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.