and forms to the administration of art as a professional, specialized undertaking.

Both the art academies and art associations were reorganized to implement the shift in policy. The two most important practical results of this change were promotion of Soviet-style oil painting and the revival of guohua . Indeed, a somewhat simplistic but largely valid generalization about painting in the period 1953-1957 is that young artists learned oil painting while old artists revived guohua . More broadly, as will be seen, all aspects of the Chinese art world, from educational institutions to the exhibition structure, were systematized during the period. This chapter will discuss the most important theoretical issues of this half-decade and their implementation in several of China's major art institutions.

While traditional art most often appeared in activities sponsored by the Chinese Artists Association, the strength of the new Soviet-inspired art was based in the academies. These institutions, which were small, exclusive, and carefully supervised, developed the most systematic approach to art, one strongly influenced by Soviet prototypes. All art was to be reformed. Oil paint-

ing was to be equated with Soviet socialist realism or with a new national form of realism. Modern styles—which, according to Soviet dogma, were incapable of reflecting the lives of the people—were theoretically indefensible and thus absent from the curriculum.^[2] Chinese painting was to be improved by replacing most traditional subjects and styles with modern figurative scenes executed in a realistic mode.

In the art world outside the academies, where artists were less tightly controlled, the issues were far more complex. Although many young artists emulated the well-publicized academic models, older artists did not always understand or agree with the canons of new reformed art. Some enthusiasts of twentieth-century European or Sino-Western art harbored private doubts about the Soviet program from its earliest implementation. Outbreaks of pre-1949 modernist styles occurred among elderly artists in the early 1960s and again in the mid-1980s, indicating that they had not been completely reformed. At the other extreme, some traditional Chinese painters hoped to be exempted from the canons of revolutionary art based on their contributions to the national heritage. Debates over theoretical differences and personal rivalries led to lively critical contests during the 1950s.

Unfortunately, whatever constructive tensions existed between the art of international communism and Chinese national art were ripped apart by the polarization of the Hundred Flowers campaign of 1956 and 1957, when contradictions between Western and traditional Chinese styles became the basis for factional attacks. The period came to a close with the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, during which artistic opinions came to be labeled as political crimes and the most opinionated advocates of both styles were purged.

Ai Qing on the Reform of Chinese Painting

In spite of his appreciation for Qi Baishi's painting, the poet Ai Qing was an important spokesman for the view that Chinese painting should be thoroughly reformed through synthesis with Western art. He conducted a session of the Shanghai Art Workers Political Study Group on March 27, 1953, that gives a lively sense of the controversies regarding administration of traditional art. In his role as political instructor, Ai Qing castigated much of traditional Chinese painting and, by extension, most Shanghai guohua artists. The text of his speech, published by Wenyibao in August,^[3] acknowledges the mandate to perpetuate the nation's cultural legacy, a mandate that dominated post-1952 art theory. Yet as Ai describes the aspects of Chinese painting to be retained and those to be eradicated, it becomes clear that he believed that most traditional Chinese art belonged in China's museums rather than in her studios. His

speech, an eloquent defense of the need for thorough reform of Chinese painting, is a key document in the subsequent intraparty battle about the future of guohua .

Ai Qing's "on Chinese Painting"

There are people who ask, "Since we esteem ancient cultural relics, why must we reform guohua ?" First we will discuss the question of our attitude toward the national cultural legacy. Our national history is very long and has an extraordinarily rich legacy, including its cultural legacy. These national legacies are our nation's wealth because they are expressions of our historical ancestors' abilities and wisdom, reflecting our ancestors' lives and struggles and the customs and habits of people of past ages, and so forth. In order to protect ancient cultural relics, our government has expended great effort and has done much collecting and research work. From the ancient cultural relics displayed in museums we can clearly see the process of our national development. At the same time, we can receive inspiration from these legacies to create even more, even better things.

The preservation of cultural relics and how one should look at these cultural relics are two different things. Ancient cultural relics are those created by people of antiquity. If a piece is destroyed, we have lost a piece, for we cannot summon the ancient person up from his grave to make another one. Thus, we must preserve it. As to how to evaluate the things left from ancient times, this is yet another matter. Such evaluation originates in our needs and our viewpoints. That is to say, we decide which things to study and which things not to study on the basis of today's needs.

Some people think that if we value the national heritage, all things that are ancient Chinese, regardless of what, are good. "If they are Chinese, they are good." This is really the "national essence" school of thought, in which ancient cultural relics are approached with a narrow, nationalistic spirit, and is something that we have opposed for a long time. Such people do not know that many of our cultural relics were suited to the needs of life and struggles in their time, but if we mechanically copy them now, the [results] are backward.

Should guohua reform? Here we must also clarify several problems. So-called guohua , in general, are paintings painted with Chinese brush, Chinese ink, and Chinese pigments on Chinese paper or silk. A more appropriate term would be national painting [minzu huihua ]; it uses our own tools and methods and it adopts forms developed by our nation over a long period of time to manufacture paintings.

Naturally, no one would misunderstand this and think that remolding guohua is like the revolution in dramatic arts,^[4] in which the works left by ancient people are revised. Doing that [to old paintings], needless to say, would be criminal. So the terminology "remolding guohua " has inherent contradictions.

What we should discuss are these two questions: (1) How does our painting accept the legacy of national painting? (2) How do we use the tools we originally had (Chinese brush, ink, color, paper, and silk) to paint new things? This is the problem of how people living now can make so-called guohua .

Paintings by ancient people were painted according to the demands of their own times. Because they, to a greater or lesser degree, satisfied the demands of their own era, their works were valued and preserved. We are now working for living people. Exhibitions are held for viewing by the living, not for viewing by the dead. Printed matter is the same; our work must satisfy the demands of living people. The ancients will not make any demands of us. But many people who make paintings seem to be laboring to satisfy the demands of ancient people and do not consider the opinions of living people.

Our artists always hope people will say that our paintings are good; even if we hope that people will point out shortcomings, our goal is still to paint better the second time. There certainly won't be anyone who publishes work in the hope that people will castigate it. If we cannot create art suitable to this era, then our era will have no art. Because of copying [lin-mo ], today's so-called guohua is almost indistinguishable from that of Ming and Qing times. Many paintings leave the viewer unable to tell whether they were painted by a person of today or by a Ming- or Qing-dynasty person. The times have changed, the people's lives have changed, but the so-called guohua has not changed; it seems that guohua is an art that tells lies. Therefore, no one believes guohua anymore. Once an artist lies, the people have the right to disbelieve. The people believe artists because they tell the truth. If, in our painting, one cannot see that the subject differs from those of ancient paintings and cannot see that the expressive method differs from those of ancient paintings, then we should simply publish old paintings. Why ask lots of people to paint pictures? He paints plum blossoms; you also paint plum blossoms. He paints orchids; you also paint orchids. Your painting and his painting—if it weren't for different signatures, one could not tell who actually painted it. What literature and art fear most is repetition. No matter how good something is, a duplicate of it does not have much significance.

Paintings are painted by people. If the painting is bad, a person must take responsibility. If you say that the guohua needs remolding, the painters must first be remolded. What is wrong with the painters? Is it that they do not understand the demands of the people, they cannot see that times have changed, and they are unsuitable to this era? The unsuitable must be altered, altered until it is suitable. If clothes don't fit because they are too big or too small, they must be altered so that they fit when you try them on. If the road is too narrow, it must be altered so that it is convenient for transportation. Change is a good thing. If something is unsuitable and is not changed, we should abandon it. That we still want to change it

means we don't want to throw it out. Now all of China is undertaking reforms, reforming so that it is suitable for the development of socialism. I have heard that some people dislike the word "remolding" [gaizao ]. They prefer instead to be perpetually imprisoned by the bonds of plagiarism and imitation. They are unwilling to liberate themselves into the boundless expanses of the great creative universe. This means that they are unwilling for society to make any demands of them.

Some people think, "Workers, peasants, and soldiers don't love our paintings, and whose fault is it? The workers, peasants, and soldiers are to blame, because they are uncultured and don't understand. After eight or ten years, when they are more cultured, they will understand by themselves."

This is a way of thinking that shirks responsibility. Times have changed, and the people who look at paintings have changed. In the past, it was bureaucrats and landlords who looked at paintings; now it is the working people who look at paintings. Naturally their demands of painting will not be the same. The people who paint Chinese paintings are faced with this problem. What should they do?

Perhaps some will sigh, feeling that their art has lost its cognoscenti. Thus, they can only "appreciate its fragrance in solitude." In this case, there is no need to reform. But if a painter still has any breath of life, he will know that now is the time that his art can truly attain liberation. In the past, he served a small number of idle people, but now he serves the billions who are creating a new world. In the past, because we wished to satisfy the tastes of those half-dead people, our painting became half-dead. Now we must satisfy the demands of the billions of people bursting with energy. Our painting must be filled with vigor, its vitality extraordinarily exuberant, a thing that excites those who see it.

Some people say, "The government commemorates Qi Baishi's birthday, so the crabs and shrimp that he paints are progressive." Their meaning is that because Qi Baishi is valued, their paintings should be valued too; if Qi Baishi does not need to reform, why must they reform?

The government's commemoration of Qi Baishi's birthday and rewards for Qi Baishi, I believe, come not only because he excels at continuing our nation's painting tradition but also because he excels at expressing the things that he wants to express; and he has created many good paintings. He is not an ordinary conventional painter; he is a painter who is very courageous in creating. The subjects of his paintings are very broad, the methods he uses are greatly varied. He is a painter with rich imagination. Naturally, he has suffered from some limitations of his time, and he has not reflected the life of the people. But he still deserves to be called a great Chinese painter of today. He can observe his subject deeply and then express the subject by means of his own creative methods. He does not paint things he has never seen. Once someone asked him to paint a landscape and he said, "I have not seen a landscape for a long time, so I can't paint

one." He refused. But his paintings often adopt an original approach. In March of this year he painted a frog. One back leg was caught in water weeds, it was floating in the water, and in front of it were three little tadpoles swimming freely. When he had finished he was very happy and said that no one had ever painted this. [For a similar work, painted two years earlier, see fig. 44.] Recently he painted a lotus with a reflection in the water. He said that this was something he had never painted before. The government rewards Qi Baishi for precisely this sort of creative labor. His great achievements in art require diligent and systematic research in the future. We hope that many artists of rich creativity like Qi Baishi will oppose blindly imitating and plagiarizing. The awards for Qi Baishi are not in the hope that everyone will paint just like Qi Baishi. There can be only one Qi Baishi; if everyone imitates him, painting crabs and prawns—that is, painting exactly the same as Qi Baishi—what significance can it have?

People ask, "What is new guohua ?" For the moment we will not discuss the appropriateness of xin guohua as a name. So-called new guohua means, I think, new Chinese painting [xin de zhongguohua ]. Some painters wish to begin a new phase in the art of Chinese painting, with some new creation. Originally Chinese paintings, with the exception of a few artists' works, all played the same old tunes and followed the same stereotypes. This situation could not continue, and so some people wished to do new things. This, naturally, is a good thing.

Where is the new in new guohua ? I think we need (1) new contents and (2) new forms. If contents are new but forms are not new, then [the work] is only half new; if forms are new but contents not new, [similarly, the work] is only half new. But if the contents and forms are both new, won't it become a Western painting? This raises the question of how to continue our heritage. Only if we continue the most precious part of our national painting heritage and then create things with new contents and new forms can we call this completely new Chinese painting.

In Chinese painting, the most acute problem is figure painting. In the past we had a good tradition of figure painting, but recent figure painting is appallingly decadent. The figures painted by many people now don't have a shred of the feeling of a real person. Many figures have no body under their clothing. After viewing many figure paintings, you have no way of telling what dynasty the figures come from. Regardless of their clothing, gesture, face, or background, they haven't an iota of the appearance of a real person in society. Some people paint beauties in great quantity, but their so-called beauties cannot be seen in the park or on the street. Nor do their own family members look like that. It is obvious that they are lying.

The second problem is landscape painting. Is it permissible to paint landscapes? I believe it is. China is so large and has good mountains and good rivers everywhere. If you paint well, you will produce in people an intense love for their own land. But what of the landscape paintings we

Image not available

Figure 44
Qi Baishi, Frogs, 1951, ink on paper,
103.5 cm × 34.4 cm, Chinese National
Art Gallery.

see? These landscape paintings mostly come from books of ancient models [huaben ], and are concocted without basis in fact after an extended period of copying. The unconvincing piecing together and piling up [of such elements] has become the fashion. "A" paints five mountain peaks, "B" then paints six, "C" paints seven, and so on, until we have dozens of peaks. It doesn't matter if [the mountains are] painted to look like they will collapse; still a little building made of matchsticks must be erected on the highest mountain peak. The artist's idea is that the viewers of the painting can climb up to enjoy themselves. As for himself, he actually strolls on the asphalt streets of Shanghai. This [approach] is also a lie.

There are some people who paint one thing for their entire lives. Some specialize in bamboo painting, some in plum painting, and others in orchid painting, as though they had seen only one thing in their whole lives. Or perhaps it is that they have loved only one thing in life. But what they paint, too, are only imitations from the old versions. No matter what, this sort of person is pathetic.

Guohua, guohua —it has no variety. It has some variety, but not much. The people who paint guohua today need a little revolutionary spirit. This revolutionary spirit is not something that can be produced from nothing; it requires technical skill and guts. Having only skill or only guts won't do. Skill is your ability to observe and express the things you want to paint. Guts is that you break the bonds of your small circles—the courage to create by yourself.

In painting people one must paint living people. In painting landscapes one must paint real mountains and rivers. You must paint what you have seen, not what people have already painted many times. Paint what no one has yet painted. To sum up in one sentence, you must paint your own paintings. China is so large, its people are so numerous, its scenery is so beautiful, and its life is so rich; how can there be nothing to paint? Why must you plagiarize someone else's things? Why must you paint people who are dead? When I travel from Beijing to Shanghai, through southern Shandong and northern Jiangsu, I see many farmers with their long gowns rolled up, shouldering carrying poles, driving carts, or tilling the fields. Their gestures are quite beautiful, but why has no one painted them? Why must one always paint an old man with a walking stick followed by a zither-carrying servant boy? Can you say that they are truly beautiful? Can you say that our country has not a single solidly built house? Why do our paintings always have houses made of matchsticks?

To paint new paintings you must have new feelings, you must have feelings toward living, laboring, struggling people. Even if painting scenery, you have feelings toward nature, which has close relationships to people and society. To be a great painter, you must have thought and at least a clear awareness of your own work. What am I giving to the people? What do I wish to say to the people? Under current conditions, thoughtful painters are too few. Chinese painting, if it cannot escape the so-called

"relax the feelings and cultivate the character" flavor of the literati class, will never have a future.

I think that we must substitute depiction of real objects for copying [old paintings] as the fundamental curriculum for the study of Chinese painting. To paint figure paintings, you must learn to paint the nude human body and to sketch. To paint landscapes [fengjing ],^[5] you must go to the wilds to sketch from life. In painting flowers-and-birds or insects-and-fish, you must also sketch from life. One must make profound observations of people and nature. One must conduct research on old painting with new eyes. We need scientific realism as our standard in criticizing and evaluating our art. The excellence or poorness of a painting must be seen first in whether it accords with social reality and natural reality.

Chinese painting is our national painting; it has a long and glorious tradition, and its legacy is limitlessly rich. Our people love their national art. We are the descendants of a great nation; our painters must cleverly continue their precious inheritance, enthusiastically creating paintings that describe the new life. Chinese painting has a bright future.

Ai Qing's colorfully expressed formulations for the reform of guohua may seem extreme, in that they would require both new forms and new contents. In fact, though, his views were rather similar to those of Jiang Feng and many other cultural leaders. According to Jiang Feng, Lu Xun believed that wenrenhua (literati painting)—which he equated, not entirely accurately, with xieyi ("idea writing," a loosely brushed style of painting)—might be useful only if merged with new work.^[6] Ai Qing exhibits knowledge of the basics of Chinese painting and theory in his many criticisms of traditional practice. He rejects the traditional means of learning guohua , which was to copy old paintings, and instead proposes a method already in effect in China's academies: drawing from life, which included the use of nude models. An important theoretical basis for the Confucian custom of copying old paintings—the belief that one could enter a state of spiritual communion or artistic dialogue with ancient masters^[7] —is implicitly ridiculed as satisfying the demands of the dead rather than the living.

One of the many contradictions between personal taste and theoretical stance that one finds in the debates of the 1950s is that Ai Qing liked Chinese paintings by traditionalists such as Qi Baishi. In his speech Ai Qing explicitly defends the government's double standard in lionizing the octogenarian painter even though his work was neither socialist nor realist. Ai Qing's defense goes well beyond orthodox party dogma in its claim that creativity, originality, and quality deserve recognition. The message he reads into the veneration of Qi Baishi is that political standards may be waived for the great but not for artists of lesser talents.^[8]

Zhou Yang on the National Heritage

The 1953 changes made in art policy to encourage socialist realism, guohua , and specialization were mandated from above. The Second Congress of Literary and Arts Workers opened on September 23, 1953. Addresses by Zhou Enlai and Zhou Yang outlined new goals of raising the level of artistic training and improving the quality of art. Each constituent group, including the Art Workers Association, held separate meetings at which they reorganized in accordance with the directives calling for new, higher professional standards in art. The AWA was renamed the Chinese Artists Association.

The most important statement of the new policies may be found in Zhou Yang's speech of September 24, 1953, which was approved by a resolution of the congress on October 6.^[9] In his lengthy text Zhou mentions visual art infrequently, but the references are important. Filled with quotes from Mao Zedong, the speech in its general tone implies that Zhou Yang did not speak for himself alone: "The principle of Comrade Mao Zedong's directive on dramatic activities, 'Let one hundred flowers bloom,' should become the policy for development of all literary and arts professions. If we need figure painting, we also need landscape [fengjing ] painting .... If we need comparatively high-class, complex artistic forms, we also need large quantities of comparatively simple and easy artistic forms,"^[10]

Although his invoking of the hundred flowers might seem to loosen the screws on some artists, the new freedom was to be highly qualified. "We take socialist realist methods as the highest creative and critical standard for all our literature and arts."^[11] Socialist realism, a term attributed to Stalin and first mentioned in print in 1932, may be defined as a "means of reflecting life in art peculiar to socialist society. It demands the true portrayal of reality in its revolutionary development."^[12]

Zhou Yang's commitment to promoting the national heritage was far stronger than that of Jiang Feng or Ai Qing. His views had profound effects on the Chinese art world,^[13] both because of his high position in the party propaganda organ and, most important, because it was assumed that he spoke for Mao Zedong. "We request that the contents of literary and art works express the people and thoughts of the new age, and the forms express the style and vigor [qipai ] of the nation .... All writers and artists should diligently study their own national literary and artistic legacy and take continuation and development of the national heritage's excellent tradition as their own mission."^[14]

Zhou Yang's dictate that artists should use new contents but national forms explicitly contradicts Ai Qing's view that both contents and forms should be new. Jiang Feng's article of 1946, which defined national forms as "new forms," seems equally irreconcilable with the new principle. In fact, the

origins of Zhou's theory may be found in Leninist-Stalinist art doctrines rather than in the theories of Lu Xun. In 1930, a Soviet conference adopted Stalin's dictum that proletarian art must be "national in form and socialist in content."^[15]

Zhou Yang's enthusiasm for China's heritage was coupled with carefully formulated criticism of theorists with other ideas.

Comrade Mao Zedong has given a very high evaluation to the achievements of the new literature and art movement that began on May Fourth [1919], of which Lu Xun is representative .... But the May Fourth Movement has not correctly resolved the duty of continuing the national literary and artistic heritage. At the time, there were people who had a completely negative and erroneous attitude toward the national heritage. This kind of attitude, when joined with a blind reverence for culture of the Western capitalist class, was a harmful influence on the subsequent development of new literature and art .... Many writers and artists often see only the feudal and backward side of the national heritage and have not recognized that the legacies are the treasury of our great national spirit .... Their understanding of the legacies' value is often narrow and one-sided. For example... [the idea that] painting is only "single-line and flat-color."^[16]

The references to national painting might be interpreted as a call for the revival of traditional forms of landscape painting and of traditional techniques of brush and ink. Again, the liberal language is qualified by further explanation:

Organizing and researching the national artistic legacies should become focal points for the teaching and research of arts schools .... First we must take the democratic and progressive aspects of our heritage and distinguish them from the feudal and backward parts, take the realistic parts and distinguish them from the antirealistic parts .... In national painting, for example, that which does not stress description of real life, that which does not stress artistic creation, such as making a specialty of purely imitating the brush and ink of the ancients..., must be opposed.^[17]

According to Zhou's mandate, old artistic forms were to be adopted if they were democratic, progressive, realistic, and not imitative. Although application of his directive involved expanding painting beyond the single-outline and flat-color mode of previous years, its implementation was otherwise vague.

According to C. Vaughn James, the Leninist line on past art was that an entirely new "proletarian" art was unrealizable in the turmoil of revolution. In-

stead, artists were directed to bring the best of classical traditions home to the people, not for purposes of slavish imitation, but for conscious assimilation and reworking.^[18] Zhou Yang's references to Leninist doctrine are clear, but he gives little concrete advice as to how it might be applied in the Chinese context.

One important purpose of the 1953 congress was to reorganize the various associations administered by the Federation of Literary and Arts Circles. Zhou Yang explained that they would now be

voluntary organizations for professional writers and artists, which is to say that they are not groups for ordinary literature and art lovers. The important duty of the associations is to organize writers' and artists' creative work and study .... After reorganizing, the associations should absorb classical literature researchers, national dramatists, national artists , and national musicians as members and as participants in the governing structure .... Leading popular work in literature and art and training young writers and artists are among the important duties of the associations.^[19]

The membership in any association under the wing of the FLAC was explicitly expanded beyond the limits set at the first congress in 1949. Those who would decide how to apply Zhou Yang's theoretical directives, then, would include both the Communist revolutionaries who dominated the association in its early years and "national artists," the latter presumably well-known professional painters of guohua, nianhua , and other indigenous forms.

Zhou Yang issued several other administrative directives. He required that provincial and municipal branches of the FLAC should become voluntary groups of writers, musicians, dramatists, and artists with definite admissions standards. It would therefore be unnecessary for each locality to establish its own branches of the national professional associations, such as, in the case of art, the CAA. The duty of a local FLAC branch, rather, was to encourage individual literary or artistic creation, to organize artistic activities, and to promote local amateur art. "Creation" groups, involving mature creative people, were acceptable during the transitional period provided they helped with other activities.^[20]

In art, the policy of developing local FLAC branches rather than branches of the Chinese Artists Association had several results. One was that, in many areas, the local FLAC group became the functional equivalent of the CAA—that is, it came to serve as the primary organ of arts administration. Another was that all local control of the arts became concentrated in the hands of a small group of FLAC officials, who might or might not be art lovers. The fu-

ture development of all aspects of creativity in local areas thus depended very heavily on the interests and tastes of FLAC officials.

The new Chinese Artists Association thus brought together Communists and professionals to implement an ill-defined aesthetic doctrine. The debates over the proper course of artistic development enriched the Chinese art world but simultaneously set the stage for bitter conflicts. Zhou Yang's advocacy of national forms contained an implicit criticism of the literary theories of many followers of Lu Xun, including Hu Feng and Feng Xuefeng.^[21] Zhou was undoubtedly familiar with the text of Ai Qing's speech on guohua , which was published in Wenyibao about a month before his own oration. It is thus entirely possible that his support for Chinese painting was intended also as a criticism of Ai Qing's more negative view.

As we have seen, Jiang Feng was personally associated with Lu Xun and Feng Xuefeng during his formative years as a revolutionary artist. And he and Ai Qing were close friends; they had served a prison term together in the early 1930s, jointly led the march from Yan'an to Zhangjiakou in 1945, and were administrative colleagues in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Those who attacked Jiang Feng and Ai Qing in 1957 claimed that the two had similar views on guohua , a suggestion that, whatever its motivation, appears to have been accurate.^[22]

No evidence has yet appeared to indicate that Jiang Feng was personally involved in the conflicts between Zhou Yang and his rivals or that he openly opposed the new doctrines. Nevertheless, Zhou Yang's references to national painting should, logically, have been interpreted as mandating a substantial change in Jiang Feng's administrative practices. Not only was the general meaning of Zhou's speech—that native Chinese art was to be promoted rather than Western art—not Jiang Feng's view, but the proposed changes would have undone much of the thought reform and reorganization work that had taken place during the preceding four years. Fortunately for Jiang Feng, at least in the short run, the vagueness of Zhou Yang's policy statement allowed him to agree publicly with its language while continuing in practice to follow a somewhat different course.

Zhou's directive that artists present new contents using national forms made theoretical justifications for oil painting problematic. Jiang Feng's efforts to obtain Mao's blessing of The Founding of the Nation , which was published in People's Daily three days after Zhou Yang's speech, could well have been intended to counteract the pro-guohua view of national forms. The fundamental conflicts between traditional guohua and socialist realism, particularly in the context of increasing professionalization of the arts, were accentuated by Zhou Yang's unresolved juxtaposition of the two approaches. The resulting tension contributed to a flowering of artistic activity between 1954 and 1957,

but it was also one cause of the art world's cataclysmic reaction to the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957.

Jiang Feng and the 1953 Reorganization of the Chinese Artists Association

The day after Zhou Yang's presentation, Jiang Feng gave his speech on the situation of art work during the first four years of the PRC and on the mission of the newly founded Chinese Artists Association.^[23] Much of the text is as turgid as his 1949 oration, but it is a crucial guidepost to the development of the Chinese art world between 1953 and 1957. Filled with concrete details (unlike Zhou Yang's more abstract speech of the preceding day), the report began by discussing the accomplishments of Chinese artists. It stated, first, that the Chinese art world had established a strong popular base of support. Over 180 million nianhua, lianhuanhua , and propaganda pictures were published during the four-year period 1949-1953 (including, according to incomplete statistics, 6,800 different paintings and 6,490 stories in serial illustration form), in addition to pictorial magazines (huabao ), of which thirty-six titles were in print in 1952.

According to Jiang, guohua , oil painting, and sculpture production had increased. Art progressed and became useful as it began to have a closer relationship with the lives of the people, to inspire enthusiasm for labor, and to work in concert with every organized movement to reform society. Jiang stated that the quality of art had improved, with creativity in form and style demonstrated by particular artists and works (see chart 4). Jiang Feng's lists of models generally have a personal twist. Three of the guohua he praised in his report had been published prominently in People's Daily several days earlier: Hu Ruosi's The People of Xinjiang Donating a Horse to Marshall Zhu De ; Li Xiongcai's Forest ; and Jiang Yan's Examining Mama .^[24]Forest was a good example of a guohua that incorporates Western effects of light and shading; the other two pictures were outline-and-color figure paintings executed in styles approved for new nianhua .

Jiang did not mention, however, the more traditional paintings reproduced on the same page of People's Daily , most notably two bird-and-flower pictures and a fairly traditional landscape composition by Liu Zijiu (Liu Guangcheng). The decision to publish the traditional pictures in People's Daily would probably have been made by Hua Junwu, then the newspaper's art director and head of its literature and arts section, on the basis of propaganda department policies. Wang Zhaowen, who wrote the exhibition review that accompanied the pictures, termed Shao Yiping's flower painting "lovely" (keai ).^[25] Jiang

Feng calls Ye Qianyu's May All the Nationalities Unite (see fig. 26) a guohua , even though it had won a nianhua prize in 1952 and was not included in the 1953 national exhibition of guohua . Out of thirty-nine prize-winning nianhua on Ministry of Culture lists he mentions only five, but adds ones by Shi Lu and Zhang Leping to the ministry's sanctioned works. As party spokesman, Jiang Feng's list became the definitive word on the new monuments of official art.

Beyond its usefulness to China, Jiang praised recent art for its contributions to the international peace and friendship movement. Via exhibitions, exchanges, and other foreign contacts, people of the socialist countries and of the capitalist countries could now gain knowledge of the lives of Chinese people. Chinese art was exhibited in thirty-five nations, and such art books as Gu Yuan's prints and political cartoon anthologies were reprinted in many socialist countries. Amateur artists in factories and elsewhere were encouraged to create art, and many professional artists, such as those at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, spent time working in factories.

Thought reform was deemed to have succeeded, especially by means of the "Three Antis" Movement and the arts and literature rectification campaign. The former, directed against corruption, waste, and bureaucratism, targeted officials.^[26] The latter was part of a nationwide campaign to remold the thought of China's intellectuals based, according to Jiang Feng, on Mao's principle of serving the peasants, workers, and soldiers.^[27] The art world thoroughly criticized the tendency toward nonpolitical art and the phenomenon of art as a commercial object. Furthermore, the long-standing concern with artistic genealogies and the split between the new and the old art were gradually being dealt with, in order to develop an attitude of mutual study and mutual aid. The number of practicing artists increased, both because new artists were being trained, in academies and on the job, and because many old guohua, lianhuanhua , and calendar (yuefenpai ) painters underwent thought reform and so began making works with new contents.

The second section of Jiang's report detailed remaining inadequacies in art. These included a continued deficiency in the quality as well as the quantity of work produced, a failure to correct conservative ideas that had hindered the improvement of guohua , and artists' resistance to the study of political treatises. We will return to his criticisms of guohua shortly.

The last part of the report outlined the planned reorganization of the artists association, henceforth to be known as the Chinese Artists Association, as an effort to solve such problems. The most important administrative changes were aimed at raising standards through increased specialization. Jiang announced that the new national organization would consist of five sections. The first was the creation committee, which encouraged and oversaw the making of art. This committee was divided into six subcommittees by specialty: painting, national painting, printmaking, cartoons, sculpture, and applied

arts. The CAA's other four sections were the national arts research committee, the popularization work section, the editorial section, and the exhibition section.

The new charter of the CAA was published in early 1954. Like many CCP statements, beginning with Mao's Yan'an Talks, it incorporated seemingly incompatible goals. It stipulated that the association would uphold the Marxist-Leninist literary and artistic principles of the Chinese Communist party and would adopt socialist realist creative methods. In contradiction to this socialist realist mandate, one of its lesser duties was to promote study of the heritage of visual art (meishu ) so as to develop China's excellent national artistic (yishu ) tradition.^[28] Just as the incongruity between popularization and the raising of standards in the Yan'an Talks was resolved by giving primacy to first one then the other in each succeeding period,^[29] the CAA charter provides for the possibility of the alternation of socialist realism and traditional art. Nevertheless, it was clear until 1956 that the party art bureaucracy intended socialist realism to be primary.

Less than a day after Jiang Feng's speech, the chairman of the Chinese Artists Association and director of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Xu Beihong, died of a stroke. His obituary in People's Daily emphasized his opposition to formalism, his commitment to realism, and his creation of an individual style based on the absorption of Western progressive art and the inheritance of China's excellent national painting tradition,^[30] In December, he was lauded by the party's cultural leader, Zhou Yang, in terms that made him a model of the new policies. His work was said to combine high-level technique with deep national characteristics, to perpetuate the realistic tradition of Chinese national painting, and to absorb the realistic creative methods and techniques of Western classical painting.^[31]

With Xu's decease, the aged Chinese painter Qi Baishi became the figurehead chairman of the Chinese Artists Association, thus adding a "national artist" in a prominent place on the roster. The vice-chairmen were augmented from two to five. Jiang Feng remained first vice-chairman, but to the figure painter Ye Qianyu were added Liu Kaiqu, director of the academy in Hangzhou; the Belgian-trained oil painter Wu Zuoren, who was Xu Beihong's most prominent disciple; and Cai Ruohong, a revolutionary printmaker and Yan'an-era rival of Jiang Feng. The association offices were located in a building immediately adjacent to the Central Academy (since converted into the school art gallery).

Differentiation in function between the academic institutions and those associated with the CAA ultimately led to greater variety in the kinds of art being practiced and to competing centers of bureaucratic power. Although Jiang Feng, the top leader in this new structure, remained the primary figure in art education, some projects promoted by the CAA seem well beyond the

scope of his interests, if not outright antithetical to his principles. The association's national painting creation subcommittee, for example, was apparently created in response to new policies advocated by Zhou Yang, not because Jiang Feng saw such a need. Similarly, the joint mandate of the CAA's national arts research committee to study both classical Chinese painting and folk art^[32] would seem to be a compromise between Jiang Feng's interests and those mandated from above.

Jiang Feng was in 1953 the administrator with the greatest personal influence on Chinese art policy and its implementation. The work to strengthen and expand the CAA through reorganization, however, created a need not for a single leader's authority, but for consensus among all art leaders. Diversity of opinion became, as art developed between 1953 and 1957, factionalism. Jiang Feng immediately began to feel pressure from his old competitor and newly elected fellow CAA vice-chairman, Cai Ruohong. Jiang's policy-setting speech of 1953 was widely disseminated, appearing first in Wenyibao and then, early the next year, in the first issue of the official journal of the CAA, Meishu . This issue also presented an article by Cai Ruohong that attacked many earlier policies, urging the revival of landscape painting, still-life painting, and portrait painting using Western media as well as supporting a broader definition of Chinese ink painting.^[33] The extent to which Jiang Feng was personally identified with earlier policies made the criticisms, at least in part, an implicit attack on his leadership.

Jiang Feng dutifully adhered to the language of the party line as articulated in Zhou Yang's September 24 speech, but his ideas for implementation of that line were undoubtedly narrower than many traditional painters liked. Jiang's 1953 analysis of the status of guohua was largely negative, in keeping with the policy shift then under way. He wrote of areas that would be improved by the new policies:

After liberation, it was pointed out that guohua should be improved by beginning with practical things and requiring the description of real people and events. Under this directive the Beijing and Shanghai guohua research associations were established. From the works of some artists, it has been proven possible to use guohua's expressive techniques and tools to describe real life. A fault in the improvement of guohua , first, is that those guohua artists who are enthusiastic about depicting new subject matter but who lack creative experience or descriptive ability are rarely given concrete help or needed encouragement, which adversely affects their enthusiasm for their work. Second, we have failed to offer timely correction to those guohua artists who, in the process of reforming guohua , have an impatience that [leads them to] overlook actual conditions. Third, we have failed to criticize the conservative artistic ideas [that Chinese painting cannot

reflect the new reality]. As a result, many guohua artists have simply stopped painting, or else they use the "paint-by-number" mode to paint so-called new national paintings in which the forms and contents are out of harmony. The die-hard guohua artists who advocate the conservative point of view criticize Chinese paintings that depict new contents, using their failings as an excuse to reject the reform of Chinese painting.^[34]

A year later, Jiang issued a much more optimistic report based on progress made during the first year of the new policy.^[35] He expressed particular pride that under Communist rule artists had worked hard to popularize their art so that they would be useful members of society. In particular, they produced socially useful and beautiful nianhua, lianhuanhua , and propaganda posters. Of guohua he wrote:

Most guohua [production], which has long been limited to copying the works of the ancients and has lacked the breath of life, has also made progress. Many guohua artists, to escape this bad habit of copying... diligently study modern methods of drawing from life. Especially gratifying is that some old painters have ... made paintings from actual observation, so that works which depict new people, things, and events are more numerous. These works forcefully overthrow the conservative idea that "Chinese painting is unsuited to describing contemporary things" and make a good starting point for inheriting the realistic tradition of our nation's classical painting.^[36]

As was customary for such reports, Jiang Feng listed artists who had been particularly successful in fulfilling party requirements. Works by the figure painters Ye Qianyu, Jiang Zhaohe, and Huang Zhou, he reported, were praised by the masses. All three of these artists painted works in the traditional media that had strong Western technical or compositional aspects; two of the three taught at CAFA. Jiang lavished particular praise on landscape sketches in ink by CAFA professors Li Keran and Zhang Ding as examples of the reform of guohua . According to Jiang, Li and Zhang used traditional techniques but drew from life in a scientific manner. The two paintings he singled out were, in fact, much more successful as works of art than many other nominally realistic guohua landscapes of the period. They represented, however, not traditional technique, but a very Western use of the traditional media (fig. 45), as we will discuss in a later section.^[37] Jiang, by encouraging innovations in landscape painting, certainly broadened the permissible subject matter; notably, though, he praised no artists who worked in truly traditional styles. Other guohua artists worthy of Jiang's mention were, as in his 1953 speech, the Lingnan

Image not available

Figure 45
Li Keran, West Lake, Hangzhou (Santan
yinyue), 1953, ink on paper.

artist Li Xiongcai and two illustrators, Hu Ruosi and Yin Shoushi. Jiang encouraged Chinese painting, in adherence to party policy, but his definition of the genre, as we have come to expect, included only new Chinese painting.

Art in the Publishing Houses

The year 1953 marked a change in approach for the art publishing houses, just as it did for the rest of the art world, even though the publishers were administratively separate from professional arts organizations. In Shanghai, the art presses were directed by the publishing bureau of the municipal government. The CAA did not directly affect their activities, except as general national policies were concerned.^[38] In the fall, given new orders that standards be raised as art assumed peacetime functions, the presses were criticized for not changing with the times and for retaining a wartime mentality. Periodicals whose poor circulation indicated that they had outlived their function, such as Worker ,

Peasant, Soldier Pictorial , published by the government-run East China People's Art Press, ceased publication. Later in the year, a party leader urged that serial picture stories be given a less overtly propagandistic direction by relating them to the national heritage or by basing them on great works of ancient or modern literature.^[39]

Lianhuanhua creation groups were criticized for not writing their own stories but instead abridging and illustrating works by screenwriters and novelists. Although such comments were intended to raise the standards of lianhuanhua , the suggestion that groups of artists come up with their own material was rejected by Shanghai arts administrators, who remained cautious following attacks in 1951 on the contents of some Shanghai serial picture books.^[40] The Beijing People's Art Press established a lianhuanhua captions research group in 1953 or 1954.^[41] The texts of the new lianhuanhua thereafter usually followed the story line of approved works of literature or cinema—whose political messages were thereby publicized to a wider public—and were prepared by professional text editors. To minimize conflicts between editors and artists, between 1954 and 1957 artists in Shanghai served in six-month rotations as art editors.^[42]

In about 1954, efforts were made to diversify subject matter. A People's Daily editorial reportedly published in the summer of 1954 urged cadres to improve their cultural knowledge and continue China's cultural tradition.^[43]Lianhuanhua publishers responded with large numbers of historical narratives, stories taken from classical Chinese literature, myths, and folktales. Because older artists were often more proficient at illustrating these genres, the ranks of successful lianhuanhua artists were expanded to include them. The staff at New Art Press in Shanghai, to cite one example, was reorganized into four specialized work groups: realistic subjects, children's literature, translated literature, and stories requiring antique costumes. Sales of the latter were particularly good. Monkey Makes Havoc in Heaven , taken from the Ming novel Journey to the West , sold over a million copies.

Greater efforts were made during this period to reorganize private publishers as well. They were gradually incorporated into New Art Press. By 1955, New Art employed 126 artists and text editors and published an average of ten new lianhuanhua per week. On December 31, 1955, New Art and Shanghai People's Art Publishing House were combined. The private publishers ceased to exist.^[44]

In the fall of 1955 People's Daily , the mouthpiece of the CCP, printed an editorial urging greater publishing freedom.^[45] The Shanghai municipal publishing system responded to this good news as bureaucracies are prone to do: it raised the number of lianhuanhua the publishers were required to produce.

The People's Daily editorial may have heralded the conclusion to a year-long investigation by the Publishing General Bureau (Chuban zongshu ) of the

Ministry of Culture into "pornographic" literature. Efforts to expand the campaign to other genres were blocked by Liu Shaoqi.^[46] As is often the case in China, the published call for relaxation served not as a prologue but as an epilogue. A four-year period of relative tranquillity for artists had followed the 1951 literary and arts rectification campaign. In 1955 and 1956, however, attacks were launched on lianhuanhua publishers for printing too many stories featuring antique costumes, demons, and ghosts. Li Lu, then an administrator at New Art, believes that such criticisms were unjustified; in his estimate, antique-costume stories made up only about 10 percent of his publication list.^[47] Rather, he attributes the movement against traditional-style lianhuanhua to the October 1955 meeting of the Sixth Plenum of the Seventh Central Committee, which criticized rightist tendencies.^[48] In any event, 1955 saw several serious political campaigns, including the posthumous castigation of State Planning Commission chairman Gao Gang, who reportedly died by his own hand after being purged from government. A campaign against the writer Hu Feng, who was stripped of all his official positions in May, followed. The political movement expanded far beyond Hu Feng and his complaints about Marxist control of culture, ultimately putting pressure on all intellectuals and artists.^[49]

The cultural climate improved somewhat in 1956, with the announcement of the Hundred Flowers Movement. By that time, all Shanghai lianhuanhua artists and text editors were concentrated at a single press, Shanghai People's Art Publishing. Zhao Hongben and Gu Bingxin directed the drafting studio (called the "serial picture creation room"); Li Lu directed the text editing section. Some artists remember that the atmosphere was extremely lively, with old scholars working side by side with younger artists. Fees for completed works were raised, and even old guohua artists from outside the firm, such as Liu Haisu, Wu Hufan, and He Tianjian, were commissioned to make traditional paintings and calligraphy for lianhuanhua covers.^[50] The biggest project of 1956 was a multivolume edition of Tales of the Three Kingdoms , a novel of the Ming dynasty that had been popular in lianhuanhua form in the preliberation period.

The first national lianhuanhua exhibition was not held until 1963, when prizes were awarded by the Ministry of Culture for works produced since 1949. Cheng Shifa of the Shanghai People's Art Press won a second prize for his 1956 guohua illustrations to Lu Xun's short story "Kong Yiji" (fig. 46). His work is characteristic of the new Shanghai guohua figure painting, with Western conventions of depicting spatial recession, gesture, and the human form being combined with sophisticated Chinese effects of line and wash. The psychological state of the characters is explored in an almost cinematic way. Cheng Shifa was strongly influenced by his study of the figure painters Ren Yi, of the late nineteenth century, and Chen Hongshou, of the seventeenth century. Though stylistically quite different, both earlier artists made individualistic and

Image not available

Figure 46
Cheng Shifa, illustration for Kong Yiji,
after a short story by Lu Xun, 1956,
lianhuanhua, ink and color on paper.

Image not available

Figure 47 (left and right)
Ding Bingzeng and Han Heping, illustrations
for Railroad Guerrillas, 1956-1958,
vol. 4, lianhuanhua, ink on paper,
16.5 cm × 21.5 cm.

expressive use of outlines. The richness of Cheng Shifa's ink-and-color variations is characteristic of preliberation Shanghai guohua and the tradition of Ren Yi; his outline technique, influenced by but not derived from that of Chen Hongshou, is an innovation that shaped his exuberant personal style. He strongly influenced younger figure painters and illustrators in Shanghai.

The lianhuanhua of greatest aesthetic interest and, according to Li Lu, of greatest appeal to readers were those executed with ink outlines. Most such works were produced with Chinese brush and ink on sturdy Western-style drawing paper. Visually they shared aesthetic qualities with traditional Chinese woodcut illustrations and figure paintings; as a result, they were easily accepted by readers. The outline technique had practical advantages as well. Because most lianhuanhua were printed very cheaply and very poorly, the subtleties of pencil drawing were completely lost in the production process, whereas black ink lines retained much of their effectiveness.^[51]

One of the most famous outline-style lianhuanhua of the mid-fifties was Railroad Guerrillas , a ten-volume war story about workers who fought against the Japanese in Shandong (fig. 47). Drawn by Ding Bingzeng and Han Heping, two graduates of the East China campus of CAFA who worked at Shanghai People's Art Press, the work won a first prize in the 1963 exhibition. The subject has little appeal to a viewer uninterested in combat stories, but the high-quality draftsmanship is typical of the new Shanghai lianhuanhua .

The most notable aspect of Railroad Guerrillas and of the best of subsequent Shanghai publications can be appreciated only if each volume, usually about one hundred pictures, is taken as a whole. Compositions change dramatically from page to page. The same interior may be depicted from every corner of the room, from above, from near and far. The cleverly varied viewpoints may have been inspired by cinematography (many lianhuanhua stories of the period did appear as movies); in any event, the artists, unhindered by the technological or logistical limitations of the movie medium, used such techniques to extraordinary effect. In both interior and exterior scenes, moreover, textured areas of grass, thatch, furnishings, or fabric contrast elegantly with eloquent expanses of blank paper (fig. 47, left); battle scenes combine Soviet-style figure drawing with landscape conventions reminiscent of Ming-dynasty illustrated

romances (fig. 47, right). It could be argued that in the lianhuanhua genre the inherent contradictions of Communist art policy, such as popularization versus high artistic standards or socialist realism versus native traditions, were most successfully resolved.

The Academies, 1953-1957

The party's shift in goals from popularization to raising standards was implemented in the art academies beginning in 1952 and 1953. Over the next several years art instruction became more specialized, following Soviet models. In October 1952, during a national reorganization of institutions of higher learning, CAFA's three specialties, painting, sculpture, and applied art, became independent departments. The applied art department was expanded with the transfer of the Hangzhou applied art specialists to the Beijing academy. Simultaneously, Chinese administrators began to replace Yan'an teaching methods with those practiced in the USSR.

In the pre-1949 period, the Hangzhou academy had separated Western painting and Chinese painting; at both the Hangzhou and Beijing campuses of CAFA between 1949 and 1953, oil painting, Chinese painting, printmaking, and such other activities as nianhua all fell into a general painting category. In 1953, however, as part of the national move to train more professional artists, to regularize academic curricula, and to raise artistic standards, the painting department at CAFA was broken into three: a new oil painting department, chaired by Ai Zhongxin; a new native painting department (called the color-and-ink painting [caimohua ] department), headed by Ye Qianyu;^[52] and, the result of a special request made by Jiang Feng in a 1953 meeting with Hu Qiaomu, a printmaking department. Yan Han served as chairman during the last department's formation, but when he was transferred to the newly established creation section of the CAA at the end of 1953 Li Hua took over.^[53] In addition, the course of study at the academy was changed back to the pre-liberation standard of five years.

The East China campus, left with only painting and sculpture specialties in 1952, similarly split its painting department into three groups in 1954. They were formally established as departments in 1955, with Zhu Jinlou, Li Binghong, and Zhang Yangxi serving as chairmen of the color-and-ink painting, oil painting, and printmaking departments, respectively. The three-year curriculum was lengthened to five years in 1953.^[54]

Professional artistic training for young people was fostered by the establishment of a modified Soviet-style middle school (zhongxue ) system (comprising both the junior high and high school years) at both CAFA and the East

China campus in September 1953.^[55] The first director of the school at CAFA was Ding Jingwen, an administrator who served as one of Mao's bodyguards at Yan'an. According to Ding, the Soviet middle schools offered six years of specialized training before college. The Chinese, however, began with a four-year program. The full six-year Soviet system was tried for just one class enrolled between 1956 and 1962; it was abandoned, partly because caring for children on a college campus proved difficult.^[56] Quite likely the opposition to specialization that marked the post-1957 period was an equally important factor. By 1955, there were six major art colleges in China: the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, the East China campus of CAFA in Hangzhou, the Northeast Art Academy in Shenyang, the Southwest Art Academy in Chongqing, the South-Central Art Academy in Wuhan, and the Northwest Arts Academy in Xi'an. All had middle schools.^[57] Students attended these schools, which were boarding schools, for four to six years, and most went to college at one of the art academies. Some students from the 1956 entering class were educated from junior high through graduate school at CAFA, spending more than a decade on the same campus pursuing the formal study of art.^[58]

During the 1953-1957 period, efforts were divided between research on traditional art and mastering the socialist art of the USSR. Several research institutes were established at CAFA to carry out Ministry of Culture policies regarding national art. Study of the history, theory, and practice of national painting, for example, was conducted at the Painting Research Center (Huihua yanjiu suo ), founded in 1953. Its director was Huang Binhong, an elderly and well-respected landscape painter and art history scholar on the staff at the Hangzhou academy. Vice-directors of the center were Wang Zhaowen and Wang Manshi. After Huang's death in 1955, Wang Zhaowen assumed the directorship.^[59] Many well-known painters in traditional media, such as Pan Tianshou and Fu Baoshi (see figs. 62 and 72), were invited to participate in research activities. The institute's name was changed to National Art Research Center (Minzu meishu yanjiu suo ) in 1954. Despite subsequent formal name changes, it is generally referred to simply as the Art Research Center (Meiyan suo ). Significantly for the development of Chinese painting, an administrative division separated the teachers of caimohua at CAFA, who were trained primarily in Western techniques, from the researchers, most of whom were well grounded in traditional painting. As a consequence, graduates of CAFA—the young elite of the art world—were schooled in European or in new synthetic styles rather than in traditional styles alone and so perpetuated their teachers' Western orientation.

The Art Research Center would be removed from CAFA administration in 1959 as part of the dismemberment of Jiang Feng's power base following the Anti-Rightist campaign. Although it was returned to CAFA in 1961,^[60] in

the post—Cultural Revolution period it has been administered directly by the Chinese Arts Research Institute of the Ministry of Culture.^[61]

A second and smaller research group, the Art Theory Research Center, was founded in June 1954. Unlike the Art Research Center, this institute, directed by Xu Xingzhi, came to play an integral role in CAFA's academic activities. In 1956 it became the art history department of CAFA, accepting its first class of undergraduates in September 1957.^[62] Jiang Feng held a faculty appointment in the new department.^[63] Although the East China campus had a smaller research section, its national art research center, directed by Pan Tianshou, succeeded in assembling an important collection of antique paintings for use in instruction.^[64]

CAFA sponsored many activities to support the development of Soviet-style art during the mid-1950s. As early as 1952, the East China campus conducted an exchange of student drawings with Soviet academies. Soon after, the school published a summary of dialogues on teaching by the nineteenth-century Russian art educator Pavel Petrovich Chistiakov (1832-1919), and an introduction to his drawing system. Chistiakov's emphasis, according to Chinese commentators, was objectivity and "restoring what is seen by the ordinary man." Practically, this meant a systematic study of the planes observable in three-dimensional objects, learning to draw five tonalities of light and dark, and ability to reproduce an object on paper accurately. The Chistiakov system, considered scientific, systematic, and successful at raising standards, was adopted as the only correct method of teaching drawing fundamentals.^[65] In July 1955, a national conference on the instruction of drawing was held at CAFA by the Ministry of Culture, at which fifty faculty members from twenty-two institutions underwent further training in the Soviet drawing system. At the conclusion of the conference, an administrative order was issued that affirmed the value of Chistiakov's didactic method. This academic mode of drawing thus became the core of the Chinese art curriculum.

CAFA was the site of a national conference on the instruction of oil painting a year later. Vice-Minister of Culture Liu Zhiming urged the forty participants to raise standards, create a national style, and learn Western methods. The teachers in attendance came from the seven national art colleges, eight normal schools, and two drama schools that taught oil painting.^[66] The CAFA color-and-ink painting department soon attempted to prove that Russian drawing and Chinese painting were compatible,^[67] an intellectual feat made possible only by extreme selectivity in the use of examples.

In the summer of 1956, specialization was further enhanced as the applied art department of CAFA became an independent national art college under the administration of the Ministry of Light Industry. It was called the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts (Zhongyang gongyi meishu xueyuan , hereafter

CAAC).^[68] Henceforth, CAFA taught exclusively painting, printmaking, and sculpture.

Guohua

The large class that graduated from CAFA in 1953 included a few students left over from the Beiping Art Academy as well as the first group of artists to be educated entirely under the Communist administration. During their four years at CAFA, the curriculum in painting consisted of drawing, watercolor painting, design, lianhuanhua, nianhua , propaganda painting, and a little oil painting.^[69] With popularization the goal of these students' education, they presented new nianhua in the party-mandated outline-and-color mode as their graduation work. One, by Zhan Jianjun, was reproduced in People's Daily ;^[70] others, including a collaborative work by Fu Zhigui and Jin Shangyi, appeared in Meishu .^[71] By the time the first class finished, however, the new emphasis on specialization dominated the academy, and the most promising graduates were retained for more advanced technical training.

The newly established color-and-ink painting departments of the national art academies were mandated to raise standards in the practice of Chinese painting. Perhaps more important, they were the laboratory in which the re-molding of guohua occurred. What was to be the relationship between new contents and national forms? Solutions varied slightly from school to school, but all promoted the development of guohua figure painting rather than the traditional genres of landscape and bird-and-flower painting. Many of the art academy graduates who were most talented in Western academic drawing were assigned to further study in caimohua , thus setting young artists with sound Western training and a great enthusiasm for oil painting to work in the traditional media. Among those who graduated in 1953 and went on to study and teach color-and-ink painting were, at Hangzhou, Fang Zengxian and Zhou Changgu and, at Beijing, Zhan Jianjun.^[72]

In Beijing, the most important figure painting professors of the time were Ye Qianyu and Jiang Zhaohe, both retained from Xu Beihong's Beiping Arts College. As we have seen, Ye's meticulous outline-and-color picture in praise of ethnic harmony, May All the Nationalities Unite (fig. 26),^[73] was praised by Jiang Feng in his 1953 speech; but Ye was best known within the academy for his new guohua style based on quick, outline brush strokes. His 1956 illustrations for the Mao Dun story "Midnight" use line in a particularly lively way (fig. 48).

Jiang Zhaohe painted in a more realistic manner and seems to have had a greater stylistic influence on the academy's guohua students. He was well known before 1949 for his penetrating images of ordinary people and for his

Image not available

Figure 48
Ye Qianyu, illustration for Midnight,
after a short story by Mao Dun, ca.
1956.

Image not available

Figure 49
Jiang Zhaohe, Selling Thread, 1937, ink
on paper, 84.5 cm × 47 cm.

monumental work of social commentary Refugees (see fig. 12). His Selling Thread of 1937 (fig. 49) is a poignant portrait of a small boy from an impoverished family peddling on the street. Jiang's preliberation work employs ink in a very Western way; in reproduction, one might almost think that the images were ink drawings rather than paintings on Chinese paper. The faces of his unfortunate but intensely human subjects are skillfully modeled with ink and color, their hollowed features testifying powerfully to their misfortunes. The drab clothing and somber tonality of the painting emphasize the depressing theme.

After 1949 Jiang began painting cheerful pictures, most of which are far less powerful than his preliberation pieces. He slightly increased his use of color, thus losing the subtle moods of his earlier tonalities. The contented characters of his later work may catch the eye, but they fail to engage the viewer's

emotions. Plump babies, the most auspicious of Chinese folk symbols, appear frequently in his post-1949 paintings, perhaps intended to evoke the birth of a new age.

Even so, Jiang was probably the most important influence on the development of the new Chinese figure painting in Beijing. One stylistic contribution he made to the new art can be seen in the strong sense of volume with which he imbued his figures. Jiang's Telling Uncle Soldier My Grades of 1953 (fig. 50), which depicts a little girl writing a letter to a soldier on the Korean front, is a typical example. As though seeking to emphasize the three-dimensionality of his characters, he often depicted them in strongly foreshortened or otherwise difficult perspective views. He used dark strokes of dry ink to model such forms, further increasing their tangibility, but often set them against a blank background, as though to emphasize their physical presence on the paper. Exposed skin was usually carefully modeled with ink and flesh tones.

Jiang was technically very skilled in guohua , for painting in ink on absorbent Chinese paper requires a deft hand; nevertheless, both the postures and the modeling techniques he used were unprecedented in the Chinese tradition. Indeed, Jiang's paintings might serve as proof that painting in the traditional Chinese medium could take an extremely Westernized form yet still retain traditional compositional conventions. His retention of black outlines, rather than switching to pure color modeling, was undoubtedly a conscious link with China's artistic past, as was his habit of setting figures against a flat, featureless background.

Because of the extremely conventionalized nature of traditional Chinese figure painting, widespread adoption of Jiang's more naturalistic approach would be ground-breaking. He created with the guohua medium naturalistic effects that others might achieve only with charcoal and pencil. Students who emulated his style, with its heavy chiaroscuro, arrived at denser and possibly more Western-looking results than did students at the other major figure painting center, Hangzhou. The work of Jiang Zhaohe and his CAFA pupils forms the basis of much of modern Chinese figure painting.

Developments at the East China branch of CAFA in Hangzhou were slightly different because of the school's preliberation staffing and its proximity to Shanghai. Zhu Jinlou, administrator of the newly founded caimohua department, was directed by academy officials to emphasize figure painting in the outline technique and skill at drawing from life.^[74] The traditional subjects of birds-and-flowers and landscapes, the traditional xieyi technique, and the traditional didactic method of copying old paintings were to be deemphasized. At first Zhu had difficulties promoting figure painting, since the majority of the old faculty were bird-and-flower painters who specialized in the loose, free xieyi style. One old figure painting instructor was eventually hired, but he never learned to depict modern subject matter. Zhu, in consultation with

Image not available

Figure 50
Jiang Zhaohe, Telling Uncle Soldier My
Grades, 1953, ink and color on paper,
78.6 cm × 56 cm, Chinese National Art
Gallery.

Jiang Feng, therefore decided to produce his own figure painting instructors by retraining academy graduates. Between 1953 and 1955, thirty-nine graduates of the East China campus were kept on as instructors in the caimohua department, where they set about drawing modern figures from life with Chinese tools. As a result of exposure to the work of Pan Tianshou and other masters of the Shanghai school of bird-and-flower painting, the young teachers Fang Zengxian, Zhou Changgu, Song Zhongyuan, and Li Zhenjian were familiar with the rich effects possible with monochromatic ink. They began drawing Western-style figure sketches in which wide ink lines and richly varied ink textures were prominent, thus creating a new style that replaced the outline-and-color mode of figure painting practiced between 1949 and 1952. Their subjects and compositions were usually simple, but they sought the ideal of the time, a Soviet concept translated as the dianxing , or "typical," in developing them. In this way the young Hangzhou artists developed a successful new movement, which came to be referred to as the Zhe school of figure painting and which strongly influenced subsequent Chinese painting (fig. 51).

Fang Zengxian estimates that by the mid-1950s, half the caimohua students in Hangzhou were concentrating on figure painting. The new Chinese figure painting, which used Chinese materials to depict revolutionary subjects, so successfully combined the dialectics of Mao Zedong's cultural theories that it survived virtually all subsequent political movements, including the Cultural Revolution. The first class trained by the new teaching method included Li Shan and Liu Wenxi,^[75] both of whom became quite prominent during the 1960s and 1970s.

Although Fang Zengxian admits to having studied paintings by Jiang Zhaohe in his efforts to create a new figure style, he feels that the absence of influential figure painters in Hangzhou gave him and his colleagues a creative freedom most artists of the 1950s lacked. The famous bird-and-flower painter Pan Tianshou freely expressed his largely negative opinions of their project. In his view, the new figure paintings were not guohua , and he rejected the heavy use of shading to create effects of volume and chiaroscuro. Perhaps in response to his criticism, the Hangzhou artists moved toward a simplified compositional mode in which expressive lines were emphasized and shading was reduced. For the most part, however, the young artists were unrestrained by older teachers as they worked to develop the new Zhejiang painting style. Antipathy to socialist realism on the part of respected senior professors such as Pan Tianshou segregated the new from the old and gave those who practiced the new art a sense of creative freedom the traditional master-pupil relationship might have hindered.

According to Fang Zengxian, who taught at Hangzhou from 1953 until the Cultural Revolution, the method he and his young colleagues developed to teach Hangzhou students consisted of several elements. First, students were

Image not available

Figure 51
Fang Zengxian, Every Grain Is Hard
Work, 1955, ink and color on paper,
105.6 cm × 65.2 cm, Chinese National
Art Gallery.

Image not available

Figure 52
Zhou Changgu, Two Lambs, 1954, ink
and color on paper, 79.3 cm × 39.3 cm,
Chinese National Art Gallery.

trained in the structure of the human form through drawing. That is, the overall configuration of the subject was emphasized, rather than effects of light and shade, texture, or volume. A second crucial skill to be practiced was sketching from memory, for ink, unlike charcoal or pencil, could not be removed if a stroke was incorrectly placed. Third, mastery of the ink line was necessary. Fang believes that reduction of chiaroscuro to a bare minimum was the strength of the Hangzhou figure painting style, as best exemplified in the work of Zhou Changgu (fig. 52).^[76]

The new figure painters studied anatomy, perspective, and other representational principles common to all realist or socialist realist artists. At the same

time, their medium, ink on absorbent Chinese paper, presented technical challenges not encountered in most Western media. Guohua figure painters in the new style thus borrowed useful techniques from the Chinese tradition. Most contemporary Chinese figure painters assert that the new guohua has a strong traditional basis, but it is clear that their art synthesizes Soviet and Chinese techniques.

One's evaluation of the relationship between this new art and traditional painting depends on one's starting point. In comparison to Dong Xiwen's oil painting The Founding of the Nation (fig. 29), for example, Zhou Changgu's Two Lambs of 1954 (fig. 52) is extremely Chinese in feeling. The vertical format, the flat white background, the moist strokes of ink, and even the sweetness of the Tibetan girl are all qualities that may be found in Chinese painting of earlier eras. However, the pensive, portraitlike rendering of the face, the suggestion of spatial recession, and the new theme of contented national minorities are all very much in tune with contemporary official art.

Later criticisms of the pre-1953 art academy curriculum indicate that guohua instruction was limited to the rather mechanical techniques of outline and opaque-color painting. Expansion of the technical vocabulary to include the more spontaneous ink effects associated with xieyi painting, such as that practiced by Qi Baishi, was an important step toward reviving traditional painting. Yet artists with a traditional point of view would agree with Pan Tianshou that the Hangzhou figure painting did not look like guohua . Not only was its imagery new, but the young artists often lacked subtlety in their handling of ink and color.

The emphasis on new figure painting continued at CAFA until 1957. Yao Youxin, trained as a teenager in Shanghai to draw comic books, began his undergraduate course at the East China campus of CAFA in 1954. His drawing skills were particularly highly developed as a result of his work for the Shanghai publishing industry. Much to his distress, however, he was assigned in his sophomore year to the caimohua department rather than to the oil painting department, a decision he blamed, at the time, on Jiang Feng and his policies of remolding guohua .^[77]

The change in Chinese brushwork as a result of the guohua reforms of the 1950s is of fundamental importance to the history of Chinese art. Not only in figure painting, but also in landscape painting, emphasis on studying nature rather than the old masters led to the elimination of all traditional techniques not immediately useful for naturalistic description. Energetic young artists such as Zhou and Fang, who did not undergo the long apprenticeship considered a critical part of the guohua tradition, became the most influential guohua instructors in the academy. As a result, many traditional techniques were not taught, and gradually, over the course of succeeding generations, they have passed out of the living vocabulary of Chinese painting.

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Figure 53
Shi Lu, Beyond the Great Wall, 1954,
ink and color on paper, 916.6 cm ×
130 cm, Chinese National Art Gallery.

Nevertheless, Zhou Changgu and Fang Zengxian did make a great contribution in the context of their time. In contrast to Shi Lu's Beyond the Great Wall (fig. 53), which attempts to recreate a socialist realist oil painting in ink on paper, Zhou's Two Lambs and, to a lesser degree, Fang's Every Grain Is Hard Work (fig. 51) are fresh and new. Artists of the Soviet bloc apparently agreed with this evaluation, for Chinese works in this new style began winning awards at international exhibitions. Zhou, for example, won first prize in the 1955 Moscow International Youth Show for his Two Lambs .^[78] Fang reports that his Every Grain was praised by a visiting Russian sculptor; and a student work by Yao Youxin was reproduced in a major Soviet pictorial magazine.^[79]

The new guohua thus overcame two of the three obstacles thought to block development of the old: it was international and it depicted the new society. A third objection, that it was unsuitable to large public works, may have been behind the horizontal format and awkward Western perspective of Shi Lu's Beyond the Great Wall , which we will discuss in more detail later. In-

deed, although the Hangzhou figure painters made guohua more suitable for public display by the simplification of their compositions, their use of ink still rewarded a more intimate inspection. Production of truly monumental guohua lay in the future.

The emphasis on a Western basis for the new guohua was not limited to the college level. The four-to-six-year art middle school curriculum concentrated heavily on realistic drawing as part of classical academic training. Instruction began with the Chistiakov drawing method, with students moving systematically from pencil renderings of cubes and spheres to drawing plaster busts and finally live models. In drawing the human form, a student began by drawing the head alone, advanced to half-length figures with visible hands, and finally graduated to the full-length format. Some of the artists who went through the middle school's six-year course became guohua artists after their graduation in 1962, providing further impetus for the systematic reform of guohua .^[80]

Although Soviet socialist realist images and forms made up the core of guohua instruction in the 1950s, the academies did not entirely neglect the national heritage. Study of old painting was revived, but in a new form. In the past, landscape scroll paintings by famous masters had dominated art historical evaluations and scholarship. Acquisitions of private art collections by the postliberation academies permitted students to view scroll paintings, yet an even more highly regarded new means of study was to make expeditions to copy ancient mural paintings. We have mentioned in an earlier chapter the fascination that artists of the 1940s, especially Dong Xiwen, showed for the Dunhuang mural paintings. The study of old art by the academy caimohua artists of the 1950s was very different from that of late imperial China. Not only was their attitude toward the past different, as Ai Qing made clear, but they also adopted a new set of models. The young caimohua painters concentrated their efforts on copying figure paintings, not landscape scrolls, and were especially drawn to temple murals by anonymous or little-known artisans. This new practice was widely publicized in art journals of the period, presumably to encourage its wider adoption.

One notable excursion was a six-month trip conducted jointly by CAFA and the East China campus in 1954. The trip leaders were Ye Qianyu from Beijing and Jin Lang from Hangzhou, and Fang Zengxian, Zhou Changgu, and Zhan Jianjun were among the participants. In addition to copying murals, the ten faculty members and students used national painting methods to draw from life.^[81] Indeed, such trips became a standard part of the curriculum and remained so into the 1980s. The theoretical justification for the new emphasis on mural painting was Marxist—it represented the art of the common people, not of the elite—and technical—it improved much-needed skills in the rendering of figures. Initial interest in temple murals predated Communist rule, as we

have seen, and may have been spurred by knowledge of Western art. One important element of the popularity is stylistic. While it is inappropriate to push the parallel between Picasso and Dong Xiwen any farther than we did in chapter 2, the affinities between primitive art and modern art undoubtedly contributed to the aesthetic appeal that ancient mural painting had for modern Chinese artists. A second element is format. In Europe, religious murals such as Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling or Leonardo's Last Supper have been hailed as some of the greatest masterpieces of world culture. In China, on the contrary, mural painters were of little consequence to historians of art. Once they became aware of the history of Western mural painting, Chinese artists seeking to redefine their tradition in modern terms came to question whether the scholarly neglect of Chinese religious murals was justified. Marxism provided a clear answer. Mural painting, from which religious meaning had now been stripped by the passage of time, was believed to have been created by anonymous folk artists and was thus ideologically superior to the art of the elites. After 1949, as a result, mural painting was largely substituted for literati landscape painting as the approved model for Chinese painters. Academic study of Chinese painting, even when it emphasized "the national tradition," was based on a tradition that had been dramatically redefined.

Soviet-Style Oil Painting

In one of his last meetings with artists of the People's Liberation Army before they moved into Beijing, Jiang Feng is reported to have celebrated the Communist victory with the words "Now we can paint oil paintings!"^[82] Such enthusiasm was a clear indication that Jiang and the party intended to emulate the Soviet model in rebuilding China. As Jiang Feng himself complained in a 1952 article written for the arts and literature rectification campaign, oil painting and sculpture were the only media students at the art academies wished to master.^[83]

Many factors lay behind the support for painting in this European form. As Mayching Kao's study of art education in republican China shows, modern academies concentrated on Western art as early as the late Qing dynasty. The presumption of many idealistic intellectuals was that Western media were better suited to modern, international art, or, in the language of the May Fourth Movement, to art that was more scientific.

Influential critics introduced several European oil painters' works to the Chinese art world in 1954. Jiang Feng wrote a laudatory essay on Goya; Li Hua, a printmaker and critic at the Central Academy, praised the works of Delacroix.^[84] Yet the increasing technical cooperation between the USSR and China after 1950 meant that Russian and Soviet oil painting would become a major model of progressive art for the new society.

Between 1952 and 1956, researchers at the East China campus published eighty books containing translations, analyses, or surveys of Soviet art and art theory.^[85]Meishu zuotan (Art Seminar), a journal published beginning in 1950 by the school's research section, and Meishu ziliao (Art Material), published beginning in 1952 by the Art Theory Teaching and Research Center, printed similar articles.^[86] Beginning in January 1954, with its premier issue, the official art journal Meishu published roughly one article a month by a Soviet critic or art theorist. The first of these justified, in rather circuitous fashion, the exaggeration that we associate with socialist realism: the "typical" is defined as

not only the frequently seen things but those with substance which most completely and most keenly express a certain social power. According to Marxist-Leninism, the typical is not a sort of statistical average. The typical is the same as the substance of a certain socio-historical phenomenon; it is not simply the most common, frequently occurring, and ordinary phenomenon. Intentional exaggeration or emphasis on a phenomenon does not exclude the typical; it is a more complete exploration of it.... The question of the typical is under all circumstances a political question.^[87]

The Soviet essay refines and reinforces the tenets of Mao Zedong's theories by defining socialist realist painting as an artificial construction made to convey a particular political idea. The theoretical emphasis on the typical and on political content would remain at the core of Chinese socialist realism.

The influence of Soviet art increased dramatically once important art leaders gained personal experience of the Soviet Union and its art. Yan Han had visited the USSR as early as 1950^[88] and at least six other faculty from the East China campus of CAFA went to Moscow over the next few years.^[89] A delegation of high-ranking art leaders, including Jiang Feng and Cai Ruohong, spent fifty days in Russia during the spring of 1954. Jiang Feng's report praises the beauty of the physical environment of Soviet cities and urges greater attention on the part of Chinese leaders to the applied arts and to architecture.^[90] In particular, he noticed that good-quality oil paintings were to be found in all public and private buildings. They were so widespread as to be comparable to Chinese nianhua . Besides their startling number, Jiang was also surprised by their variety. Subjects included government leaders, revolutionary history, genre paintings, landscapes, still lifes, and copies of classical Russian paintings of earlier eras. Jiang's revelation that oil painting could be as popular as nianhua undoubtedly justified his encouragement of Soviet-style oil painting in the art academies.

By November 1954, an exhibition of Soviet art and culture had been held in Beijing. The catalogue proclaimed, in prose that was undoubtedly translated

into Chinese from the Russian, "Soviet art has matured by overcoming vestiges of formalism and naturalism; it has developed on the basis of realism. The Soviet Communist party is deeply concerned with ... helping artists raise their ideological and creative levels." This hard-line defense of realism was accompanied by a plea for creativity: "The Communist party emphasizes: socialist realism should not be narrowly or dogmatically understood, and artistic questions cannot be judged by a uniform criterion. In the realm of art we must guarantee breadth for individual creation, for individual tendencies, and for the artists' thoughts and imaginations."^[91]

Chinese writers such as the oil painter Ai Zhongxin, who had been appointed to the Beiping Arts Academy by Xu Beihong, expressed immoderate enthusiasm for Soviet art in his review of the 1954 exhibition: "Soviet art is a new stage in the development of the art of all mankind. Oil painting, like all Soviet art, has had enormous achievements."^[92] He likewise praised Soviet "thematic" paintings (zhutixing huihua ) and remarked on the richness of Soviet subject matter. Ai Zhongxin is in fact typical of Chinese writers of his time in his comments on the variety of subjects to be found within Soviet socialist realism. Such views not only recognize the mild thaw in Soviet art after Stalin, but also indicate the impoverished state of Chinese art in the period.

Adoption of the Soviet model resolved conflicts within China's art world between art professors who had previously advocated styles as dissimilar as academic realism, impressionism, Fauvism, and cubism. Although the virtues of Western art were widely accepted before liberation, adoption of Soviet definitions of oil painting after 1949 left little room for stylistic or conceptual dispute. The contending modernist schools were all incorrect. Academic painting of the nineteenth century was to be the primary model henceforth.

The training of young Chinese oil painters by Soviet teachers constituted the most important element in the transformation of Chinese oil painting in the 1950s. Chinese arts administrators had been visiting the Soviet Union since 1950, and they all returned with a detailed report of things to be learned from the Soviet model. Then, between 1953 and 1956, some two dozen young professional artists affiliated with academic institutions were sent for a six-year course in oil painting at the Repin Art Academy in Leningrad.^[93] The first to return home with newly gained expertise was CAFA professor Luo Gongliu, a Yan'an veteran, who had gone to Leningrad on a special three-year course (1955-1958) for faculty members. His colleague at CAFA Wu Biduan went to Russia in 1956, returning in 1959 with the first group of students. Meanwhile, the artists' colleagues at home were eager to learn about Soviet art through their letters and imported books.

Among the students who were sent to the Repin Art Academy were, in the first group, Li Tianxiang, a 1950 graduate of CAFA, and Chen Zunsan, of

Image not available

Figure 54
Quan Shanshi, Study of a Woman,
ca. 1956, oil on canvas, collection of
the artist.

Liaoning. The 1954 group included Lin Gang, a young professor at CAFA, and two artists from CAFA's East China campus, Quan Shanshi and Xiao Feng. In 1955 Deng Shu, who had attained considerable recognition for her nianhua in the early 1950s, was dispatched. Li Jun, a young teacher at Beijing Normal University, went to Leningrad as part of the last group, in 1956. In general, students chosen to study in the USSR had impeccable party credentials and suitable family backgrounds. Talented artists from capitalist or landlord families were largely excluded in favor of children of workers, peasants, and soldiers. A student work by Quan Shanshi is typical of the style the artists brought hack from the USSR (fig. 54). The paint is applied in blunt, painterly strokes, with great concern for rendering volume and perspective.

While study abroad was extremely important, of equal or perhaps greater significance to the development of Chinese oil painting was the arrival in Beijing of a Soviet portrait painter, Konstantin M. Maksimov (b. 1913), on February 19, 1955. The first artist sent by the Soviet government to China, he was appointed by the Ministry of Culture to serve as a consultant to the oil painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He was welcomed enthu-

siastically by Jiang Feng: "Comrade Maksimov's arrival in China enables us to directly and systematically study the advanced artistic experience of the USSR. We believe that under Maksimov's direction our art education work and our training of oil painting teachers will bring forth extraordinarily important and valuable contributions."^[94]

The Ministry of Culture and CAFA organized a two-year postgraduate course in which Maksimov trained artists and art educators in Soviet academic oil painting. National competition for admission to the class was fierce; finally, after concerns for geographic and vocational balance had been considered, about twenty young art professionals—including artists from the national art academies, the normal colleges, the People's Liberation Army, and the Shanghai publishing industry—were selected. In one case, that of Zhan Jianjun, CAFA's policy of sacrificing talented young artists to the reform of Chinese painting was reversed. Zhan, who was just completing his graduate studies in caimohua , was rescued through his admission to the Russian expert's oil painting class. Under the circumstances, improving oil painting may have been considered more important than the problem of traditional art.

Other artists from CAFA included Zhan's classmates Jin Shangyi and Hou Yimin, and three more, Feng Fasi, Zhang Wenxin, and Shang Husheng, reportedly attended only part of the course. From the People's Liberation Army came Gao Hong and He Kongde. From the academy in Hangzhou came Wang Dewei, Wang Chengyi, Yu Changgong, and, the following year, the French-trained Wang Liuqiu, who entered as an irregular student. Others included Ren Mengzhang, from the Lu Xun Academy of Arts in Shenyang; Wang Xuzhu and Yuan Hao, from the academy in Wuhan; Wei Chuanyi, from the academy in Sichuan; Zhan Beixin, from the academy in Xi'an; Lu Guoying, from the Nanjing College of Arts; Wu Dezu, from the People's Art Press Creation Studio in Beijing; and Qin Zheng, from Tianjin.^[95] Yu Yunjie, who worked at a publishing firm in Shanghai, was added as a special student in 1956, the only representative of his city.

Maksimov's oil painting training class had a profound effect on both the art and the careers of the twenty students who were formally enrolled. From the time of their 1957 graduation exhibition, which was attended by Zhu De and was extremely well publicized, up to the present day, their works have been represented in almost every national show. Upon graduation the artists returned to their home institutions to assume important positions and spread the gospel of Soviet realism.

One might expect to find discussion of this educational experiment limited to the Central Academy's journal, Meishu yanjiu , but party leaders considered the class important enough that news of its progress was reported in the principal national art journal, Meishu . Notes taken during Maksimov's class were serialized, to give a more personal view of the man's instruction.^[96] Several

essays by students told of the Soviet teacher's contribution to the selection and execution of their graduation topics.^[97] An album of their graduation work was published in 1958.^[98]

He Kongde, an army artist attached to the East China Military District in Hangzhou, had first come to national attention in 1954 when his gouache paintings of the Korean front were published in Meishu .^[99] These early works, which display the charm and anecdotal interest of a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape, have a journalistic quality; one usually cannot understand the picture until one has read the story. Although his interest in the natural landscape and in genre painting lessens the heroic impact of these early images (his figures, situated in scenic northern landscapes, tend to be small and a bit awkward), it nevertheless gives them a spontaneity and pictorial interest unmatched in most other propaganda pictures of the period.

The painting he exhibited in the Second National Exhibition of 1955, another battle scene, received some criticism for its dusty and inadequately heroic figures.^[100] He Kongde's 1957 graduation painting, however, demonstrates an enormous change in his figure painting as a result of Maksimov's training (plate 2). He began working on a much larger scale and treating all his figures as icons of military heroism. Technically, he adopted a way of handling paint that was shared not only by his teacher and fellow students but also by Chinese students who studied in Leningrad. This picture, like most of He Kongde's subsequent work, was executed with large, blunt, squared-off brush strokes, a technique related to that of Quan Shanshi, who was then studying in Leningrad (fig. 54). This method gives the picture a painterly quality visible even from some distance.^[101]

According to another student, Ren Mengzhang, Maksimov urged his students to consider their colors carefully, avoiding muddy black effects and utilizing strong color contrasts in planning their compositions. Hue should be strong from a distance and rich when the painting is viewed close up.^[102] Maksimov's own paintings, such as Dawn at Zhengyang Gate (fig. 55), tend toward dramatically colored skies. An art historian who served as his interpreter now considers his instruction in color to be his most important contribution to Chinese oil painting.^[103]

Works painted for the graduation exhibition, while models of socialist realism, tended to be based on the student's own experience rather than on the relatively limited themes lauded in the 1955 national exhibition. He Kongde, one of the few students who entered the class with a thematic specialization, continued his work on the Korean War. Only later, after having mastered the monumental Soviet figure style, did he expand his repertoire to include history paintings. Fortunately, his early interest in landscape painting survived his training in figural art and has remained a strong component of his later painting.

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Figure 55
Konstantin Maksimov, Dawn at
Zhengyang Gate.

Qin Zheng took his subject not from his adult career but from his childhood experiences of foreign invasion and civil war (fig. 56).^[104] His painting depicts a young peasant woman and her two small children standing miserably in the ruins of their home—the sort of topic Jiang Zhaohe had painted so poignantly in the 1930s, but now somewhat stiffened by the posed quality of the central figures. Gao Hong, an army artist, painted an interior scene of a soldier feeding orphaned children. Hou Yimin depicted underground Communists printing flyers in a dingy dormitory, clearly an autobiographical theme.^[105] Yuan Hao's Morning on the Yangzi explored the artist's interest in the construction of the new Yangzi River Bridge; for the project he returned to the site during the summer of 1956 and lived with the construction workers.^[106]

Maksimov further encouraged diversity by urging the young artists to exploit their particular talents and artistic personalities. Some specialized in landscapes, others in portraits; some in romantic scenes, and others in more violent ones.^[107] His aim was to develop separate specialties within Chinese oil painting, a goal that became so fully institutionalized that it was revived under Jiang Qing, who may have recognized its affinities with Mao's Yan'an Talks but was, apparently, ignorant of its Soviet and academic foundations.

Most of the oil painting training class's graduation pictures look trite to Westerners. Wang Dewei's Heroic Sisters , for example, would not seem out of place on the cover of an American paperback novel (fig. 57). Yet this mass market appeal was, in the context of the time, a significant advance. Oil painting previously held little appeal for the average Chinese viewer. While the outdated aspects of the "new" Soviet style were not readily apparent to most Chinese, its emotional power was clear. Among other technical advances, Maksimov's students learned to execute much more complicated compositions, many of which involve processions of figures traveling across a landscape. Some began using quite luminous and subtle colors. For the first time since 1949, the goals and the technical means of oil painters working for the Chinese government were in harmony.

Soviet influence dominated Chinese oil painting between 1952 and 1982, with the Central Academy of Fine Arts serving as the laboratory for exploring the practice and possibilities of this imported art form. For the young, Soviet training proved to be restrictive. All artists learned to paint in the same style, and individuality was strictly limited, expressible only by choice of subject matter; artists might paint a socialist theme that was related to their personal experiences, their lives carefully edited to illuminate some positive aspect of revolutionary China. Older artists, by contrast, took the opportunity to study the relationship between Soviet doctrines and their own knowledge of Western art.

For a few, the post-Stalin thaw was even liberating. Soviet official art included portraiture and landscape painting, as Maksimov's work attested. As a

Image not available

Figure 56
Qin Zheng, Home, 1957, oil on canvas.

Image not available

Figure 57
Wang Dewei, Heroic Sisters, 1957, oil on
canvas, 188 cm × 124.5 cm, Museum of
Chinese Revolutionary History.

result, the dean of CAFA, Wu Zuoren, was permitted to abandon his poor attempts at socialist realism and to paint his sensitive 1954 portrait of Qi Baishi (fig. 58). Over the next few years he exhibited numerous landscapes and flowers.

His colleague, the landscape painter Ai Zhongxin, adapted his work with some success to socialist realism, but only after learning that that genre was broader than the Chinese art world had originally believed. Like Wu Zuoren, Ai Zhongxin had originally risen to prominence under the patronage of Xu Beihong. His surviving landscapes of the preliberation period are softly colored plein air paintings; if the architecture of the Qing palace were not visible in the distance one might assume these early pictures were made by a late-nineteenth-century French artist (fig. 59). Following China's liberation, however, when landscape painting was deemed useless, Ai began to add large, ungainly figures to his paintings in order to fulfill socialist realist requirements. His painterly sensitivity to atmospheric effects proved of little value during the early 1950s.

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Figure 58
Wu Zuoren, Portrait of Qi Baishi , 1954,
oil on canvas, 113.5 cm × 86 cm.

Image not available

Figure 59
Ai Zhongxin, Melting Snow, Forbidden
City, 1947, oil on canvas, collection of
the artist.

Only when he gained a greater familiarity with Soviet painting did it become apparent to Ai that his conservative and beautiful landscapes might, particularly when used as a setting for heroic action, have a place in socialist realist iconography.^[108] One such painting, On to Urumchi , was exhibited at the 1955 national art exhibition;^[109] but Ai's most dramatic effort was prepared in 1957, toward the end of Maksimov's tenure in his department. The Red Army Crosses the Snowy Mountains (fig. 60), painted for the Exhibition to Commemorate the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Formation of the People's Liberation Army, depicts the Red Army crossing Sichuan's Jiajing Mountains. During this perilous part of the Long March many soldiers froze to death. Ai's picture places less emphasis on heroic individuals, however, than on the natural en-

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Figure 60
Ai Zhongxin, The Red Army Crosses the
Snowy Mountains, 1957, oil on canvas,
100 cm × 210 cm, Chinese People's
Revolutionary Military Museum.

vironment. An icy blue Himalayan sky fills the top three-quarters of this striking horizontal landscape. Organized as though in a film by Sergei Eisenstein, a dark file of soldiers fights the bitter wind to traverse the frame of the composition, finally disappearing into the opaque cloud of snow at the extreme right. A virtuoso display of landscape painting, at the same time the work conveys a legendary moment of the Red Army's history in a truly heroic image.

The Russian model revealed to Ai Zhongxin the monumental possibilities for presenting the figure in landscape composition. His personal style, based on late-nineteenth-century French painting, in fact sprang from the same roots as much of Russian landscape painting. He was one of the fortunate older artists who were able to modify their preliberation styles to suit socialist realist standards. Like Dong Xiwen, therefore, he managed to remain in the forefront of Chinese art during a period that emphasized the emergence of the young.

It was, however, young artists, those with little pre-Communist art education, who were most affected by Soviet art. Although few Chinese artists today consider Maksimov a great painter, his teaching is widely acknowledged to have been clearer and more methodical than that of Chinese oil painting professors of the period. Besides the formal course at CAFA, he conducted many informal classes for older faculty and for artists of the Beijing publishing industry. Wu Zuoren and Ai Zhongxin were among many established oil painters who felt obliged to present themselves at the Russian expert's classes. Both men were mature artists, and there is little indication that Maksimov had much effect on their technique. Yet his students, young and old alike, did adapt his instructional methods to their own teaching, with the result that

academically trained Chinese oil painters today are capable of reaching uniformly high technical levels in realistic rendering and composition.^[110] A drawback to Maksimov's teaching style and to the didactic methods adopted by Chinese academies was that standardization, though beneficial in that it assured good teaching for all students, led quickly to rigidity. Creativity, as we interpret the word, had little place in this system.

The Chinese Artists Association, 1953-1957

The national CAA became extremely active between 1953 and 1957, particularly in the areas of organizing exhibitions and publishing art criticism, both of which were useful for rewarding the attainments of individual artists and critics. During the first several years of this period, a balance between Soviet-inspired and more traditional art was maintained. In 1956 and 1957, guohua became more important. The political background for these changes will be discussed after a short survey of the CAA's principal activities.

In keeping with the new policy of support for guohua , several important guohua exhibitions were held in 1953. The Beijing Chinese Painting Research Association (Beijing zhongguohua yanjiu hui ) held its first show from July 31 to August 13. The association (founded in August 1949 as the New Guohua Research Association) had been recently reorganized and comprised some two hundred members. A report in People's Daily asserted that many of the exhibition's 361 works contributed to China's excellent realistic tradition and that the figure paintings, as well as some landscapes, took their contents from real life and the new ideology. Bird-and-flower paintings were also included. Jiang Feng, Cai Ruohong, Hua Junwu, Ai Qing, and Shao Yu participated in conferences about the exhibited works. The show was important enough to warrant attendance by many government officials, including vice-chairman of the government, Li Jishen; vice-chairman of the People's Political Consultative Committee, Chen Shutong; director of the Culture and Education Committee of the Political Administrative Council, Guo Moruo; and vice-director of the Central Propaganda Bureau, Hu Qiaomu.^[111]

The most important of the guohua shows, the First National Guohua Exhibition, was held by the Art Workers Association during the September 1953 FLAC conference in Beijing.^[112] In May, the Ministry of Culture ordered local cultural administrations to collect works. The 842 paintings submitted by thirty-two provinces and cities were juried by the AWA, which eliminated about three-fourths of them. The goal of the exhibition was to develop the excellent tradition of national painting and to promote guohua creation. The works selected, according to the exhibition flyer, manifested the special traits

of national art, and many reflected the new life of the people and the beauty of their great motherland.^[113] Published pictures, as we have seen, ranged from outline-and-color figure paintings to traditional bird-and-flower paintings.

The Second National Art Exhibition was announced in Meisbu in 1954, with a call for works in various media, including Chinese ink painting, nianhua , oil painting, watercolor, and gouache.^[114] (It was for this event, which opened in March 1955, that Dong Xiwen revised his Founding of the Nation . He also exhibited a new work, Spring Comes to Tibet .)^[115] The procedure for selecting works was similar to that followed in most subsequent national exhibitions. While the CAA, the voluntary organization administered by the Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist party, issued its call for submissions in its journal, the Ministry of Culture, an organ of the civil government, directed local cultural organizations to organize the preparation of works. Over four thousand works were submitted, of which some nine hundred were eventually displayed. Every work was juried at least twice, once by the local authorities and again in Beijing.

The final selection appears to have occurred in the midst of another rectification campaign—one publicized in Meishu in late 1954 and early 1955.^[116] Criteria for admission were primarily political. The contents and the didactic meaning had to be correct: successful works should express the achievements of the nation's reconstruction and should depict the spirit of the laboring people in production and struggle. Artistic criteria, though less important, included varied subjects, truthful images, and creativity of expressive method. Realism was to be emphasized, but mediocrity, conventionalism, and plagiarism should be avoided.^[117] The final checklist included eleven categories of work: color-and-ink paintings, oil paintings, sculptures, prints, nianhua, lianbuanhua , posters, cartoons, illustrations, watercolors, and drawings.^[118]

As Ellen Laing's discussion of the event makes clear, the kinds of guohua exhibited in 1955 were varied.^[119] Political themes and "progressive" Soviet styles dominated, but traditional works in representational styles were not entirely excluded. Among the new guohua must be counted Shi Lu's awkward but politically correct Beyond the Great Wall (a work that was rewarded with a centerfold color reproduction in Meishu ), in which the artist attempted to use Chinese materials to paint a monumental Western-style socialist realist landscape (fig. 53).^[120] One of Guan Shanyue's five exhibited paintings, Newly Opened Road , was a much more successful adaption of existing approaches (fig. 61). His style, that of the Lingnan school, was strongly influenced by Western and Japanese realism and thus more easily bent to the requirements of the new subject matter.^[121] Zhou Changgu's Two Lambs represented the new Hangzhou figure style (fig. 52),^[122] while Jiang Zhaohe's Child and Dove exemplified the new figure painting of Beijing.^[123] Li Keran exhibited four of his modern landscapes. Even Dong Xiwen submitted a color-and-ink mountain scene that strongly resembles a Western watercolor painting.^[124]

Image not available

Figure 61
Guan Shanyue, Newly Opened Road ,
1954, ink and color on paper, 177.8
cm × 94.3 cm.

Despite this variety, some rather old-fashioned guohua also appeared, including loosely executed flower paintings by the seventy-nine-year-old Chen Banding^[125] and carefully painted bird-and-flower compositions by Yu Feian.^[126] Though traditional landscapes were neither prohibited nor encouraged, their showing was poor. Whereas socialist painters such as Shi Lu, Li Keran, Luo Ming, Li Xiongcai, Zhao Wangyun, and Guan Shanyue were each represented by several paintings, nonideological or conservative painters such as Huang Binhong, Wu Hufan, Qi Baishi, and Liu Haisu exhibited only one painting each.^[127] Such works, not surprisingly, are rarely mentioned by the critics.

The oil painting section of the exhibition included works illustrating moments from Communist military history, many of them presumably painted for the Museum of Revolutionary History in the old imperial palace. Newer history paintings by such young artists as He Kongde described scenes from the Korean War. Here, as in the guohua section, it seems that certain older artists were given special consideration. A still life flower painting by CAA vice-chairman Wu Zuoren, for example, while realistic, is completely nonpolitical in subject matter.^[128] His portrait of Qi Baishi, as we have seen, represents a similar broadening of permissible subject matter (fig. 58). Nevertheless, socialist realist styles and subjects dominated the Second National Exhibition. Exceptions were made for certain well-respected older realists and guohua painters, but not for modernist oil painters.

Although works in the 1955 exhibition were selected from art units in all regions of China, Meishu and other publications of the period present Chinese art as a centralized undertaking, with all artists in China striving to attain the same goals. Well-publicized pictures tended to be made by artists with close ties to the authorities in Beijing, and such issues as regionalism or individualism are largely ignored in criticism of the period. Artists working at CAFA, indeed, seem to be featured disproportionately in critical literature of the pre-1957 period, a testimony to the importance of the academy, to their proximity to CAA headquarters, to centralization, and to Jiang Feng's support.

Regional branches of the Chinese Artists Association, which have been important since the late 1950s, were then still in their formative stages. For example, in a news item of 1954 it is stated that national CAA leaders Cai Ruohong and Shao Yu had spoken to a meeting of the North China Federation of Literary and Art Workers that March, but no mention is made of a local branch of the CAA.^[129] One of the earliest local branches was the Northwestern Art Workers Association, founded in Xi'an in about 1950.^[130] The East China Artists Association was formed in Shanghai in February 1954, with Liu Kaiqu of the academy in Hangzhou elected its director. Vice-directors were the printmaker Lai Shaoqi and the painter and cartoonist Feng Zikai; Chen Yanqiao headed the secretariat. Of primary concern to the new association was the

Image not available

Figure 62.
Pan Tianshou, Corner of Lingyan Gully,
1955, ink and color on paper.

creation of nianhua and of national paintings.^[131] The Guangzhou CAA branch was established in March 1954.^[132] By 1956, a preparatory committee for the CAA's Jiangsu branch had been formed, with Fu Baoshi, Liu Haisu, and the young military painter Ya Ming in charge.

A sharp change in the CAA's emphasis became evident in 1956, when revival of the national heritage was labeled a key element of the art world's contribution to the Hundred Flowers campaign. Traditionalism appeared with particular strength in 1956 at the Third Exhibition of the Beijing Chinese Painting Research Association (which was not limited to Beijing artists). Academic bird-and-flower or animal paintings by Xie Zhiliu and Yu Feian

largely lack innovation; and Pan Tianshou's flower-and-rock painting, one of the most beautiful of the published works from the show, displays only the subtlest, if any, influences of his involuntary study of Western drawing (fig. 62). Bird-and-flower paintings by Wang Xuetao, Chen Banding, and Wang Geyi seem unaffected by the new painting.^[133] Of great importance is the reappearance at this time of traditional landscape painting in critical literature. Wu Hufan's conservative blue-green-style landscape, for example, which was reproduced in Meishu , possesses only the barest hint of modernity in its slight cropping of the foreground and its photographic scale relations between foreground, middle ground, and distant landscape elements (fig. 63). The painting, which was subsequently displayed in the Second National Guohua Exhibition, relates closely to works the artist painted as early as 1937.^[134]

The Second National Guohua Exhibition, organized by the CAA and the Ministry of Culture, was held in Beijing and Shanghai between July and October 1956 and later was represented in Meishu by some modern works, including a number by the Shanghai illustrators. Lu Yanshao demonstrated his mastery of Western-style perspective in a picture of a child teaching her mother to read.^[135] Lu pushed his less successful figures into the painting's middle ground, perhaps to minimize the flaws in his figure drawing. Fang Zengxian's Every Grain Is Hard Work (fig. 51) is typical of the new guohua of the younger generation at the Hangzhou academy. The exhibition, with 944 works, was much larger and more varied than earlier guohua exhibitions. For the first time, moreover, the artists were organized by province, an indication of greater concern for local developments.^[136]

Art criticism underwent a Similar shift in 1956 as writers became more sympathetic to traditional guohua . The official spokesmen for the Second National Guohua Exhibition included, as Ellen Laing points out, some relatively conservative artists.^[137] The academic bird-and-flower painter Yu Feian, for example, while expressing satisfaction at the progress of the older artists, specifically criticized that of the younger painters. He singled out figure painting as being the weakest aspect of contemporary guohua , noting that fewer figures than landscapes or bird-and-flower paintings were on display in the exhibition. His point of view was clearly that of a traditional artist responding to the new painting. One wonders if the emphasis on bird-and-flower and landscape themes in the exhibition itself is not the result of a similar concern on the part of the jury for old-fashioned aesthetic virtues as opposed to innovation or revolutionary subject matter.

Hu Peiheng expressed his views even more frankly as he divided the work into four categories: (1) great masters, such as Li Xiongcai, whose works he considered profound in thought and execution; (2) traditionalists whose works had not improved since liberation and whose works lacked adequate content; (3) works based on Western techniques that entirely lacked the qualities of

Image not available

Figure 63
Wu Hufan, Mountain Peaks in Mist,
1956, ink and color on paper.

Chinese painting and could be judged only on the basis of content, not on execution; and (4) works inadequate on both counts.^[138] We assume that he would have placed the best of Jiang Feng's protégés in the third rank.

As the exhibition neared its close in the fall of 1956, the propaganda arm of the Communist party, which also controlled the Chinese Artists Association, outlined a shift in party art policy. An editorial in People's Daily entitled "Develop the Art of Guohua " described a new, nationalistic support for traditional forms of art. "Guohua is part of the precious heritage of our country's national arts; it has a long history and rich tradition. Over time, painters have ... expressed the magnificence of the rivers and mountains of our motherland and the appearance of the people's life in each period." The editorial goes beyond simple praise for guohua , proceeding to criticize those who would undervalue it:

But we cannot deny that in a previous time the cultural sector offered inadequate leadership to the guohua world. At the same time, certain comrades in the art world adopted an incorrect attitude of slighting and discriminating against the national heritage and guohua artists. In this way they caused the guohua world to lack the value and support it should have had in society. In the past, when guohua artists were selected to participate in the Chinese Artists Association, the leadership structure was not wide-ranging enough. In certain art academies, some guohua teachers did not hold classes for long periods. They felt deeply that they had been stifled and excluded and were considered unscientific and backward in teaching. The works and theoretical writings of guohua painters have had very few opportunities for publication in publishing organizations, newspapers, and periodicals.... The party and government have chosen a policy of actively fostering and promoting national arts imbued with the excellent tradition. Guohua , like other national forms, is the cultural product created from the life and labor of our nation's people over a long period. It established, over a long period, an intimate relationship with the thought and feeling of our nation's people and has an important function in the spiritual life of the people, so is loved by the masses.^[139]

It was later revealed that "certain comrades" meant Jiang Feng and Mo Pu, while "certain art academies" referred to the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The party was changing course. Guohua artists undoubtedly found the new line cause for celebration. Some CCP art administrators, however, most notably Jiang Feng, proved unable to reorient themselves. From this point a schism developed between the CAA, which followed the new line, and the art academy system, where Jiang Feng's supporters maintained a staunch resistance to it. What neither Jiang Feng nor most guohua painters knew, when

reading the People's Daily editorial, was that Mao Zedong himself had heard the painters' complaints. Jiang Feng's days as an art administrator were numbered.

Guohua Artists, 1953-1957

The Reformers: Guohua Landscapes from Life

The art academy system had, since its establishment in 1950, mandated that all artists master life drawing, a subject usually interpreted as figure drawing. This requirement made the talents of many old guohua artists obsolete. Following Zhou Yang's 1953 speech on developing the national tradition, three faculty members at CAFA, Li Keran, Zhang Ding, and Luo Ming, conceived the idea of reforming Chinese painting by drawing landscapes from life. Their plan met with the initial skepticism of administrators such as Ye Qianyu, newly appointed head of the caimohua department, and Jiang Feng, who felt that success in reforming traditional landscape painting was unlikely in any event. Oil painters, for their part, were dubious that traditional media could be employed successfully for representational purposes. And traditional painters in Beijing opposed the plan because they were against any reform of guohua that might damage its long-established techniques and, by extension, its essential character.^[140]

Nevertheless, the academy granted approval and funding for the artists to travel in southern China for five months in the first half of 1954 and try out their scheme.^[141] The three men spent a month at the art academy in Hang-zhou, hiking around West Lake and the surrounding hills. Each carried a homemade sketching kit so that he could draw with ink and Chinese brush. Every night they met to discuss their results. Other places they visited, either as a group or individually, included Wuxi, Suzhou, Shanghai, the Fuchun River, Huang Shan, and Shaoxing.

Zhang Ding, who had spent many years producing cartoons and woodcuts for the anti-Japanese resistance, confesses that he struggled in his sketches with a conflict between the Western viewpoint, which he defines as objective, and the traditionalist goals of their project. After three months of work, however, he had a breakthrough: he discovered how to express a Chinese point of view, but one that combined the objective and subjective responses to a scene.^[142] The journey was even more important for Li Keran, for it was to be the first stage in his ultimately successful quest to establish a new Chinese landscape painting.

Upon their return to Beijing, the artists' ink sketches were admired by

academy skeptics Ye Qianyu and Jiang Feng, as by the traditionalist Hu Peiheng. At Ye Qianyu's insistence, an exhibition was arranged by the CAA for late September 1954. The accompanying brochure, the title of which was inscribed by Li Keran's mentor Qi Baishi, then in his nineties, stated their goals in unassuming but appealing terms:

In the first half of this year, we had the opportunity to go to the Jiangnan area for an ink painting sketch-from-life trip. Using the expressive techniques of traditional ink painting to describe true scenes and objects was a new attempt, so our goals and requirements were relatively simple; they were: to paint some landscape paintings that have the style of traditional Chinese paintings, but are not the same old thing, and that have a touching authenticity.

The artists further recounted that they had seen many travelers and realized how much "the liberated people love the beautiful rivers and mountains of their motherland" and how fortunate the Chinese people are to live in "an environment that is like a painting." The artists briefly described the technical choices they had encountered. Their formulation appears to be a sincere attempt to make practical sense of the latest party pronouncements. Using phrases taken from speeches by Zhou Yang and Jiang Feng they asked important questions:

Among [our] most important [problems] were how to use traditional techniques and how to develop them further. If the question was whether we simply reject traditional techniques, thus using Chinese tools and foreign techniques to do ink sketches, or whether we use completely traditional techniques, thus making conventionalized descriptions of modern scenes and things, it would be simple. But it is not so simple if we intend to develop further the excellent parts of [our] tradition, to make them suitable for reflecting recent reality, and to blend modern foreign techniques into traditional styles, so as to enrich their expressive power. The difficulty really is not whether [we] have attained theoretical clarity; it is that we must attain a concrete resolution in practice.^[143]

In short, they rejected the uncritical continuation of traditional techniques and aimed to improve Chinese landscape painting by synthesizing Western techniques with native ones. Their ultimate goal was to reflect modern reality in the traditional medium. Li Keran, as the brochure claimed, avoided using con-ventionalized brush strokes for trees or mountains (fig. 45), and his landscape recessions were often very Western in feeling. Nevertheless, his sensitivity to

Image not available

Figure 64
Zhang Ding, Landscape Sketch, 1954,
ink and color on paper, collection of the
artist.

the varied tones of his ink lines and ink washes reveals a debt to his teachers, the traditional masters Qi Baishi and Huang Binhong. Zhang Ding, by contrast, relied largely on outline strokes and colored washes, thus presenting a more Western appearance (fig. 64).

There was little initial opposition to the general policy behind the ink sketch exhibition. The accompanying brochure adhered closely to Zhou Yang's theoretical stance and claimed patriotic motives for depicting the beauties of new China. In his National Day report of October 1954, Jiang Feng made particular mention of the ink landscape sketches by Li Keran and Zhang Ding as examples of the successful reform of guohua , saying that the works, though executed with traditional technique, were drawn from life in a relatively scientific manner.^[144] Not all critics were so approving. Hard-liners attacked Li and Zhang during the Anti—Hu Feng campaign of 1955 for the insufficiently political nature of their subject matter.^[145] The paintings were characterized as unhealthy, formalistic, and contrary to socialist realism. During

the Hundred Flowers campaign of the following year, conversely, traditionalists declared that the new way of painting was not guohua .^[146] Generally, however, the three Beijing artists' synthetic approach to landscape painting, which combined Chinese and Western painting conceptions, received favorable publicity and served as a strong influence in the development of guohua landscape painting.

Li Keran, Zhang Ding, and Luo Ming may have been the most innovative of those who made sketching expeditions, but many other artists were funded by art institutions to undertake similar journeys in 1954 and subsequent years. Indeed, the art academy system, since its founding, had required that students and healthy professors spend part of every year living and working among the peasants, a practice designed to enable them to "refine life" as preparation for subsequent art work. Between about 1954 and 1957, for example, Chinese painting professors at the East China campus of CAFA spent their Sundays on school expeditions to draw from life in the Hangzhou suburbs. Works by Pan Tianshou from this period (fig. 62) are more meticulously executed and more carefully composed than his previous paintings, which may be a response to his closer study of natural forms. Many bear titles referring to scenic spots in the vicinity of Hangzhou. As it came to be assumed that progressive art would be based chiefly on the artist's personal experiences, the government began to fund a wide variety of trips for artists to gain new creative insights.

One important early expedition was made by a group of artists including Ai Zhongxin, the CAFA oil painting professor, and Shi Lu, vice-chairman of the Xi'an CAA branch, to observe the construction of the Lanzhou-Xinjiang and the Gaocheng Railways in 1954. Ai was inspired by the magnificent western Chinese landscape to produce a series of monumental oil mountainscapes, including one about railroad construction called On to Urumchi , which was exhibited in the 1955 national exhibition.^[147] Shi Lu, like Li Keran, attempted a series of color-and-ink landscapes. Unlike the sketches of Li Keran, however, Shi Lu's published paintings are socialist realist "creations" in which the observed scenery has been reworked to depict specific projects of socialist construction. His Clouds Across the Qinling Mountains , for instance, depicts the construction of mountain tunnels for the Gaocheng Railway. A second color-and-ink painting from the same trip, Beyond the Great Wall (fig. 53), portrays a section of the Lanzhou-Xinjiang Railway that passes through the Tianzhu Tibetan Autonomous Region of Gansu province.^[148]

The northwestern military artist Huang Zhou depicted a highly romanticized view of Uighurs and Han surveyors traveling by camel in a snowstorm (fig. 65). The painting is a celebration of the workers who built a new road across the northwestern desert. Flecks of white paint on the surface give an immediacy to the picture that speaks of the artist's personal experiences, even if the low vantage point and sharp contrasts in scale between foreground and

Image not available

Figure 65
Huang Zhou, Snowstorm on the Steppes,
1955, ink and color on paper, 73.4 cm ×
117 cm, Chinese National Art Gallery.

background figures reflect Soviet conventions. The artist, then serving in Tibet, recalls that his group ran into the surveying party in a deserted place called Ge'ermu. He was very moved by the unexpected meeting in such a forbidding place.^[149]

Works more closely related to the landscape sketches of Li Keran, Zhang Ding, and Luo Ming continued to be published in spite of attacks from both left and right. They include caimohua landscape paintings by CAFA faculty Wu Jingding and others from the fall of 1955 that attempt to combine relatively traditional brushwork with more realistic, Western conceptions of space.^[150] Li Keran persisted in his new approach, as published views of Beijing attest.^[151] Shi Lu's travel sketches of the same year resemble realistic Western watercolors, but he softens his landscape images with effects of ink possible only on Chinese paper.^[152]

There is little question that such works are more appealing to the eye than most socialist realist figure paintings. Moreover, their combination of tradi-

tional and modern elements was justified by the theoretical stance taken by Zhou Yang in 1953. The further linking of Chinese landscape painting to patriotism, as was done by Li Keran and his colleagues in the preface to their exhibition brochure, significantly broadened the permissible range of Chinese artistic expression. The landscape-drawing-form-life movement was one of the most significant events in the development of guohua , as we will see in later chapters.

The Traditionalists

The Shanghai guohua artists, in 1953 still impoverished, finally obtained funding from the CAA and the municipal cultural bureau to run a production cooperative. The cooperative obtained fans from a government export corporation, decorated them, and then sent them to be sold in the Soviet Union. Once an artist's pattern was approved, which had to be done in advance, he normally painted the same design for a year or two. An artist would receive between twenty and ninety Chinese cents per fan. If the fan was ruined by the artist or rejected by the export corporation for poor-quality work or deviation from the approved pattern, the cooperative owed $2.20 renminbi (RMB, people's dollars) per fan, an amount that was divided among the members. Lai Chusheng, Zhang Dazhuang, and Jiang Handing are reported to have produced the largest proportion of rejected fans because of the strength of their personal styles. Later the product line expanded to include lanterns. Extremely well known artists, such as Wu Hufan, Wang Geyi, Tang Yun, and He Tian-jian, were among the participants in the cooperative.^[153]

Beijing artists complained of the same inadequate employment. In the fall of 1956, People's Daily published an article by Yu Feian entitled "How Much Money Is a Guohua Painter's Labor Worth?"^[154] He condemned the poor pay artists received for decorating crafts objects: decorating a piece of hand-painted stationery yielded an average of seven cents; decorating Sichuan bamboo blinds paid better, between $1.00 and $1.20 RMB each, but there was not enough work to go around. In some cases, finished work would be rejected as insufficiently "national" in style, thus leaving the artists with no recompense. This complaint was followed by the official change in policy toward guohua artists. In October 1956, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and President Sukarno of Indonesia were photographed viewing a guohua exhibition.^[155] Within the month, People's Daily editorials had blamed administrative sectors for ignoring the aesthetic quality of the guohua artists' decorations and for viewing them only from an economic point of view. The party admitted that most guohua artists could not support themselves working for the co-ops.^[156]

The cooperative as a solution to the guohua problem was hardly the answer. In September 1956, as part of the Hundred Flowers campaign, the

State Council publicized plans for improving the artists' lot.^[157] A Chinese Painting Institute was established in Shanghai to employ famous artists from all over eastern China, including Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Nanjing. Former mayor Chen Yi, who had been promoted to foreign minister by this time, personally inscribed the sign for the front door.^[158] Plans were made for a similar institute in Beijing, and one under local auspices in Nanjing.^[159]

Summary

The period 1953-1957 was critical for the development of Chinese art. A standardized national art academy system based on Soviet models was fully implemented, with Soviet socialist realism approved as the official academic style. Guohua artists such as Fang Zengxian in Hangzhou and Jiang Zhaohe in Beijing developed new socialist realist guohua styles. And rigorous technical refinement became a mandatory part of the artists' glorification of socialism.

While encouraging greater professionalism, the Communist party maintained firm control of the activities of professional artists by systematizing the activities of the Chinese Artists Association. Once artistic standards were centralized, mastery of Soviet socialist realism and, within limits, development of new forms of Chinese socialist realism could be, and were, encouraged.

With increased specialization, however, fundamental conceptual differences reemerged. The position of traditional artists was improved, a policy justified by Zhou Yang's calls to carry on the national tradition. Zhou issued renewed directives on this score in May 1955 at the second CAA directors' meeting.^[160] Opposing both "nihilistic"^[161] and conservative views of guohua , he announced that the tradition of Chinese painting was not only its brush and ink but also its realism. At the same meeting Konstantin Maksimov, the Soviet oil painting expert, spoke.^[162] Each speaker found receptive listeners. Tensions between internationalist Communist bureaucrats around Jiang Feng and older guohua artists mounted. The battle that resulted is the subject of our next chapter.