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.
Image not available
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-
Image not available
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.