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.

Image not available

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.