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

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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.