Five
The Great Leap Forward and Its Aftermath
More, Faster Better Cheaper"

The Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957 and the political movements that followed it had a profound effect on the Chinese art world, drastically altering the leadership structure. Between 1949 and 1957, Jiang Feng had dominated both the art academy system and the party-sponsored Chinese Artists Association, encouraging work in socialist realist styles. Within the art bureaucracy, thanks to his leadership, artistic standards were consistent and strongly centralized. Academy artists served as models for artists in society at large. With Jiang Feng's purge, the unified operation of the art world came to an end.

Cai Ruohong and Hua Junwu assumed control of the CAA and abandoned Jiang Feng's pro-Soviet theoretical stance. Their nationalistic tenor, which was characteristic of much Chinese official rhetoric of the period, was reflected in exhibitions and critical writing. They did not, however, gain administrative control of the art academies, which continued to operate with the Soviet-inspired procedures adopted under Jiang Feng. Collaboration between the CAA and the art academies occurred, but their activities and even their standards were now quite separate. On one occasion, a CAFA student was criticized by the school's party secretary for admiring works he had seen in a CAA-sponsored exhibition—a situation that can hardly have inspired confidence in the propaganda system.^[1]

In this chapter we will first survey the political and theoretical background for changes in the practice of art between 1957 and 1965. Then we will look at the ways various art institutions and their artists coped with the changing ideological and administrative requirements. A brief chronological guide may be helpful before we begin. The year after the initiation of Mao Zedong's ill-fated Great Leap Forward, in May 1958, most Chinese artists were laboring in

factories or in the countryside. Hints of a developing official emphasis on regionalism and nationalism may be seen, however, in the CAA-sponsored exhibition of guohua paintings from Nanjing, which included many renderings of the local landscape, held in Beijing in late 1958 and early 1959. Between May and October 1959, many professional artists went back to work preparing paintings in celebration of the tenth anniversary of People's China. Unfortunately, conflicts within the upper echelons of the CCP produced rapidly shifting and unpredictable cultural policies throughout late 1959 and 1960. This confusion was compounded by events such as the famines of 1959, 1960, and 1961 and the Sino-Soviet split of July 1960, which culminated in a state of national crisis. Perhaps to release mounting social pressure, cultural controls were briefly liberalized between 1961 and 1963. This chaotic period left its share of victims, those caught as targets in a poorly demarcated political landscape, but it also provided unprecedented opportunities for many artists, particularly those who worked in places far from Beijing, the focus of the political struggle.

Although parallel developments may be traced in art institutions in different parts of China, greater variation is now evident than in earlier periods. For this reason, our narration will not proceed in a single chronological line. Instead, separate developments will be traced in each of the bureaucratic realms we discuss: the provincial, where woodblock prints and guohua now came to flourish; and the urban academic, where oil painting maintained its dominance. What follows, then, will describe the eclipse of the art academies and the rise of the Chinese Artists Association, with its regional branches, as the primary institutional force driving artistic development (though some young artists trained in the academies during this period did go on to play prominent roles in the late 1960s and 1970s, as we shall see). The status of art academies during this inward-looking period, the well-publicized accomplishments of the CAA, the achievements of artists in the publishing houses, and the remarkable patronage offered to artists in preparation for the new nation's tenth anniversary celebrations will all be addressed. In addition, we will look at the appearance of regional schools of art, particularly those of Jiangsu, Sichuan, Heilongjiang, and Xi'an, a development made possible by the theoretical and administrative changes of the period. A very brief survey of a fragile but related phenomenon, the appearance of individualistic strains of guohua, is included as well. We will describe the political movements leading up to the Cultural Revolution, which ended these promising developments. Finally, we will draw some conclusions about the circumstances under which the Chinese art bureaucracy might have permitted or encouraged diversity of style and theme.

Political Background

The most important political, social, and economic program of the period 1957-1966 was Mao Zedong's poorly conceived Great Leap Forward, officially launched in May 1958 shortly after the conclusion of the Anti-Rightist campaign. By the late fall, people's communes had been established in most rural areas, collectivizing 99 percent of China's peasants.^[2] One slogan of the program was "Surpass Great Britain's industrial production within fifteen years." Backyard steel furnaces were set up by most work units, including schools, farms, and art academies, to boost national steel production. Even in urban areas communal mess halls were established, with individual families contributing their pots and pans to the drive for communal steel smelting.

During the spring of 1959 many leaders, including Chen Yun and Zhou Enlai, became nervous about the communes' poor planning and impossibly ambitious production targets. At a July 1959 Politburo meeting held at Lushan, Jiangxi, several members, among them Peng Dehuai, attacked Mao's policy. Rather than modifying the Great Leap Forward, however, Mao interpreted the criticism as a power play and silenced his critics.^[3]

Droughts and floods in 1959 and 1960 led to poor harvests, food shortages, and even starvation in rural areas. Intraparty and international conflicts left the CCP leadership unable to respond adequately to the crisis.^[4] The period between 1959 and 1961 is now called the "Three Disaster Years." The suffering visited upon China's people by these natural and manmade calamities forced Mao to give way. By late 1960, the government had liberalized economic policies in order to stimulate food production.

Along with relaxation of the domestic economy came a partial liberalization of social, cultural, and political controls.^[5] Artists found themselves hungry, but some were freer than before to make their own creative choices. The liberalization of 1961 through 1963 was, for the most part, administered more benevolently than that of 1956, which had turned into a vengeful political struggle. Artists in the early 1960s sought recognition largely on the basis of their art, not their political posture. Peaceful accord between painters of different groups was encouraged in this second attempt to implement the Hundred Flowers. A wider range of creative activities allowed more artists to participate in the officially sanctioned art world.

International affairs probably played an equally important role in arts policies of the period. Border disputes with India and the Soviet Union began to isolate China, which responded with increasingly strident Chinese nationalism. Indigenous forms of art, such as guohua and woodblock prints, thus became politically appropriate for no better reason than that they were Chinese.

Soviet-style oil painting remained a vital part of Chinese artistic production, but critics referred to it by function, as "history painting" or "propaganda painting," rather than by its style, medium, or heritage.

The decentralization of finances and administration implemented to speed Mao's communization drive in late 1957 and 1958 had a strong and largely unintended influence on artistic development. Once power had been allocated to the provinces, it was impossible to return it entirely to the center, even when recentralization became a goal in the 1960s.^[6] This aspect of the Great Leap Forward broadened the scope of China's cultural activities and was a key factor in the most important artistic trend of the era, the development of regional styles of art. Let us first look at some of the theoretical foundations for these changes.

Mixed Signals from Above: Zhou Enlai's Unpublished Speech of I959

In mid-April 1959, Zhou Enlai delivered an address to the National People's Congress that has been characterized as possessing "curiously contradictory overtones."^[7] Artist-members of the Political Consultative Committee, who included Wang Zhaowen, Ye Qianyu, and Jiang Zhaohe from Beijing and Fu Baoshi from Nanjing,^[8] responded in print with verbal contortions, leaving it unclear to their readers whether raising artistic standards, continuing the Great Leap Forward, or some other program should direct artistic activity. Variety in artistic expression seems to have been encouraged, however, as the group vowed that "just as we need history painting, we also need bird-and-flower and landscape painting."^[9] Such suggestions were interpreted literally, and artistic activity increased accordingly in these three specific areas.

Perhaps aware of the confusion created by his fence-straddling oration, Zhou sought to reassure artists. Most artists were under a great deal of pressure, being expected to complete high-quality works both for the exhibition marking the PRC's tenth anniversary and for newly constructed architectural complexes while simultaneously engaging in manual labor, peasant painting, and the like. Zhou therefore invited a group of writers and artists, including Beijing intellectuals and delegates to the National People's Congress and the Political Consultative Congress, to attend a conference in the governmental compound at Zhongnanhai on May 3.

Zhou's frank remarks to the gathering on that spring day were not published until twenty years later, and as he commented sadly in 1961, "there was no response to my talk, [spoken as though] into an empty hall."^[10] Although his opinions on the ten points he discussed were probably conveyed orally to most official artists, conflicts within the upper reaches of the CCP about economic issues left arts administrators uncertain about whether this was to be the last word. Moreover, the purge of Peng Dehuai following his criticism of

the Great Leap Forward in July resulted in a new political movement against "rightist tendencies" that fall. Artistic effort was diverted into the public criticism of artists who had narrowly escaped the rightist label two years earlier, which certainly discouraged experimentation.

While Zhou's call for peace of mind as a necessary condition for the production of high-quality art was superseded by subsequent events, it appears that some of his specific instructions were adopted. First, Zhou criticized the Ministry of Culture for putting too much pressure on writers and artists.

One cannot call [authors] on the telephone over and over every day to pressure them. If their spirits are too tense, they will be unable to write good things. Production of good works can be attained accidentally, but this kind of accidental attainment is built on a foundation of long life [experience] and cultivation .... I hope everyone's spirits will relax a bit, and perhaps good works will appear .... Art works and so forth need not be completed before October 1. Later in October, or late in the year, is fine, as long as they are good works.^[11]

This reprieve may have been good news for some artists, but it no doubt disappointed others, for it meant, in effect, the cancellation of the Third National Art Exhibition, originally scheduled for October. Instead of a national exhibition, each province held its own exhibition in celebration of the republic's anniversary.^[12] The national exhibition, finally held in the summer of 1960 during the Third Congress of Literary and Art Circles, was referred to as the Great Leap Forward Exhibition.^[13]

Other points of discussion were the relationship between technical training and literary and artistic cultivation. Ideally, artists would study literature, music, and drama as well as their own specialties. Abuses in administration of manual labor were addressed with an order that old artists were not to be forced to do excessively strenuous work and that artists might decline labor assignments for health reasons upon application to the State Council. The Ministry of Culture was implicitly blamed for problems and ordered to change such extreme practices.

Zhou's tenth and last point was of great importance for the practice of art. "An art that lacks a unique style will decline." Noting that Beijing opera had various distinctive schools of performance, Zhou stated his belief that unique styles and a variety of expressive means were required in any art. Several phenomena that we will discuss, including the establishment of studios at CAFA and the extraordinary critical enthusiasm that developed for Nanjing artists, may have been generated by Zhou's remarks. His final point undoubtedly provided theoretical justification for the experiments in regional and individual styles that occurred over the next several years.

Zhou Enlai's Unpublished Speech of 1961

Two years later, on June 19, 1961, Zhou Enlai delivered talks concerning literature and the arts that, like his speech two years before, remained unpublished until after his death.^[14] Delivered against the background of widespread food shortages, his message was a renunciation of the hard-line cultural policies of the Great Leap Forward.^[15] It called for the regularization of artistic activity, the return of amateur artists to their regular jobs, the elimination of some newly founded art technical schools, and the democratization of art. He specifically urged intellectuals to speak their minds, claiming that the party had been advocating the liberation of thought for three years with little result. Additionally, he criticized people who restricted themselves to the framework of Mao's Yan'an Talks.

Yet Zhou also stressed the need to balance freedom with order. That freedom of speech had limits was suggested when Zhou defended the Anti-Rightist campaign except as it had applied to those who "only spoke one sentence in error." He further ordered leaders to remain responsible for preventing political errors but to interfere less in other realms. Tolerance for individual work styles was desirable, he suggested, pointing to the poetic production of Chen Yi in contrast to that of Mao Zedong: whereas Chen Yi wrote quickly and rather effortlessly, Mao pondered and reworked his compositions. Similarly, the particular requirements of each art form, be it literature, drama, music, art, dance, film, or photography, he said, must be taken into account in determining how it might best serve the people. Moreover, within each form, differences should be tolerated; an art that loses its own form will not survive. Zhou mentioned several examples of regional schools of opera or drama that should be encouraged, concluding that Beijing people should not regulate Shanghai opera. His praise for the Jiangsu guohua painters, who were cited for the abundance of their work, encouraged regional developments in guohua.^[16] In spite of his protestations that the particular tastes of party leaders should not determine policy, merely by mentioning the Jiangsu group he ensured its painters a privileged position throughout the next two decades. Even though Zhou's examples were often taken too literally by cautious bureaucrats, his 1961 discussion was a mandate to promote regional arts of all kinds.^[17]

Zhou argued not only for regional styles, but also for professional and local determination of standards for art. "If we government leaders happen to love drama, painting, antiques, and so forth, that does not give us the right to set standards."^[18] To underscore the absurdity of political leaders establishing national artistic norms, he pointed out that he and Chen Yun liked different kinds of opera: Zhou favored that of the north, while Chen enjoyed

that of Suzhou. In emphasizing opera, Zhou may have been targeting Jiang Qing, who held extremist views on the need to reform the genre. Indeed, it became clear within two years that the moderate cultural policy outlined in Zhou's talk was strongly opposed by Jiang Qing and her allies.^[19]

Zhou's remarks were part of a nationwide readjustment of policy at the conclusion of Mao's disastrous economic experiments. In 1961, the secretariat of the Politburo, led by Deng Xiaoping and Peng Zhen, drafted the Sixty Articles on Agriculture, a manual for commune management that institutionalized a retreat from Great Leap policies. The Propaganda Department similarly re-evaluated the cultural situation.^[20] The result of this analysis emerged in draft form in May. In December 1961, the Eight Articles on Literature and Art, a document advocating the same sort of liberalization articulated in Zhou Enlai's speech, were drafted. They were formally issued in April 1962.^[21]

The single most influential event in the cultural readjustment was a speech delivered by Chen Yi at the Canton Forum of Opera and Drama on March 3, 1962, in which he told the artists that thought reform would no longer be implemented through movements, nor would the party force them to read Mao's works. He further declared that because intellectuals had undergone thirteen years of reform, they should have their "capitalist class caps" removed. "Today, I am holding for you a 'cap-removing ceremony.'"^[22] This liberalization of thought and intellectual practice, which was made public in a People's Daily editorial by Zhou Yang on May 23, 1962,^[23] was an extremely powerful, if short-lived, influence on artistic circles.

The shifting policies between 1959 and 1965 made artistic activity both challenging and perilous, as we shall see. Following the failure of Mao's extremist economics, open opposition to his leadership erupted within the party. The power struggles taking place at the highest levels of government filtered down to artists in the form of ever more rapidly shifting, and sometimes contradictory, cultural policies. It appears that individual artists were rarely able to adapt to party policies in such an environment. Instead, those whose style and outlook were suited to a particular trend might emerge when that view of art was on the ascendant, only to be replaced by different artists when new requirements were made of art a few months later. Relatively traditional landscape painters, such as the Nanjing master Fu Baoshi, attained great fame in 1959 (fig. 71). Specialists in painting oil portraits of Mao Zedong, such as CAFA artists Jin Shangyi and Wu Biduan, were publicized in 1960 (fig. 68). The Xi'an guohua painter Shi Lu emerged as a landscapist in 1961 (figs. 100 and 103). Even the reclusive and apolitical Lin Fengmian was pulled into the spotlight in 1963; by 1965, however, socialist realism was once again dominant.

The Academies

The Aftermath of the Anti-Rightist Campaing

The troubles experienced by artists who worked or studied in China's art academies began well before the Great Leap Forward. The academy in Beijing, only a short bicycle ride from Zhongnanhai, the governmental headquarters and the site of China's political struggles, was particularly sensitive to each succeeding political movement. The response of its artists and administrators to events between I958 and 1963, which we trace in this section, serves as an extreme against which to consider the situation of artists elsewhere.

The academy system was severely shaken by the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957 and 1958. Jiang Feng, the leader of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, was stripped of his titles, expelled from the Communist party, and sentenced to labor reform in the Beijing suburbs. Several years later he was given a minor position as a library worker at the National Art Gallery, but he remained banned from most professional and social intercourse.^[24]

The purges were not confined to CAFA. Because Jiang Feng's accusers charged him with having established a widespread antiparty network, administrators of regional art colleges were implicated as well. The leaders of the Hangzhou campus, as we have seen, were early targets of the campaign. The director and party secretary of the Northeast Art Academy in Shenyang, Yang Jiao, who had the bad luck to be in Beijing during the bitter May debates, was discovered to be another arm of the conspiracy. He had allegedly served as one of Jiang's "three hired guns" at Yan'an and lobbied for his academy to be renamed Northeast Campus of CAFA so that he would be responsible to Jiang Feng rather than to local authorities. He and his wife, Zhang Xiaofei, who served as vice-director and party vice-secretary, were purged, a move that deprived the academy of its founding administrators.^[25]

Many other important administrators, professors, and students met with similar punishment. The campaign continued with regular public criticism meetings throughout the latter half of 1957 and first half of 1958. On December 15, 1957, for example, a meeting held in the CAFA auditorium and attended by more than six hundred Beijing art figures condemned two promising young artists for rightist crimes. Speeches were delivered by CAA officials Zhang Ding, Ye Qianyu, and Cai Ruohong summing up the charges against the two men.^[26] One of the two artists, Wang Zhijie, completed graduate training at CAFA in 1955 and is described by former classmates as one of the most talented students in the college. He turned down an appointment as instructor in the color-and-ink department, requesting instead permission to become a "professional artist." Once this permission was granted in 1956, he established himself as a very successful free-lance illustrator. His career exemplified an

idea Jiang Feng developed in the mid-1950s—that artists should be paid according to their artistic productivity rather than in a flat monthly wage.^[27] Jiang's blessing was his downfall in 1957, and he completely dropped from view after 1958.

During the spring of 1958 CAFA and other art academies continued their campaigns against rightism and revisionism, including a thorough criticism of school policies in the period 1953-1957. Particularly serious errors were identified as individualism, elitism, and overemphasis of technique, talent, and reputation. An exhibition of condemned works—an event that was to become a standard part of political campaigns in the art—was held. As Hitler's attempt to remake the German art world by similar means proved, such methods were, as long as they lasted, successful. At the Central Academy of Fine Arts, student works were exhibited to demonstrate the pernicious influence of the Jiang Feng administration. Three periods supposedly defined the academy's development and decline: the first was marked by early political works, the second by mid-fifties works that overvalued technique and undervalued politics, and the third by rightist works.^[28]

Rightist students were identified in all sections of the school, even the middle school. Among them was Fu Xiaoshi, son of the well-known Nanjing artist Fu Baoshi, who had complained that the Ministry of Culture was unfair for abolishing scholarships for art students while retaining them for music students. Other middle school "rightists" included Xu Kuang and Sun Kexiang.^[29] The college student Yuan Yunsheng was castigated for believing that socialist realism was out of date and that there was no need for his work to serve the people. Criticism of Yuan was especially harsh because he had originally been regarded by school authorities as a gifted student. To their chagrin, however, he had allegedly returned from labor in a fishing village with sketches of nude fisherwomen and a picture of a couple courting in a fishing boat. The accusers, naturally, blamed Jiang Feng's leadership for Yuan Yunsheng's political and moral failings. Similar campaigns were reported at the academies in Hangzhou and Xi'an. A new job assignment policy was implemented in their wake: instead of being sent to work in specialized art and educational institutions, more students were assigned to factories and farms.^[30] Students with political problems, such as Yuan Yunsheng, were exiled to the provinces after graduation.

The status and attainments of the Central Academy of Fine Arts declined after the Anti-Rightist campaign in several ways. In keeping with a general decentralization of national administration, begun in late 1957, CAFA was assigned to the control of the Beijing municipal government and removed from Ministry of Culture direction.^[31] This, in effect, lowered its administrative stature by making it similar to any other local art academy. Moreover, in late summer 1958 it was decided that each of China's provinces, municipalities,

and autonomous regions should, within three to five years, establish its own institutions of higher learning to train artists.^[32]

The five major provincial academies were all renamed and reorganized during this restructuring of the national arts colleges and schools in 1958.^[33] The South-Central Art Academy, directed by Hu Yichuan, was even moved—from Wuhan, where it had been founded in 1953, to the southern city of Guangzhou. The instructors all stemmed from the art departments of the defunct South China Arts School, South-Central Arts School, and Guangxi Arts School; by 1958, the year of its relocation, the school had expanded to include departments of Chinese painting, oil painting, sculpture, printmaking, and industrial arts. A year after its relocation it was renamed the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, henceforth to be funded and administered by Guangdong province. The other provincial academies similarly received new names: the Southwest Academy became the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, the Northwest Academy became the Xi'an Art Academy, and the Northeast Academy in Shenyang became the Lu Xun Academy of Art, in recognition of its ancestral bonds to the academy of that name in Yan'an.^[34]

In June 1958 the East China Campus of CAFA was renamed Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (ZAFA) and placed under direct supervision of the Zhejiang provincial government. The announcement of this change served as formal cancellation of the proposed move to Shanghai and severance of all ties to CAFA. The traditional painter and preliberation director Pan Tianshou assumed the post of director of the academy in 1959. Another part of the original CAFA administrative structure, the National Art Research Center, received harsh criticism at a Ministry of Culture conference in March 1958 and was reassigned to Ministry of Culture control.^[35] Thus the powerful institutional structure once controlled by Jiang Feng was finally dismembered.

The leadership vacuum created by Jiang Feng's removal from the Central Academy of Fine Arts was never completely filled. The respected oil painter Wu Zuoren was elevated to the directorship, a largely honorary post. The sculptor Liu Kaiqu, filling the same position he had held in Hangzhou, became vice-director. Outside party officials were appointed by the Ministry of Culture and the universities section of the municipal government, though most did not serve for long. Wang Zicheng, for example, was named vice-director and party secretary. Because his primary task was to direct the Anti-Rightist campaign in the academy, he was reassigned at its conclusion in 1958. Qi Su, a second newly appointed vice-director and party vice-secretary, was removed in the late-1959 campaign against rightist tendencies. A military man who specialized in political indoctrination, Chen Pei, was appointed party secretary in 1958. With his promotion to vice-director in 1960 he became the school's leader, a position he held until 1964. Chen Pei is evaluated charitably by academy historians for his conscientious study of his new specialty and for the administrative

flexibility he developed.^[36] Unfortunately, what benevolence he may have shown could not protect academy artists from forces beyond the school's walls. He himself succumbed to political circumstances in 1964, when he became the target of a rectification campaign that is now considered a small-scale and successful test of Cultural Revolution confrontational tactics.

The Great Leap Forward

With the launching of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward in May 1958, CAFA artists found themselves being required to devote several weeks to manual labor. Prominent teachers such as Li Keran, Wu Zuoren, Jiang Zhaohe, Ye Qianyu, and Dong Xiwen, for example, spent ten days in May laboring at the Ming Tombs Reservoir construction site.^[37] On May 25, the Party Central Committee, including Chairman Mao, performed one day of ritualistic labor at the site. On May 28, two hundred students and young faculty from CAFA joined the political spectacle by helping in the construction work.^[38] The young instructor Li Qi recorded Mao's presence at the reservoir in a much-celebrated guohua portrait (fig. 66).

CAFA, like all work units, developed a production plan to accompany the Great Leap. In September it was reported that the academy artists had collectively produced many pictures promoting the Great Leap, including one work over thirty meters long that was displayed above the door of the Beijing Department Store.^[39] They completed 138 murals for the Great Leap Forward before going to labor in the countryside.^[40] For ten months, oil painting students and faculty held classes at the industrial suburb of Moshikou Village, Shijing-shan, in order to involve themselves more closely in steel production. The school also opened a paint factory, a printing factory, and a magazine called Popular Art (Qunzhong meishu ).^[41] Yet even in their popularization work, CAFA administrators felt stymied by bureaucratic interference.^[42] Once famines set in in 1959, students shared malnutrition with the masses. They returned from the countryside with swollen legs and faces, a result of beriberi.^[43]

National policies promulgated in 1958 encouraged the training of worker-peasant-soldier artists. An important goal was to attain, within five years, a student body comprising at least 60 or 70 percent worker- and peasant-class children. By retaining these students as instructors, the goal of replacing rightists with leftists could be attained.^[44] Accordingly, CAFA began a formal worker-peasant-soldier training program in that year and accepted no regular students, thus essentially suspending normal admissions procedures. Approximately 20 percent of the entering students in 1958 were graduates of the CAFA middle school; the other 80 percent were worker-peasant-soldier students.^[45] In addition, the school trained seventy-nine workers to paint

Image not available

Figure 66
Li Qi, Mao at the Ming Tombs Reservoir
Site, 1958, ink and color on paper,
74 cm × 56 cm.

nianhua and other popular forms of art in a special half-year class. Faculty were dispatched to teach amateur artists at a nearby mine.^[46] More regular admissions procedures were reinstituted in 1959, though outreach provisions were retained for the spring 1959 examinations. Sitting for the examination required a high school diploma, unless the candidate was a worker, commune member, or folk artist with three years' experience, in which case a middle school cultural level was acceptable.^[47] Examinations were held in four regional centers that year. However, political circumstances once again disrupted normal artistic activity. The national campaign against rightist tendencies conducted in late 1959 led to a six-month hiatus in regular classroom activity.^[48]

A debate launched in 1958 about the relationship between politics and specialization, the "red-versus-expert" question, was carried forward into the following year. Because the artists were already considered expert, what mattered for them was the state of their political consciousness, or the degree of their "redness." At CAFA, faculty and students who allegedly valued expertise over political reliability were selected as negative examples and subjected to public criticism in a small-scale replay of the Anti-Rightist campaign. The printmaking professor Huang Yongyu and the oil painter Dong Xiwen were attacked for exemplifying capitalist views of art, valuing art over politics, and overemphasizing student talent. First-year students Jiang Tiefeng and Guang Jun in the printmaking department and Yao Zhonghua in the oil painting department were similarly castigated for their lack of interest in politics. Some of these students were attacked again in 1964 and banned from participation in their class's graduation exhibition. Once labeled politically unreliable, their careers were ruined. In 1964, Guang Jun was assigned a job in the sanitation department; Jiang Tiefeng and Yao Zhonghua were given unappealing jobs in distant Yunnan.^[49]

While similar political movements disrupted institutions all over China, they were particularly damaging to the national art academies, especially CAFA, because of the severe setbacks already undergone during the Anti-Rightist campaign.^[50] Some artists who were students during those years mark their lives not by their art but by succeeding political movements.^[51] These included the "red-versus-expert" debate of 1959, the Three Banners of 1960, the anti-Khrushchev movement of 1961, the anti-revisionism campaign of 1962, and the Socialist Education Movements of 1963 and 1964. Some individuals on the academy staff managed to retain national visibility during this period, as we shall see later, but the emphasis on collective activity and the failure of CAFA to compete successfully with other institutions for the attention of critics led to a decline in the academy's influence after the Anti-Rightist campaign.

Because of CAFA's location in the heart of Beijing and the ties of many students to high officials, the academy has always been more sensitive to high-

Image not available

Figure 67
CAFA Middle School Faculty, Contemporary
Heroes, 1960, guohua.

level politics than many provincial institutions have been. Children of Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi attended the academy, as did a girl reported to be Zhou Enlai's goddaughter, to name only a few. While loyal artists in China might have been able to change their styles gradually when confronted with a new official line, very few could produce an artistic response to policy change at the drop of a hat. And during the Great Leap Forward and the subsequent famine, unmanageably swift changes in political climate were more the rule than the exception. In the absence of a strong director, it is probable that political uncertainty left academy artists unclear about the best direction for their long-term artistic development. By contrast, the Lu Xun Academy of Art, under the hard-line direction of Zhang Qiren since 1957, won national recognition as a progressive work unit in 1960.^[52]

It was not until June 1960, on the eve of the Third Congress of Literary and Arts Workers and the national art exhibition, and with the country facing ever-worsening domestic and international crises, that one finds young CAFA artists receiving any public recognition. Two works in particular count among the earliest artistic contributions to the cult of Mao that flowered in the peculiar iconography of the Cultural Revolution. Contemporary Heroes , a large drawing prepared collectively by fifteen young faculty members of the CAFA middle school, commemorates one of the first congresses held in the newly completed Great Hall of the People in October 1959.^[53] Reworked soon after as a Chinese painting (fig. 67), it depicts Chairman Mao striding into the hall flanked by dozens of bemedaled people's delegates from all walks of life. The enormity of the architectural stage on which Mao is placed, his centrality, and the great number of people walking with him propagandize powerfully for the mutual support between Mao and the people.

Image not available

Figure 68
Jin Shangyi and Wu Biduan, Mao
Zedong with the People of Asia, Africa,
and Latin America.

Two young teachers at CAFA, Jin Shangyi and Wu Biduan, produced an equally effective iconographic formula in Mao Zedong with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (fig. 68), published on the cover of an important issue of Meishu .^[54] Jin was a graduate of Maksimov's oil painting class; Wu had studied in Leningrad from 1956 to 1959. "For reasons," as the editors apologetically and ambiguously state, the CAA magazine was issued two and a half months after its scheduled publication date in mid-July—the "reasons" consisting largely of the Soviet Union's abrupt announcement that it was recalling its experts in China. When the magazine finally did appear in late

September (presumably after undergoing editorial changes), the cover vividly asserted the Chinese Communist party's claim to represent both orthodox Communism in the face of Soviet heterodoxy and the regions in which it intended to dominate the international foreign policy stage. Oddly enough, considering the anti-Soviet implications of its Maoist theme, in style and subject matter the piece is closely related to the work of a leading Soviet artist, A. A. Myl'nikov (b. 1919), who had visited China not long before. His Awakening , exhibited in Beijing in 1957, depicts the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas marching together with raised fists.^[55] The stylistic and iconographic origins of the Chinese work were not publicized, however, and the young Central Academy artists, unprepared by the school's erstwhile Western orientation for the new emphasis on national forms in art, made their mark by developing a new iconography for Chairman Mao.^[56]

The Studios

A brief relaxation of pressure on artists in the spring and summer of 1959 led to experiments in decentralizing instruction at some art academies. In Beijing and Hangzhou, the color-and-ink painting department had been renamed the Chinese painting department in 1958 as part of the Anti-Rightist campaign and reorganized by genre, with students specializing in landscape, bird-and-flower, or figure painting, along traditional lines.^[57] The oil painting and print-making departments were later divided into separate studios that would teach slightly different styles.^[58] The presumed goal was to contribute to the Hundred Flowers policy by increasing artistic variety and by diminishing the stranglehold of Soviet art on the academy's curriculum. Ai Zhongxin claims credit for the idea; the first studio at CAFA was named for the academy's director, Wu Zuoren, whom Ai assisted in administering it. Both men were disciples of the European-trained Xu Beihong.

Whatever its political justification may have been at the time, the studio system was hardly a new idea. Many Chinese artists who studied in France learned painting at privately run studios. The national academy in Hangzhou, which had a strong French tradition, had been organized by studios as early as the late 1940s. Moreover, Chinese artists who failed to obtain teaching posts before 1949 often survived by running instructional studios at home. Enterprising students, even those enrolled in the art academies, might explore different approaches by taking lessons at such private studios. Several private studios continued to operate in Shanghai during the 1950s and 1960s, led by artists who were technically very skilled but unemployable for political reasons. The most prestigious of these was the Zhang Chongren Studio, taught by a Catholic sculptor who had been trained in Belgium. Ha Ding, one of Zhang Chongren's students, taught Renaissance-style drawing and British-style

watercolors at his less expensive studio.^[59] The Repin Art Academy in Leningrad, where Chinese students studied in the 1950s and early 1960s, was also organized by the studio system.^[60] Apparently the French academic and Soviet systems were similar enough to satisfy both Communist and non-Communist realists.

The Soviet practice of referring to studios by the names of their directors was soon recognized as an ideological error in Communist China. Consequently, the CAFA oil painting studios changed to a numbering system. Studio One, the former Wu Zuoren Studio, was taught primarily by Ai Zhongxin, with the assistance of Xu Beihong students Wei Qimei and Feng Fasi. Its mission was to teach European styles of oil painting, by which was meant premodernist styles. Studio Two, headed by Luo Gongliu, was taught by enthusiasts of Soviet and Russian art.^[61] When Luo became involved with other administrative duties, his Soviet-trained assistants, Li Tianxiang and Lin Gang, carried on.

As we have mentioned, the failures of the Great Leap Forward led to a nationwide reevaluation of administrative practices in 1961.^[62] Investigation of educational policies led to the drafting of Sixty Regulations Governing Work in Institutes of Higher Education, commonly referred to as the Sixty Articles on Universities. Deng Xiaoping asked that the draft include a provision that rightist teachers could return to educational roles. Documents concerning high schools and primary schools soon followed, thus ending the half-work, half-study system of the Great Leap Forward. The documents stressed adjustment, consolidation, augmentation, and improvement (tiaozbeng, gonggu, chongshi, tigao ), an approach usually abbreviated in China as the Eight Character Directive. Party supervision of academic activity was to be minimized. Lu Dingyi called for a staffing system in universities that would yield one-third proletarian intellectuals, one-third left bourgeois, and one-third neutral bourgeois.

CAFA began to reemerge from its obscurity in this new atmosphere. Oil Painting Studio Three, headed by Dong Xiwen and Japan-educated Xu Xingzhi,^[63] was founded in 1962,^[64] the same year that some rightists were allowed to resume high-profile educational positions. Although Dong, like Wu Zuoren, had been protected during the 1957 Anti-Rightist campaign, he was criticized in 1959, probably because he was believed by students to value art over politics. Dong Xiwen sought to imbue the Western medium of oils with a Chinese aesthetic so as to produce "national-style" oil paintings. His work, like that of his students, was based on study of both Chinese and European art, with faint echoes of prohibited early modern styles.

The CAFA goal of attaining variety through the studio system was hindered by both high-level politics and practical administrative concerns. Dong's studio was in formal operation less than two years before the system was eliminated, targeted by the cultural crackdowns leading to the Cultural Revolution. None of the studios survived long enough to develop an artistic tradition of its

own. Moreover, the younger faculty in each studio, who did much of the teaching, had themselves been trained in a uniform Soviet manner. Maksimov pupils Jin Shangyi and Zhan Jianjun worked in Studios One and Three, respectively; Soviet-trained Lin Gang and Li Tianxiang assisted Luo Gongliu in Studio Two. Drawing fundamentals remained grounded in the Soviet-inspired Chistiakov system; hence, students assigned to studios in their second or third years were already steeped in principles of Russian art.

The print department was divided in 1961 into four studios similar to those of the oil painters, with Li Hua, Gu Yuan, Huang Yongyu, and Wang Qi the head instructors.^[65] One former student characterized the differences between the print studios on the basis of political outlook more than artistic style. Li Hua, who had worked in Chongqing during the war under Guo Moruo and Zhou Enlai, is remembered best for the rigor of his teaching methods. He required students to master a standard set of knife strokes before they could carve their first picture, much as a traditional guohua teacher might require students to copy ink strokes endlessly before allowing them to paint a landscape.^[66] He was a devoted disciple of Lu Xun and held his students to a canon of styles approved by the master. Gu Yuan, a veteran of the Yan'an print movement, was considered the most "revolutionary." Most of his students were party members. Wang Qi was interested in Soviet prints but diligently supported the party line.

Huang Yongyu, who attracted unfavorable publicity by refusing to join the party, was a particularly lively teacher who, like Dong Xiwen, was believed to value art over politics. His only requirements were that students love China and study hard, though he rejected potential students whose sole talent might be spying for the CCP.^[67] Huang's official art, as exemplified by his New Sound in the Forest (fig. 69), tends to be sweet and optimistic. His more personal pictures, most notably his cartoons, are satirical, however, and were more welcome in Hong Kong than in Beijing.

Changes in guohua instruction between 1958 and 1963 were probably the greatest of any medium. Jiang Zhaohe taught drawing in charcoal and ink wash; Ye Qianyu and Li Hu taught outline drawing from life with a Chinese brush. While the deemphasis on academic pencil drawing and on rendering three-dimensional forms was an important shift, its effects were not immediately noticeable. The most competent students in the 1958 entering class were the CAFA middle school graduates. Yet because they had already received four years of training by the Chistiakov method, they were slow to adapt to different techniques. Zhou Sicong, one of the most talented CAFA middle school graduates to enroll, recalls that she saw objects as volumes rather than as linear forms when she entered college and had to work very hard to master outline ink sketching.^[68] In 1961, the Chinese painting department was formally divided into specialties that functioned as studios. Ye

Image not available

Figure 69
Huang Yongyu, New Sound in the
Forest, 1954, polychromatic woodblock
print, 36.8 cm × 25.2 cm, Chinese
National Art Gallery.

Qianyu and Jiang Zhaohe directed figure painting instruction. The landscape painting specialty was headed by Li Keran and Zong Qixiang. The bird-and-flower specialty was taught by Guo Weiqu, Tian Shiguang, and Li Kuchan.

A former student recalls Li Kuchan's group as the daxieyi (large idea writing) studio.^[69] Assigning Li Kuchan to teach was intended to correct "errors" of the previous administration by reviving a style and subject that had suffered

neglect since 1949. Li's position was somewhat special. In 1949, he had been retained as a professor at the National Beiping Art Academy, but he was not on regular salary and was assigned to decorate pots in the ceramics department. One summer night in 1950, after consuming a copious amount of liquor, he dashed off a long calligraphic complaint to Mao Zedong. The epistle, written in the "crazy-cursive" script of the Tang-dynasty monk Huaisu, took up most of a large sheet of Chinese painting paper (about one by ten feet, according to his biographer) and must have been impressive to the calligraphy enthusiast Mao Zedong. Within a month, Mao had written to Xu Beihong asking him to solve Li's employment problem. Li was subsequently assigned to the National Art Research Center and paid a steady salary.^[70] This may have solved his economic difficulties, but the research center was segregated from the teaching staff. It was not until the conclusion of the Great Leap Forward that Li emerged as a teacher of traditional painting and his freely brushed pictures rose in official status.

Most exhilarating for young artists in 1962 was the burgeoning of unofficial student-organized activity. Students had been extremely enthusiastic about the Great Leap Forward. According to one CAFA graduate, they had covered every blank wall with mural paintings, built blast furnaces in the school courtyard, and carried baskets full of dirt to help build the Ming Tombs Reservoir as part of their patriotic effort. They believed the propaganda they painted—that grain was piled to the sky and that pigs were as big as elephants. The bubble burst with the onset of rationing in 1960 and real hunger in 1961. Students did not know of starvation in the countryside, but morale was low nevertheless.

In 1962 an academy leader, probably responding to Zhou Enlai's suggestion to improve and broaden the cultural level of cadres, suggested that study groups be established to improve the academic atmosphere. Several good students in the upper classes, including Guang Jun and Yao Zhonghua, were asked to organize informal groups. The students were permitted to study almost anything, including impressionism and abstract art. At night they held informal critiques of one another's work. They conducted drawing classes for students in other specialties and eventually branched out into musical performances and dancing lessons.^[71] Guang Jun's group was so popular and successful that students began referring to it as "Guang Jun's salon."^[72]

Students who entered the CAFA middle school in the early 1960s recall an equally lively atmosphere among high school students.^[73] Their daily schedule involved ten hours of class, organized around a rigorous Soviet curriculum. Drawing, taught according to the finely sharpened pencil method associated with Chistiakov, was extremely strenuous. Despite hunger due to growing food shortages, they spent their Sundays and evenings practicing drawing, taking turns posing for each other.^[74]

Enjoying the freedom and incentives of the studio system, the faculty poured their efforts into teaching and painting. Huang Yongyu, who lived in a courtyard next to his classroom, would hop out his back window to pay late-night visits to the studio, where students worked into the wee hours. One memorable and mildly shocking event was his "no-shirt party," held for his all-male studio on a hot summer evening. Former students describe the very close artistic and personal relationships that developed between professors and the pupils in their studios.^[75] Some recall other practical benefits—teachers, including Huang Yongyu, provided snacks to the hungry adolescents during the three famine years. Largely for reasons that lay outside the academy, however, the short-lived studio system had little impact on the stylistic development of Chinese art.

Ominous signs were to be seen even in the midst of the liberalization. In 1962, Cai Ruohong published a letter he had sent to an unidentified art educator that implicitly advocated strict limits on creative freedom in the classroom. He proposed a list of topics that students should be required to paint. For example, guohua students should depict the teenage martyr "Liu Hulan Delivering Army Shoes," in both the hanging scroll and horizontal format. They were to base the picture on the Biography of Liu Hulan , a text describing the peasant girl's heroic virtues in the face of the enemy, and on their own imaginations. Their goal should be to convey the assistance Liu gave the Eighth Route Army, for which she was executed, by means of the arrangement of shoes.^[76] Even if the CAA leader's proposal was not adopted, it is evidence that the liberalization was narrowly interpreted by some.

Another important event of the period was the second oil painting training class. It was originally planned that a second Soviet expert (identified by one student as Myl'nikov) would begin training Chinese oil painting students in 1960, just as Maksimov had done five years before. When the USSR pulled its personnel out of China just as the class was slated to begin, the Ministry of Culture decided to demonstrate Chinese self-sufficiency by conducting the class without Russian help. As a result Luo Gongliu, an artist trained in Hangzhou, Yan'an, and Leningrad, was appointed to teach the eighteen students. The group, which referred to itself as the "Eighteen Arhats," included many artists from Beijing, such as CAFA painters Zhong Han, who served as secretary, Wen Lipeng, and Du Jian; a cadre from the Creation Studio at the People's Art Press; and an army artist.^[77] Although the students' graduation works, exhibited in 1963, were all history paintings, they were more varied in style than were those of the Maksimov class. This evolution probably had as much to do with developments in Soviet art, which was still the predominant model, as with the Chinese cultural thaw of 1962. In addition, Luo Gongliu himself was quite open-minded about painting styles; as we shall see below, his own work of the period is somewhat experimental. The best-known and most dramatic

Image not available

Figure 70
Du Jian, Advancing Among Swift Currents,
1963, oil on canvas, 220 cm ×
332 cm, formerly Museum of Chinese
Revolutionary History (reported destroyed).

painting of the group was Du Jian's Advancing Among Swift Currents (fig. 70), which no longer survives.^[78]

The encouragement of diverse views within the academy and the bonds that developed between students in studios had an unexpected effect once political circumstances changed. When Communist authorities renewed political attacks on artists in 1964, they found fertile soil for the factional competition that drove their rectification movements. Unfortunately, by 1967 factionalism became bloodshed. CAFA seems to have been better prepared in the 1969s to respond to political swings to the left than to liberalization.

The Shanghai Art School

One of the most unexpected aspects of art education in the PRC, as we have seen, was that China's pre-1949 art center, Shanghai, was left out of the

national art college system. After the private art academies were closed Jiang Feng and Mo Pu had intended to move the Hangzhou campus to Shanghai, but the plan was scrapped with Jiang Feng's purge. Decentralization of education as part of the Great Leap Forward, which led to the establishment of many short-lived local art colleges, gave the Shanghai art world another chance. The Shanghai Art School was founded in March 1959, under the auspices of the Bureau of Light Industry. The academy was initially organized as a technical school at the high school level (zhongzhuan ) and had a three-year curriculum. In 1960, junior college and college programs were added, and the academy was reorganized under the Shanghai Department of Education. During its brief existence, it moved at least four times, occupying the grounds of an old middle school, then an abandoned synagogue, and finally moving into the old campus of St. John's University, where it shared its facilities with the Shanghai Institute of Social Sciences.

The new school's faculty members included many skilled artists who were not satisfactorily employed because of political difficulties. Zhang Chongren, a sculptor very much out-of-step with the Communist art world, was hired in 1959 to teach anatomy in the technical school. With the founding of the college program at Shanghai Art School in 1960, Zhang was promoted from anatomy instruction to his specialty, sculpture. Zhang, a devout Catholic, had been educated in church schools in Shanghai and at the Royal Academy in Brussels. He won a gold medal in a Belgian sculpture competition and collaborated with his classmate, the illustrator Hergé, on two comic books about China.^[79] On his way home from Belgium he traveled to Rome for an audience with the pope. Upon returning to China he earned fame by winning a national competition to sculpt the image of the Nationalist leader Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kaishek). After liberation he had hoped to participate in carving the Beijing Monument to the People's Heroes, but the commission went instead to Liu Kaiqu, a French-trained sculptor with ties to Zhou Enlai.^[80]

Our view of his subsequent career comes from younger Shanghai artists, who present a slightly negative but strangely uniform account of Zhang's career, one that may be based on Red Guard condemnations. They believe, for example, that Zhang was rejected from participation in the Tiananmen relief sculpture because he requested an excessively high payment for his draft plan. He supported himself in the 1950s by giving private art lessons in his home. His studio, though the most prestigious in the city, was also the most expensive, and he required that tuition be paid promptly. Students at the Shanghai Art School considered him an excellent watercolorist and found it memorable that he wore a Western suit to class. He spoke at a national conference on watercolor painting in August 1962^[81] —proof that his talents were, however briefly, recognized by the arts leadership.

In the painting department, rightists and modernists emerged as the lead-

ing faculty members. Among the rightists were Yu Yunjie, an oil painter from the Shanghai People's Art Press who had studied with Konstantin Maksimov, and Meng Guang, who became a popular oil painting instructor. Wu Dayu, a cubist and former head of the Western painting department of the National Hangzhou Arts Academy, had been forced to leave that school after liberation. He was hired by the Shanghai Art College in 1960. Guohua was taught by part-time instructors from the Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting, including Cheng Shifa.^[82]

Russian realism was the predominant stylistic approach adopted by the students, in part because of the influence of Yu Yunjie and Meng Guang and in part because their contemporaries in Hangzhou, Beijing, and other colleges favored it. Some of the students, such as Xia Baoyuan, had graduated from the art middle schools of one or another of the national academies. All were steeped in Soviet socialist realism before admission to art college. This had its problems. One former student, for instance, described Wu Dayu's classes as incomprehensible, a problem he attributed, in retrospect, to the students' narrow interest in Soviet art rather than to the teacher's weakness. Wu Dayu himself was viewed as a particularly unworldly character, prone to relating art to the philosophy of Zhuangzi and Laozi rather than to that of Chairman Mao and refusing to collect his monthly pay in person.

Many of the first class of graduates at the high school level, who finished study in 1962, were assigned to work at the Shanghai Drama Academy, though some remained at the Shanghai Art School for further study as college students. Probably as a result Of economic recentralization in the post-Leap era, the school was closed after the graduation of its first college class in 1965. The remaining students were transferred to the local handicraft institute. Its graduates and some teachers were assigned to a newly established institution in 1965, the Municipal Oil Painting and Sculpture Studio. Because their rise to artistic prominence did not occur until the Cultural Revolution, we will delay further discussion of Shanghai Art School artists until the next chapter.

The Chinese Artists Association

The tense political atmosphere of the Great Leap Forward was harmful to both the reputations and the artistic development of most academic artists. Outside the academy, however, the period following the Anti-Rightist campaign had another aspect: unprecedented support for artistic activity, partial implementation of the Hundred Flowers policy, and increased regard for the artistic production of artists in regional cultural centers.

We have seen that political conformity was strongly enforced, both during

the concluding months of the Anti-Rightist campaign in 1958 and during the movement against rightist tendencies in the latter half of 1959. Yet two practical aspects of the Great Leap Forward were an emphasis on high productivity and a decentralization of economic administration. The former was reflected in March 22, 1958, regulations issued to all members of the Chinese Artists Association: they were to prepare Great Leap Forward work plans, to concern themselves with politics as well as art, to engage in popularizing work, and to increase their teaching of the masses. Moreover, in 1958 all but the old and weak were required to engage in manual labor in the countryside.^[83]

Two slogans were coined as inspiration for increased artistic production. One, "More, Faster, Better, Cheaper" (duo, kuai, hao, sheng ) exemplified nationwide economic policy. Some groups of artists responded by contributing directly to industrial production. Shi Lu and his Xi'an colleagues, for example, designed decorations for enamelware.^[84] One washbasin embellished with a Cheng Shifa design was even published in a propaganda magazine.^[85] Cheng, like other artists, reportedly worked side by side with laborers, thus learning from the masses. Other painters, particularly guohua artists, were praised for making pictures that were sold cheaply, so as to be affordable to all. The Beijing painters Li Keran, Ye Qianyu, and Li Kuchan, for example, all of whom were salaried at CAFA, sold their paintings for $0.20 RMB.^[86] A fan exhibition sold works by older Beijing masters such as Chen Banding and Yu Feian priced at $0.80 to $11.00 RMB.^[87]

A second slogan, "Every Home a Poem, Every Household a Painting" (jia-jia shige huhu hua ),^[88] was implemented by painting murals on many rural walls and by making vast numbers of folk paintings on paper. Peasants and urban artists collaborated on the designs and execution of many such works.^[89] In Bi county, Jiangsu, 183,000 murals and folk paintings were reportedly produced in two months, work deemed of sufficient significance for exhibition in the CAA Art Gallery in Beijing in September 1958.^[90] In a similar vein, the guohua artist Fu Baoshi painted albums illustrating the poems of Chairman Mao.^[91]

Decentralization was announced somewhat obliquely in the new work policies of the CAA leadership. The national CAA officers pledged to increase their contacts with artists, to hold more exhibitions outside Beijing, and to spend at least a month or two every year inspecting art activities in localities outside Beijing.^[92] According to a report published in November 1959, they did in fact investigate activities in nineteen provincial and municipal centers during the preceding year.^[93]

Material support for artistic activities during this period appears to have been largely a local responsibility. Decentralization of the Chinese economy gave local officials more discretion in their use of funds and a greater incentive to produce regional results.^[94] An exhibition of Great Leap Forward guohua

held on October 1, 1958, was sponsored and funded by the Beijing Municipal Committee of the CCP. Most of the artists represented in the exhibition were members of the Beijing Chinese Painting Research Institute or staff painters at the Beijing Chinese Painting Institute.^[95] This model of local funding and administration seems to have been. emulated nationwide.

In some areas, decentralization gave previously neglected artists much-needed financial and critical attention. When Great Leap Forward work plans were publicized, the quotas promised by local branches of the CAA, not by the national organization, were reported in the CAA journal. For example, it was announced on March 8, 1958, that the Shanghai branch of the CAA was raising its production plan from 10,000 works of art to 20,000.^[96] On March 10, fifty-five members of the Shanghai branch who had not gone to labor in the countryside pledged to turn out 9,200 works of art and write twenty-five books in 1958. The guobua artists He Tianjian and Tang Yun, for example, vowed to create a new guobua style within one or two years. The old oil painter Yan Wenliang promised to make ten paintings and write a book during the year. Others promised to join the Communist party within a specified period.^[97]

The preparatory committee for the Nanjing CAA branch pledged its 791 artists to paint 80,981 pictures and its theorists to write 3,046,000 words.^[98] Similar reports issued from other cities, including Chongqing^[99] and Xi'an.^[100] Even regions that did not yet have CAA branch organizations vowed to step up artistic production.^[101] While such a method of planning artistic production is of course preposterous, it did put pressure on local leaders to ensure that all painters and art theorists had adequate support to fulfill their quotas. It also focussed unprecedented critical attention on regional artistic activities and regional artists.

A primary motivation of the CAA-sponsored Great Leap Forward activity was to produce works for the Third National Art Exhibition, which, as we have seen, was scheduled to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. The Chongqing branch, for example, announced plans to submit eighty "excellent works" to the national exhibition.^[102] Such a goal was rather different from the decorating of rural walls and washbasins, for it put the various local arts administrations in competition with one another for qualitative recognition at the national level. Local support and, in some cases, political protection for the artists involved were clear prerequisites if this goal was to be met.

Reports published in the late 1950s and early 1960s indicate not only greater concern for the activities of local CAA branches but also a rapid increase in the number of such branches. In 1954 alone branches were established in six major cities: Tianjin, Chongqing, Shanghai, Xi'an, Guangzhou, and Wuhan.^[103] Likewise, during the late 1950s preparatory committees, which seem to have functioned as the leadership of branches that were operating but

not yet formally recognized by central authorities, arose in many cities and provinces, including Nanjing, Zhejiang, and Guizhou. By 1960, twenty-four local branches existed, comprising about 3,500 members.^[104]

For most members, the national artists association served as a voluntary professional organization. Salaries were generally paid by another work unit, such as a publisher, art academy, or research institute. Typically, though not universally, leaders of the local branches had been transferred from positions as editors or administrators at provincial propaganda publications, such as newspapers and pictorial magazines.^[105] In some cases they might hold elected office in the CAA while retaining their salaried publishing jobs. The administrative link between the two seemingly different occupations is that both were, directly or indirectly, sponsored by the Propaganda Bureau of the Communist party.

Perhaps inevitably, the national CAA became more responsive to local opinion when it decentralized its admission procedures in 1958. Whereas previously the national CAA had admitted new members directly, beginning in 1958 branch organizations were made responsible for recommending potential members to the national organization. This change, coupled with greater local control of funding, greatly increased the power of regional arts leaders, both to promote and to suppress artists in their provinces.

Although its membership had expanded by 1960, the national CAA remained a highly exclusive organization. In 1953, membership stood at 104. By 1960 it had climbed to 758—after taking account of seventeen deceased members, one resignation, and three expulsions.^[106] According to a Red Guard account published in 1967, by 1964 the membership was 1,116; forty-six members were workers, peasants, or soldiers, and most of this group were believed to have been admitted in 1959.^[107] The most influential leaders of the CAA between 1958 and 1964 were Cai Ruohong, Hua Junwu, and Wang Zhaowen, though apparently their activities were determined less by personal conviction than by the ever-changing policies sent down from above. Of the three men, Wang Zhaowen, a prolific but thoughtful writer, reveals the greatest consistency of approach, steadfastly supporting new developments in guohua .

Commissions for the Ten Great Buildings

The best-publicized aspect of Great Leap Forward art policy was state encouragement of amateur art. Peasant paintings, which saw wide overseas promotion, were in fact initiated by professional artists who taught the farmers how to paint.^[108] A related phenomenon, that of professional artists engaging in manual labor, was mentioned in our discussion of the Central Academy of

Fine Arts. The central government, however, made an extremely significant exception to the deprofessionalization of art in 1958 and 1959 with the commissioning of works for new China's tenth anniversary.

A massive construction project was undertaken in the capital in 1958 and 1959. Referred to as the Ten Great Buildings (Sbida jianzhu ), the project was, according to exaggerated reports, planned and completed in only seven months by collaborative teams of architects, engineers, and construction workers. It included construction of the Great Hall of the People, the Museum of Revolutionary History, the National Museum of History, the Chinese People's Revolutionary Military Museum, the National Agricultural Exhibition Hall, the Nationalities Cultural Palace, the Beijing Train Station, the Worker's Stadium, the Nationalities Hotel, and the Overseas Chinese Hotel.^[109] Other buildings, such as the Chinese National Art Gallery, were built soon after.^[110]

As Ellen Laing has pointed out, the new buildings took essentially Western forms and may be related to those of Washington, Paris, or Moscow.^[111] Sited around the recently created Tiananmen Square or along one of the newly widened public thoroughfares, the monumental buildings symbolized China's emergence as a modern state. The architectural focus of the city in the imperial period, the walled compounds of the Forbidden City, became a public museum, a park, and offices for the Communist party. The new buildings shifted the focus of pedestrian attention to the unwalled and open public square south of the palace, as figure 67 suggests. Commentators proudly pointed out that the interior floor space of the Great Hall of the People was greater than that of the old palace.^[112]

All the new buildings required didactic or ornamental displays. China's leading artists were therefore commissioned to produce paintings, decorations, and sculptures to fill the buildings in three campaigns conducted between 1958 and 1965.^[113] The Ministry of Culture held a conference for the purpose of consulting with architects and artists on how to make the buildings "reflect the spiritual situation of our nation's people and our nation's ancient cultural and artistic traditions."^[114] The paintings from the three campaigns that have been most influential in the Chinese art world were prepared for the Great Hall of the People, the Museum of Revolutionary History, and the Military Museum. Just as Dong Xiwen's national reputation was established by The Founding of the Nation , successful completion of the later commissions became, in many cases, the most important document of an artist's career.

The 1958-1959 Campaign

The first campaign, begun in 1958, was organized by the Chinese Artists Association, the Ministry of Culture, and the Ministry of Light Industry; it yielded 345 works. Of these, 136 were Chinese paintings, 108 were large oils or mu-

Image not available

Figure 71
Fu Baoshi and Guan Shanyue, This Land
So Rich in Beauty, 1959, ink and color
on paper, Great Hall of the People.

rals, and 101 were sculptures.^[115] It is likely that the CAA did most of the organizational work, since its membership executed the project, but funding came from the two government ministries involved. In the frenzied atmosphere of the Great Leap Forward, deadlines were often short and expectations high. The new buildings were scheduled for completion on October 1, 1959, new China's tenth anniversary, which undoubtedly put the artists under substantial time pressure. In addition, government officials who rarely concerned themselves with concrete artistic questions involved themselves in this project, in some cases offering opinions about specific aspects of the works in process.

This Land So Rich in Beauty

One of the most notable artistic products of this campaign was the collaborative guohua of Fu Baoshi and Guan Shanyue, This Land So Rich in Beauty , painted for the grand stairway of the Great Hall of the People (fig. 71). The painting's enormous size, 5.5 by 9 meters, is the result of Zhou Enlai's opinion that an earlier version, only 4 meters high by 7.5 meters wide, was too small for its setting. The artists painted the larger, final version in only two weeks—apparently to Zhou's satisfaction, for the work became a photographic backdrop for gatherings of foreign dignitaries.^[116] It is specifically mentioned in descriptions of the building.^[117]

The circumstances of the commission seem to be typical of most such endeavors. Fu Baoshi and Guan Shanyue were originally brought from their homes in Nanjing and Guangzhou to Beijing by the Administrative Office (bangongting ) of the State Council for the purpose of painting individual pictures for the Great Hall of the People. When it was decided in May 1959 that a gigantic Chinese painting based on Mao's poem "Ode to Snow" should be hung on the stairway landing near the banquet hall, the two artists were asked to create it collaboratively.^[118] Officials involved in the early stages of the commission included the chief of the State Council's Administrative Office, Qi Yanming; Beijing vice-mayor Wu Han; and CAA vice-directors Cai Ruohong and Hua Junwu.

The artists were then assigned neighboring rooms in the Oriental Hotel (Dongfang fandian ) and allowed to use the second-floor meeting room of the Great Hall as a studio. Despite the reputations both men had earned for successfully illustrating revolutionary poetry, they claimed to have had difficulty arriving at a satisfactory draft.^[119] The standard translation of Mao's poem makes clear the problems landscape painters might encounter in converting its imagery to pictorial form:

North country scene:
A hundred leagues locked in ice,
A thousand leagues of whirling snow.
Both sides of the Great Wall
One single white immensity.
The Yellow River's swift current
Is stilled from end to end.
The mountains dance like silver snakes
And the highlands charge like wax-hued elephants,
Vying with heaven in stature.
On a fine day, the land,
Clad in white, adorned in red,
Grows more enchanting.

This land so rich in beauty
Has made countless heroes bow in homage.
But alas! Qin Shihuang and Han Wudi
Were lacking in literary grace,
And Tang Taizong and Song Taizu
Had little poetry in their souls;
And Genghis Khan,
Proud Son of Heaven for a day,
Knew only shooting eagles, bow outstretched.

All are past and gone!
For truly great men
Look to this age alone.^[120]

When Foreign Minister Chen Yi, FLAC chairman Guo Moruo, Wu Han, and Qi Yanming came to check on the painting's progress, the artists were forced to confess their failure to complete a usable draft. Chen Yi, the poet-general, immediately advised them to focus on the word jiao (beauty) as the key to the composition. He stipulated that the picture should include territory on both sides of the Great Wall, the full length of the Yellow River, the snowy northwestern plateaus, and the broad expanse of Jiangnan; it should incorporate the four corners of China and the four seasons. Only then might it convey the magnificence of the fatherland's mountains and rivers.

The group immediately accepted Chen Yi's ideas and began refining them. Would figures be included? Should the sun be visible? All agreed that figures were unnecessary, but Guo Moruo suggested that a red sun rising in the east would aptly symbolize ten years of Communist rule. Just as Mao's poem was deemed to exemplify revolutionary optimism, the artists aimed to emphasize this same optimism with a dawn landscape. Following Chen Yi's suggestions, they sought to describe the beauty of the nation as a whole. The landscape thus was constructed as a composite of different geographical features, rather than as a description of one particular place. To emphasize China's grandeur, the artists took care in applying color, so that the mountain peaks appear to recede over a vast distance.

A draft of the entire composition in Fu's hand survives,^[121] but the most prominent details of the finished version are from Guan's brush. The scratchy and rather subtle brushwork visible beneath the pine trees suggests that Fu painted the waterfall and mountains in the right foreground. Yet Guan's more dramatic style is pronounced in the remaining foreground treatment, with its distinctive mountain vegetation. As the collaboration proceeded, Guan Shanyue painted the Great Wall and the distant snowy mountains, while Fu Baoshi was responsible for the panoramic middle distance, including the river view that leads the eye to the right, toward the glorious rising sun. The resulting composition is held together by the crossed diagonals of Guan Shanyue's bold mountains and Fu Baoshi's more restrained panorama.^[122]

By mid-September the work was complete. The two artists were instructed to have the painting hung for an inspection by Premier Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi. Zhou studied it from all angles for almost an hour before judging it a success. Even so, he concluded his viewing with two complaints. First, the painting was too small; and second, the sun was out of proportion to the architectural setting.

Following his instructions, the artists completely repainted the work before

the October I national holiday.^[123] Particular care was taken in the enlarged version to make the red sun more prominent and to spread the red tonalities of light more widely. The goal was to create the feeling of "the east is red; the sun has risen," joining images from Mao's poem with phrases from the national anthem.

The painting was completed with the arrival of Mao Zedong's handwritten inscription of its title, the poetic phrase on which the painting was based. Zhang Zhengyu, a professor at Beijing's Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, spent the night before the tenth anniversary celebration laboriously enlarging and copying Mao's calligraphy onto the completed work.

The selection of guohua landscape painters to fulfill the most important commission of the period was a clear sign of the government's commitment to indigenous forms of art. Regardless of party slogans urging inheritance of the "national tradition," however, This Land So Rich in Beauty is unprecedented in the Chinese tradition. It is crucial to recognize the incorporation of Western concepts in the form and content of this painting, for it may serve as a marker of the effective replacement of traditional painting with a new, synthetic mode that combines Chinese and European traditions.

The problem the two guohua artists were set was extremely difficult. The painting commission, like the building in which it was hung, was essentially Western in conception. Like many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings, their work was to be a monumental, horizontal, framed picture on permanent display in a public building. The artists believed that this was the first such guohua ever created. It was certainly one of the largest Chinese works ever painted on paper.

Traditional guohua tended to be created in one of three basic formats: hanging scrolls, handscrolls, and albums. Hanging scroll paintings on paper or silk were exhibited on walls, with collectors generally rotating works according to season or personal inclination; as a result, even in the home, works were not on permanent display. A small horizontal scroll or album was meant to be held in the hands, like a book, and then, after viewing, rolled or folded up for storage. Less commonly in later Chinese history, painted screens might be made as part of the interior decoration of a palace or mansion; murals were often included in decorative programs for temples.

Fu Baoshi excelled at painting small hanging scrolls and albums that require intimate inspection of their subtle brushwork and washes for fullest enjoyment. His work of the 1940s and 1950s, like this painting, conveys effects of weather and mood by contrasting hazy, wet ink and color with dry, scratchy brush strokes. His album leaf The West Wind Blows Red Rain , for example, is a richly textured and quite beautiful small landscape (fig. 72). Slightly more chaotic than many of his best small pictures, this autumnal scene is brought to order by the sweep of red leaves falling on the delicately rendered

Image not available

Figure 72
Fu Baoshi, The West Wind Blows Red
Rain, 1956, ink and color on paper,
45.7 cm × 48.3 cm, Fu family collection.

skiff and ancient scholar at lower left. The tidy boat is balanced by the artist's inscription, a phrase from a poem, in the opposite corner. This same rather romantic style may be seen in paintings Fu executed immediately before his 1959 call to Beijing. The most notable of these is his delicate album after the poems of Mao Zedong, which he painted in November and December 1958 and which includes a remarkable monochromatic ink rendering of Mao swimming the Yangzi.^[124]

Guan Shanyue is best known for his hanging scrolls, of which his Newly Opened Road of 1954 is typical (fig. 61).^[125] Slightly under two meters high and about one meter wide, the painting provides a breathtaking view of a

mountain gorge, making excellent use of the vertical format to convey height. Using a combination of loose wet outline strokes and careful washes, the artist has exploited to the fullest his mastery of atmospheric perspective, thus adding depth to the scene. From a technical point of view, Guan combines a traditionalist's interest in the abstract qualities of ink with more naturalistic, Western-style spatial effects. The latter, achieved by carefully conceived washes, may be found in Song dynasty painting as well, but their revival in the twentieth century is due in large part to Western influence reaching China from Japan.^[126] Silhouetted against mountain mists, a band of tiny monkeys perches atop foreground trees. Our attention is drawn to the object of their curiosity, a truck lumbering up a newly built mountain road. While both men had painted successful political guobua , neither artist's earlier work indicates a talent for painting on the scale or in the format required for This Land So Rich in Beauty .

This Land So Rich in Beauty is a monument not only to the Communist regime and its founder but also to the artistic policies in effect when it was created. Because communist ideas of statehood were heavily influenced by Western ideologies, it is not surprising that physical monuments to the regime would require Western forms. Yet in the aftermath of the Anti-Rightist campaign, cultural policy called for more attention to national forms in art. The huge painting implicitly responds to a discredited idea attributed to Jiang Feng—that guohua was unsuited to large paintings for public spaces.

The contradiction at the core of this artistic effort is inherent in the nationalism of the period. Twentieth-century Chinese nationalism, like communism, has a strongly Western flavor. With the clash between Mao's ambitions and Soviet policies in the late 1950s, the Chinese Communist party saw fit to mandate the selective revival of traditional cultural forms. The result was a hybrid, a complex synthesis of Western and Chinese elements. The party leadership's selection of these native and foreign components was an important determinant in the subsequent development of guobua .

The format and materials of This Land So Rich in Beauty are the clearest physical evidence of a synthesis of Chinese and Western conventions. The work is painted on Chinese paper with Chinese ink and colors; it was backed with stiffened paper and decorated with silk borders, in the Chinese way, but then was framed in the Western manner.^[127] Its brushwork is bold and its atmospheric perspective strong, so that it may be viewed from a distance. The subtle effects of ink and wash that characterize Fu Baoshi's best work and most good Chinese paintings may be found if the work is inspected from a ladder or platform, but they are lost when the work is seen from the floor. Moreover, the size, shape, and proportions of the painting are closer to those of nineteenth-century France than of imperial China.

While large, framed guohua may be unprecedented, China has a long tradition of mural painting. According to historical texts with which the artists were undoubtedly familiar, Tang-dynasty palaces, temples, and tombs often boasted large landscape paintings as decoration. Thus, although the tradition was largely defunct by the twentieth century, and likely would not have been revived had China not been exposed to Western art, those seeking native sources for the concept of monumental mural painting could easily find textual evidence of great Chinese muralists centuries before Michelangelo. The beauty and technical refinement of Tang imperial tomb murals excavated during the Cultural Revolution strengthened such claims in the late 1970s and 1980s, but temple sites such as Dunhuang, Yonglegong, and Fahaisi provided similar material to artists and theorists of the 1950s. The somewhat shaky conclusion that the practice of monumental mural painting in modern China merely represents a continuation of the national tradition is not far behind.^[128]

Just as the physical form of This Land So Rich in Beauty synthesizes native and foreign elements, so does its theme. Chinese emperors in earlier periods had commissioned paintings from court artists to praise, legitimize, or propagandize for their reigns and dynasties;^[129] the 1959 picture, though clearly more national than imperial in substance, performs a similar function. We will examine the ways in which This Land refers to traditional imperial propaganda, but it is important to keep in mind that the fundamental concept of the painting, the glory of the Chinese nation, is as modern and Western as the Great Hall of the People in which it hangs.

Specifics of the painting's commission unquestionably reflect the Chinese tradition, in which poetry, painting, and calligraphy have long been viewed as closely related arts. Just as court artists of the Song dynasty were required to base their paintings on poems by the emperor, Fu Baoshi and Guan Shanyue were asked to make a painting based on a poem by the contemporary Chinese leader. As in some Song paintings, the poetic line that inspired the picture is inscribed on the painting in the calligraphy of the ruler.

The idea that the spirit of man can be represented by means of a generalized landscape has been fundamental to Chinese painting since earliest times. An identification of Mao's spirit with the grandeur of the scene is implicit in this painting.^[130] Natural images were used to characterize individuals in literary texts as early as the fifth-century A New Account of Tales of the World (Shishuo xinyu ).^[131] Yet despite this reference to traditional Chinese views of the landscape and by extension to dynastic legitimacy, in This Land Western-style nationalism is never far off. The natural environment was a vehicle for conveying many meanings in traditional China, but national greatness was not one of them. Some American landscape paintings of the late nineteenth century, by contrast, embodied intensely nationalistic sentiments.^[132] One might

argue that Communist intellectuals were often as sympathetic to such Western values as to the Confucian culture underlying traditional Chinese landscape painting.

Details of Fu and Guan's execution are immediately recognizable as Chinese. The emphasis on ink and brushwork that led the artists to use huge brushes, rather than simply building up the image from many small, inconspicuous, strokes, is a fundamental of Chinese painting. Atmospheric perspective, which produces a sense of expansive space in the mountains, has parallels in both early Chinese landscape painting and Western art, as we have seen. On the surface, the execution of the picture makes it an excellent example of traditional Chinese forms in art. At a deeper level, however, the expression of nationhood that it embodies is based quite securely on nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Western ideas of art.

Fighting in Northern Shaanxi

The Great Hall of the People was constructed with large rooms in which delegates from each province might hold meetings and banquets or simply relax. These rooms were decorated by artists who lived in the province in question, and often depicted the scenery, customs, or cultural history of the region. The history museums on the other side of Tiananmen Square, conversely, were better suited to illustrations depicting famous events. In either case, the artists selected for these prestigious commissions gained an opportunity for unprecedented national visibility.

One artist whose 1959 work attracted a great deal of attention was the Xi'an guohua painter Shi Lu. He was called to Beijing to make two monumental paintings, one for the Shaanxi room of the Great Hall of the People and the other for the Museum of Revolutionary History. Both paintings were praised for their local color and innovative style, but his Fighting in Northern Shaanxi , rendered for the museum, became particularly famous (plate 3).^[133]

According to a friend who accompanied Shi Lu to Beijing, the artist's desire to create a powerful and innovative image led him to difficulties in executing his assigned topic. The picture depicts Mao Zedong pausing during a military campaign to contemplate the local landscape. Mao was on the run from the Nationalist army during this period, but his future victory is foreshadowed by his elevated position in the scene. He stands isolated on a precipice, planning his next move. Below Mao on the trail one sees his heroic white horse and three bodyguards.

Mao himself is depicted with dark washes of ink in which the artist has left pale highlights. The rich ink bleeds into the paper, as in paintings by earlier masters, while the highlights create a startlingly three-dimensional effect. According to his friend, Shi Lu based his image of Mao on a sculpture rather than on a photograph. The figures who accompany Mao are depicted with pale gray ink, which pushes them into the distance and diminishes their im-

portance. It is significant that Shi Lu chose not to paint a figural composition, but instead surrounded his small image of Mao with a grand landscape.

Shi Lu's painting bears certain similarities to the huge painting by Fu Baoshi and Guan Shanyue both in the panoramic concept and in the nontraditional approach to guohua landscape painting. Shi Lu's innovative style, however, is less a synthesis of Western and Chinese norms than a mode of painting oblivious to both. His earlier work, most notably his woodcut Down With Feudalism (fig. 42), demonstrates the artist's powerful innate sense of composition. Yet neither his spotty artistic education nor his previous work provides evidence that he was particularly skilled in the refined techniques of either Chinese or Western painting. This painting, indeed, marks a breakthrough for the artist; it is, moreover, compositionally more successful than the much larger This Land So Rich in Beauty .

The viewer gazes on the panoramic landscape as though from a helicopter. Bold, dark outline strokes and deep orange pigment create a heavily abstracted but powerful image that is very effective when viewed from afar in the museum setting. The hills become paler in tone as they recede, giving a sense of the vast territory that waits to be conquered. The stark, loess plateaus are identifiable geographic references, but the overall feeling of the landscape remains highly generalized.

Although the work shares its romantic view of the Chinese landscape with This Land So Rich in Beauty, Fighting in Northern Shaanxi was conceived as a history painting, not as an interpretation of a poem. Nevertheless, Shi Lu's painting describes a particular moment in time and a known locale in such a way as to transcend the specific. Indeed, Mao could as easily be composing a poem as planning strategy. His noble character and the greatness of China thus become more important themes of the work than the particular military campaign the artist was asked to illustrate. The territory Shi Lu was assigned to depict was that of his home province, but the elevated point of view seems to make Shaanxi a symbol of the entire nation.

One wonders whether proximity to the Fu and Guan project may not have spurred Shi Lu to his innovation. Shi Lu's work, like This Land So Rich in Beauty , satisfies the new interpretation of national forms in painting. His landscape subject matter has deep roots in the Chinese aesthetic tradition. His execution, however, is based not on traditional conventions for rendering mountains but on a personal reinvention of guohua techniques. He dragged his brush across the paper to create a structure of slightly messy ink outlines and paler texture strokes. Outlines and texture strokes were mandatory elements of Chinese landscape painting as early as the tenth century, but none, not even those of Shi Lu's idol Shitao, ever looked quite like this.^[134] His medium, ink and color on paper, his landscape subject matter, and even his concept, that the loftiness of the man might be reflected in his setting, come straight from the

Chinese tradition. Yet the large square compositional format was new, and the bright color, even today, overwhelms the exhibits located next to it. The result was a thought-provoking exploration of the problem of painting modern guohua . More important in its time, it was a remarkable success in its assigned task: to glorify the regime from the walls of the Museum of Revolutionary History.

Five Heroes of Mount Langya

Many of the best-known works for the history museums were oil paintings in the Soviet style. There was, by 1959, a strong group of painters who had been trained in this mode. In addition to the artists who had studied with Konstantin Maksimov in Beijing, students were beginning to arrive back in China from their six-year courses in Leningrad. One typical example of the Soviet style was painted by Zhan Jianjun, a faculty member at the Central Academy of Fine Arts who had studied with Maksimov. The Five Heroes of Mount Langya is executed in the broad, flat strokes of paint favored by many Russian-trained artists (fig. 73). The five figures in the composition are fierce, well-muscled men. They are placed, as on a pedestal, atop a precipitous mountain peak and carefully posed, one behind the other, to form a single, rather sculptural unit. The artist's unifying intent is made explicit in the background of receding mountain ranges, one peak of which echoes exactly the silhouette of the group. The heroes, in short, represent the highest peak of the glorious natural configuration that they dominate.

The exaggerated poses and musculature of the figures, as well as the artist's handling of paint, are based on Soviet socialist realism, though it is probable that the artist was well aware of the romantic landscapes of the guohua painters. In 1955, after all, he had completed the CAFA graduate program in guohua , one of the young artists Jiang Feng hoped would develop the new Chinese painting. In spite of the growing emphasis on "national forms"—which meant guohua and folk painting—Soviet-style works such as this continued to play a key role in Chinese art. As we have seen, the Ten Great Buildings project, which itself was undoubtedly influenced by Soviet prototypes, assumed a central role for art created for public display. The Soviet-style paintings were thus admirably suited to exhibition in the new museums, both because of their dramatic, or even melodramatic, styles and because of their narrative content. To remove the stigma of foreign influence, this form of art came to be called by a simple, relatively unideological term: history painting.

Bloody Clothes

An unusual work prepared for the Ten Great Buildings is Wang Shikuo's Bloody Clothes , which depicts peasants during land reform testifying to the horrors they had suffered at the hands of a brutal landlord (fig. 74). Wang had studied at the National Hangzhou Arts Academy under Wu

Image not available

Figure 73
Zhan Jianjun, Five Heroes of Mount
Langya, 1959, oil on canvas, 200 cm ×
185 cm, Museum of Chinese Revolutionary
History.

Dayu and at the Shanghai Art Academy, from which he graduated in 1935. He was an art student in Japan until the Japanese invaded China following the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937, and in 1938 he joined the Communists at Yah'an. He had exhibited a woodblock print on the subject of land reform, Reform the Hooligans , at the First National Exhibition in 1949 (fig. 6). During the 1950s he became one of the most popular teachers at CAFA. Rather than abandoning the theme of land reform, as most printmakers did once the movement concluded, Wang made it his life's mission to execute a monumental history painting on the theme. He worked on sketches throughout the fifties and was invited to complete the work for the 1959 opening of the historical

Image not available

Figure 74
Wang Shikuo, Bloody Clothes, 1959,
charcoal on paper, Museum of Chinese
Revolutionary History.

museums. Because of time constraints, he did not contribute an oil painting, but instead a huge black-and-white charcoal drawing on Chinese paper. This version was admired by art leaders and by Zhou Enlai. Wang later painted a preliminary version in oils, but failed to complete his revisions before his death. The powerful drawing remains on display at the Museum of Revolutionary History and is the artist's most famous work.^[135]

While many of the new paintings were publicized in Meishu and caused excitement in artistic circles, the 1958-1959 history painting project did not come to a successful conclusion. As we have seen, in July 1959 Defense Minister Peng Dehuai criticized the excesses of the Great Leap Forward in letters and speeches. A split in the party developed, with Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping absenting themselves from the meeting at which Peng's comments were discussed. Mao responded to the criticisms by firing Peng Dehuai and by launching an anti-rightist drive in the fall. Although the new ideological campaign was slightly milder than the one two years before, it marred planned celebrations of the nation's tenth anniversary.

As the Museum of Revolutionary History prepared to open in this tense atmosphere, it was inspected by high party officials. One of the reported partic-

ipants was Kang Sheng, a hard-line ideologist who had played an important part in the 1942 Yan'an rectification campaign^[136] and who, during the early 1960s, emerged as a protector of Mao's thought against the forces of liberalism. He deemed the entire display ideologically erroneous and, for good measure, singled out particular paintings for criticism. One work Kang considered too gloomy was Jin Shangyi's Farewell (Departing for the Long March ), a scene in which the artist, according to his own account, had emphasized the gray tonalities of early-morning mist.^[137] Another was Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan Coal Miners by Hou Yimin.

The previously mentioned Red Guard account from 1967 presents a view favorable to Kang Sheng, in which Peng Zhen, Lu Dingyi, and Hu Qiaomu criticized the exhibition because it contained too many portraits of Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai found the "red line insufficiently prominent." Kang Sheng, viewing the exhibition on September 11, apparently concluded that there were too few portraits of Chairman Mao. As a result of these last-minute difficulties, the central authorities decided not to open the museum.^[138] Paintings that Kang had criticized were removed from the display. The combination of economic disaster and internal dissension that befell China at this time prevented the new museum from opening for another two years.

The 1961 History Painting Campaign

The second campaign to cover the walls of the new museums, conducted in 1961, produced some of China's most famous history paintings. Artists were called to Beijing from all over the country for this project, which was directed by Luo Gongliu of CAFA. China was still suffering from food shortages during this period, but the artists, who were housed at the Oriental Hotel near Tiananmen Square, received nutritious meals. By this time more artists had returned from the Soviet Union, and complete absorption of Russian canons of history painting into Chinese art practices is evident. Even so, some variation was to be found within the genre's rather narrow confines.

Jin Shangyi, a graduate of Maksimov's class, was particularly skilled at portraiture. After rejection of his 1959 painting Farewell , he transmuted his newly assigned historical topic to better suit his individual talents and the hard-line requirements of the new Museum of Revolutionary History's inspectors. His work for the project, entitled Mao Zedong at the December Conference , was a half-length portrait of the young Mao Zedong against a red background (fig. 75). Another notable work was executed by Bao Jia and Zhang Fagen, two oil painters working in Anhui, who collaborated on a nineteenth-century-style battle scene. The Huai-Hai Campaign depicts the vast and victorious Red Army advancing under Chen Yi's leadership against a Turneresque pink sky (fig. 76 ). Quan Shanshi, recently returned from the USSR, displayed

Image not available

Figure 75
Jin Shangyi, Mao Zedong at the December
Conference, 1961, oil on canvas,
155 cm × 140 cm, Museum of Chinese
Revolutionary History.

his painterly talents in a boldly brushed Soviet-style painting, Death Before Surrender (fig. 77). This painting stands out less for its melodramatic image, which was standard for such commissions, than for its rich colors and lively brushwork.^[139]

An iconographically interesting image from the 1961 painting project was Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan Coal Miners by Hou Yimin (fig. 78).^[140] According to 1967 Red Guard material, the 1958 plans for the display had also included a work by this title. Hou, a party committee member at CAFA, had visited coal mines in 1951 with his students, and on this basis he was commissioned by Luo Gongliu and Cai Ruohong to execute the painting. His topic was ex-

Image not available

Figure 76
Bao Jia and Zhang Fagen, The Huai-Hai
Campaign, 1961, oil on canvas,
150 cm × 320 cm, Museum of Chinese
Revolutionary History.

tremely suitable for the period: with Mao's decision to partially retire at the end of 1958, Liu Shaoqi had assumed the post of chairman of the People's Republic in the spring of 1959. Nevertheless, the first version was rejected in the confusion surrounding the museum's aborted opening.

Hou Yimin was recruited for the new painting campaign and assigned to produce a better version of the Liu Shaoqi painting. Whatever details may have been criticized in 1959, it is probable that the key issue involved differences over who would be portrayed as the maker of party history, Mao Zedong or someone else. Shifts in historical interpretation inevitably followed the policy shifts or personnel changes resulting from high-level power politics. According to the 1967 Red Guard account, Deng Xiaoping personally required that a photographic or painted portrait of Liu be displayed when the new museum formally opened on June 29, 1961. The 1967 discussion of Hou's painting, written at the height of the Cultural Revolution, is slanted to its own purposes, which were to castigate Liu Shaoqi and his supporters. Nevertheless, there is every reason to believe that the painting's prominence in 1961 derived from a broad view of party history that corresponded more closely to the Liu-Deng view than to that of the Maoists.^[141]

One of the most peculiar products of the project was Luo Gongliu's Mao

Image not available

Figure 77
Quan Shanshi, Death Before Surrender,
1961, oil on canvas, 233 cm × 127 cm,
Museum of Chinese Revolutionary
History.

Zedong at Jingang Shan (plate 4). Luo, who was then forty-five years old, was prepared by his artistic background to be versatile. He had studied Western painting at the National Hangzhou Arts Academy from 1936 to 1938, worked briefly as a propagandist in Wuhan, and by 1938 had begun making revolutionary woodcuts in Yah'an. He joined the CCP in October 1938. In the early

Image not available

Figure 78
Hou Yimin, Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan
Coal Miners, 1961, oil on canvas,
formerly Museum of Chinese Revolutionary
History (reported destroyed).

1950s he returned to oil painting with his Tunnel Warfare , painted for the first history painting project of 1951-1952 (fig. 2.7).^[142] In 1955 he went to learn Soviet-style painting in Leningrad. After the Anti-Rightist campaign, Luo was no doubt somewhat constrained in his advocacy of Soviet styles. This painting clearly represents an experiment in the Sinicization of oil painting, a concept that was much discussed but rarely implemented. Unlike many of his comrades, Luo had the technical facility and education to invent a Chinese way of using the Western medium.

In Luo's painting, Mao is seated on a rock, as though resting after making his plans. Behind him are rice paddies and a mountain range. Rather than painting sharply defined peaks as Zhan Jianjun did in Five Heroes , however, Luo seems to have copied his gently rolling hills from a Chinese ink painting. This particular compositional mode, with its overlapping triangular forms, is best known from the mid-fourteenth-century ink landscape Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains by Huang Gongwang.^[143] Instead of the large, squared brush strokes the Chinese artists learned to make from their Russian teachers, Luo employed the longer, curved strokes of Chinese painting to describe his mountain. Moreover, Luo applied regular vertical dabs of color to suggest

mountain foliage, a clear reference to the distinctive pointed dots of ink used by many ancient landscape painters.

Chinese oil painters were periodically criticized for painting human figures that looked like Europeans. Luo had no difficulty painting Chinese figures, but he goes on to make his landscape Chinese as well, by depicting it in the Chinese manner. Thus Luo attempted to implement the rejection of Soviet models in a substantive way, by changing both his brushwork and his landscape imagery. This was not an experiment that could be copied, though. Younger artists who might have wished to follow his example did not have Luo's range of experience, and his innovation did not become a movement.

The 1964-1965 History Painting Campaign

The last major history painting campaign of the period took place in 1964 and 1965, a renewed period of hard-line cultural controls. Cosponsored by the Ministry of Culture and the Museum of Revolutionary History, it was directed by Wang Shikuo. Some famous artists, Dong Xiwen, Hou Yimin, and Ai Zhongxin among them, did not participate because they were targets of a political campaign then under way at CAFA. Those who contributed paintings included Maksimov students Wang Dewei, Zhan Jianjun, and Jin Shangyi and artists returned from study in the USSR, such as Quan Shanshi, Lin Gang, Deng Shu, and Li Jun. A new crop of young oil painters participated as well. Among them were Cai Liang, a CAFA graduate who had been exiled to Xi'an in the Anti-Hu Feng campaign; Yin Rongsheng, a CAFA instructor; and the young Tang Xiaohe, from Wuhan. The most significant additions to the group were the 1963 graduates of the second oil painting training class held at CAFA, young artists taught by Luo Gongliu rather than by a Soviet instructor.^[144] The new works did not differ significantly in style from those of the two earlier campaigns.

Shanghai Illustrators

By the late 1950s, steady development in illustration, particularly in Shanghai, was leading to works of superb aesthetic quality. We will observe in all genres of art that the period 1958-1964 was dominated by an emphasis on national forms. Art policy did, however, shift from the extreme popularization of 1958 to an interest in raising standards by 1962. This new concern was already evident in an exhibition of lianhuanhua in 1959, and it culminated in late 1963 with the awarding of prizes for the best lianhuanhua of the first fourteen years of the PRC—during which time, a high-ranking Ministry of Culture official re-

ported, seven hundred million volumes of these serial picture stories had been published.^[145]

He Youzhi won a well-deserved first prize for his art work in Great Change in a Mountain Village of 1963 (fig. 79). He Youzhi was a Shanghai-born artist who had grown up in a rural Zhejiang village. He quit school to work as a laborer in Shanghai, but in 1952 was invited to join New Art Press, where he attended drawing classes under Yan Wenliang. He emulated the Western drawing style of Gu Bingxin and Liu Jiyou, the two most famous revolutionary illustrators, in his early work, but expanded his stylistic repertory by studying Ming-dynasty illustrated books, the woodcuts of Chen Hongshou and Ren Xiong, and reproductions of detailed, realistic, outline-style paintings such as the Song-dynasty Spring Festival on the River .^[146]

There is little doubt that He Youzhi and his colleagues were better educated in the history of Chinese illustration than artists of the preliberation period. Gu Bingxin, one of the studio supervisors, was an avid collector of old books, both lianhuanhua and original editions of Ming and Qing illustrated dramas. The improvement in the cultural and physical circumstances of the Shanghai lianhuanhua artists thus allowed the production of some works that equal or surpass in quality paintings by guohua artists or oil painters.

The text of Great Change in a Mountain Village was based on a book of the same title by Zhou Libo about the successful communization of a rural village. He Youzhi's art—over five hundred illustrations—is of greater merit than the uninspiring text deserves. So concerned was he with quality and local color that the artist made several journeys to the region in Hunan where the work is set to sketch and familiarize himself with local customs.

We reproduce two striking scenes from volume 3 of the multivolume lianhuanhua edition of Great Change . It is evident that the artist had absorbed compositional devices from Qing prints in his effective contrasts of white paper and linear textures. In figure 79 (left) we see how he used the sharply tilted ground plane of Ming illustrations. Figure 79 (right) is filled with details of foliage and rock that are reminiscent of traditional prints. Textural contrasts, such as that between the flat white roof and the carefully described weeds around it, resemble those developed by the greatest of Ming and early-Qing woodblock illustrators. Yet the pictures are completely unlike traditional illustrations in the individualization of human figures. Although He Youzhi's mastery of realistic figure drawing is evident throughout his work, he goes well beyond simple technical skill to effect a psychological penetration of his characters. In figure 79 (left), for example, we do not see the faces of the three figures being depicted, but only their backs and feet. Nevertheless, their postures and footwear are sufficient to characterize them. The strong young man wears new shoes, one bent old woman wears neatly patched cloth shoes, and a third slouched figure wears cloth shoes that have frayed and collapsed—a

Image not available

Figure 79 (left and right)
He Youzhi, illustrations for Great
Change in a Mountain Village, 1963,
vol. 3, lianhuanhua, ink on paper,
Shanghai People's Art Press collection.

warning of her despair or laziness. He Youzhi has a talent well suited to an illustrator, that of observing people as an actor or director might, to develop a cast of visible, moving characters based on the printed word.

He Youzhi's illustrations for Li Shuangshuang (fig. 80) are slightly more conventional, but no less successful. Many of the scenes take place indoors. A device we saw in the earlier Railroad Guerrillas is used here to great effect: the artist looks at his figures from every corner of the interior space, including the ceiling, so as to increase the variety of his compositions and intensify the emotional tenor of each scene. Colleagues from the press still marvel at the visual interest he managed to create in each of the seemingly endless series of party meetings the story required. Unlike Railroad Guerrillas, Li Shuangshuang does not portray exaggerated socialist realist heroes, but relatively ordinary, if attractive, people. He Youzhi's flair for surface pattern is particularly evident in the two scenes reproduced here. Textile designs, window lattices, and even electric switches contribute to striking formal relationships. The blank rectangu-

lar window behind Li Shuangshuang's head (fig. 80, left) is a fitting frame to contain the isolation she felt in her hopeless quarrel with her husband.

Li Shuangshuang was based on a film script of the same title, and some viewers believe that the heroine looks rather like the actress who starred in the movie. Nevertheless, the lianhuanhua version stands very well on its own. The focus of the story is Li Shuangshuang's marital conflict. Shuangshuang has become active in local party affairs, a role in which she does many good deeds for fellow villagers. Her husband, humiliated by these exhibitions of female independence, quarrels with her and eventually leaves her, though in the end he · sees his error and returns. Their little daughter is used throughout the story to intensify the drama of their bitter arguments. In scenes 100 and 101, pictured here, the little girl appears to be the only means of communication between her mother and father.

A third important lianhuanhua of the period was Monkey Beats the White-boned Demon by Zhao Hongben and Qian Xiaodai (fig. 81), which won one of the four first prizes in the 1963 competition. The story, taken from the Ming novel Journey to the West , and the pictorial style, which has a strongly traditional flavor, are very much in keeping with the nationalism of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Whereas He Youzhi incorporated traditional elements into his modern style, Zhao and Qian go the opposite route and modernize the "ancient costumes" genre. The simplified settings, angular rocks,

Image not available

Figure 80 (left and right)
He Youzhi, illustrations for Li Shuang-shuang,
lianhuanhua, ink on paper,
Shanghai People's Art Press collection.

trees, drapery folds, and details of costume make reference to conventions of traditional woodblock illustration. Nevertheless, the individualization of character, naturalistic gestures, and essentially Western figural arrangements give the images a three-dimensionality rare in classical illustrations.

Claims that Shanghai lianhuanhua combine national forms with realistic observation are fully realized in works such as these. The reform program in the publishing houses reached its goals between 1958 and 1964, producing illustrations of unprecedented popular appeal, quality, and originality.

The Reappearance of Regional Art

As we described at the beginning of this chapter, the cautious liberalization proposed by Zhou Enlai in his speeches of 1959 and 1961 was paralleled by greater diversity in the administration and practice of art. The most notable trends of the period—the development of regional schools of art and the limited reappearance of artistic individualism—may be attributed, in part, to

this ideological stance. A more important change, however, was wrought by the administrative decentralization of the Great Leap Forward.

This restructuring had irreversible consequences for the Chinese art world in its encouragement of local artistic activity. While events in the major art centers of Beijing and Shanghai continued to be reported nationally, regional groups of artists began to receive unprecedented national attention during the Great Leap Forward. Conditions necessary for this critical success included one or more effective local arts leaders, unusually strong support for these leaders by the provincial party organization or by a national political leader, a local group of capable artists, and good relations with national CAA leaders. In most cases, such groups worked in Chinese media, such as guohua or wood-block prints. We will look at two schools of guohua painters, those of Nanjing and Xi'an, and two groups of printmakers, those of Sichuan and Heilongjiang.

The Nanjing Painters

The group that received the earliest and most enthusiastic national recognition was the Nanjing guohua painters. In a review of a late-1958 exhibition of their work in Beijing, editors of the official art journal cited the strength of Nanjing painting as evidence that guohua was flourishing nationwide. Further, in this era of decentralization, the Jiangsu provincial party secretary was lauded for his successful participation in their activities.^[147]

Although some of the Nanjing artists had exhibited in previous exhibitions

Image not available

Figure 81
Zhao Hongben and Qian Xiaodai,
illustrations for Monkey Beats the
White-boned Demon, lianhuanhua, ink
on paper.

and had strong individual reputations, the emergence of the Nanjing painters as a regional group corresponded with a new cultural formula. Mao Zedong urged that literature and art should "combine revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism." Party theorist Zhou Yang elaborated on Mao's views in a June 1958 article that found both realism and romanticism in the works of great writers of China's past. The new formula was exemplified in the contemporary period by Chinese folk songs and by the poems of Chairman Mao.^[148]

The December 1958 Jiangsu Province Guohua Exhibition had the good fortune to open in this euphoric atmosphere of cultural nationalism.^[149] Just as Zhou Yang cited folk songs and Mao's poems as exemplars of the union of revolutionary realism and romanticism, an important article in praise of the Jiangsu exhibition identified two art forms as particularly appropriate for the current era: peasant paintings and Chinese paintings. "Chinese painting is our nation's precious art treasure," the author wrote, "with unique national style, a long history, and excellent traditional skill; it is loved by the masses and valued by our party."^[150]

The leading spokesman for the exhibition, the Nanjing guohua painter Fu Baoshi, was much more modest than the Beijing critics in his claims for Nanjing painting.^[151] He credited the exhibition's success to the unity of party leadership, the painters, and the masses, a unity that included consultative revisions of the work to be shown. The censorship or interference in the artistic process implied by the last phrase leads one to low expectations of the results, which are sometimes justified. A typically uninspiring, though technically skilled, collective product is People's Commune Dining Hall (fig. 82), sometimes called Free Food for All , by members of the preparatory group for the Jiangsu Provincial Guohua Institute. Its closest art historical ancestor might be the documentary scrolls of civil works projects and imperial journeys prepared by artists at the court of the eighteenth-century Qianlong emperor.^[152] Several exhibited works by Fu Baoshi's colleague Qian Songyan, including On Furong Lake (fig. 83), are similarly filled with minute depictions of laudable economic activity.^[153] The well-organized landscape setting of On Furong Lake indicates that Qian's particular contribution to the Nanjing school may have been his sound foundation in traditional painting.

The exhibition flyer, written by the Preparatory Committee for the Jiangsu Branch of the CAA under Fu Baoshi's direction, is more explicit in crediting rectification, ideological education, the Great Leap Forward, and local party officials for the improvement in guohua . Commentators also cited such ideals of the period as "the high-level union of ideology and art" and "the union of revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism," along with popular slogans—"The east wind knocks down the west wind" and "Each day equals twenty years"—as providing motivation for the paintings.^[154]

Image not available

Figure 82
Collective painting, People's Commune
Dining Hall, 1958, guohua.

Image not available

Figure 83
Qian Songyan, On Furong Lake, 1958,
ink and color on paper, 108 cm × 64.5 cm.

Fu Baoshi devotes most of his Meishu article to artistic rather than political questions, yet it is clear that the guohua he promoted was carefully formulated to avoid political difficulties. He describes many conventions of literati painting that his group sought to eradicate, including adulation for the ancients, concern for qualities of brush and ink, interest in the antique or the elegant in painting, and avoidance of real life and of the common people. Nevertheless, Fu Baoshi quotes the early Qing individualist Shitao as writing that brush and ink (bimo ) must follow their time. Bimo , which may be translated literally as brush and ink or figuratively as brushwork, comprises, in Fu's view, the primary expressive tools and forms of China's national painting. Fu exhorts that bimo must not be mystified or made the only creative method, nor should the artist fail to consider whether his brushwork is appropriate to his subject.^[155]

Such opinions argue implicitly for a reform of traditional techniques. Brushwork should not be flaunted for its own sake; brushwork that is out of harmony with a painting's modern subjects should be avoided, but bimo should be retained. In practice, this meant that the Nanjing group sought to develop new types of landscape brushwork to describe China's modern life.

A typical Fu Baoshi work from the 1958-1959 exhibition is his Ode to Yuhuatai , painted to illustrate a contemporary commemoration of Communist soldiers who died in a Nationalist prison in Nanjing (fig. 84). The painting is a highly romanticized view of the city of Nanjing, in which industrial images are used to extraordinary pictorial effect. The foreground is defined, somewhat photographically, by pine branches hanging down from the upper right corner. Less photogenic, but with a surprising abstract beauty, are the delicately rendered power lines sweeping across the lower right section of the picture. The middle ground, in which a memorial stele dominates a tree-covered hill, occupies the left side of the picture. A tiny file of Young Pioneers proceed along a hilltop path to pay respects to the heroes. In the distance we see the hazy city, its smokestacks emitting delicate strokes of gray ink.

The image's pictorial unity is created in a traditional manner. Ink dabs of different tones but similar rounded shapes define the foreground foliage, middle ground trees, and distant puffs of smoke, thus linking all parts of the surface. One might identify them as "Mi-dots," a way of texturing mountains popularly thought to have been invented by the Northern Song painter Mi Fu, but their function has been modernized. The composition is organized by its linear silhouettes, such as the pine branches, power lines, the crenelated wall of the old city, the contour of the hill, and the white path leading to the memorial stele. These gently curving lines come together in the center of the composition, uniting the pine, a traditional symbol of immortality, and the monument to heroic soldiers against a romantically tinted rosy sky. The work, painted for the August 1 military holiday, succeeds in combining revolutionary realism

Image not available

Figure 84 (top)
Fu Baoshi, Ode to Yuhuatai, 1958, ink
and color on paper, 60 cm × 105 cm.

Image not available

Figure 85 (bottom)
Gong Xian (1619-1689), Mountains and
Clouds, leaf from a six-leaf landscape
album, ink on paper, 22.2 cm × 43.7 cm,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York.

and revolutionary romanticism. Indeed, if one can overcome environmentalist objections to the glorification of industrial smoke, the picture is beautiful.

Fu Baoshi's reputation as a painter was well deserved in the context of his time. That his talent was recognized and promoted, however, probably had to do with high-level patronage. In 1938 he had served as secretary in the Third Section of the Political Ministry, serving under the poet Guo Moruo. Guo, who was appointed to direct the government's Culture and Education Committee in 1949, held the post of chairman of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles in 1958. He was one of the greatest enthusiasts of the doctrine of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism, in part because of a long-standing interest in romanticism.^[156] As Guo's critical influence soared, Fu Baoshi reminded the art world of the long relationship between the two men by quoting a Guo Moruo poem of 1944.^[157] The poem advocates smashing elegance, seeking truth, adopting folk forms, and pursuing the ordinary or common (su ) in painting. The 1958 publication of Fu's paintings bore a preface by Guo.^[158]

Guo Moruo's personal secretary confirms that the two men remained close until Fu's death in 1965.^[159] Guo Moruo was Fu Baoshi's primary patron at the national level. Fu's political reliability was suspect in the early PRC period, though, which led to a lowly job assignment at a Nanjing normal school. Former students recall that he required them to make drawings of plaster statues, as did all Chinese art instructors in the early and mid-1950s, but that Fu had his class execute them in ink outline with a Chinese brush, shunning the Western manner.^[160] In October 1956, probably owing to a turnabout in national policy on guohua , Fu was appointed to direct the preparatory committee for the Nanjing branch of the CAA. In February 1957, he became director of the preparatory group for the Jiangsu Provincial Chinese Painting Institute.^[161] The Jiangsu branch of the CAA was formally established on April 13, 1960. Fu Baoshi was elected chairman, and the military artist Ya Ming (b. 1924) was general secretary. Four of the five vice-chairmen, Ya Ming, Chen Zhifo (1886-1962), Qian Songyan (1899-1985), and Xie Haiyan (b. 1910), were guohua painters.^[162] Only Lü Sibai (1905-1972), a French-trained rival of Xu Beihong, worked primarily in oils. With Guo Moruo's assistance, Fu was selected as a delegate to the Political Consultative Conference in 1958.^[163] He became a vice-chairman of the national CAA and a member of the All-China FLAC, which Guo chaired, in 1960.^[164]

Political connections were one element in Fu's rising reputation, but professional factors provided the foundation for his fame. His earlier academic appointments recognized his technical skill, scholarly reputation, and strong personal style. His best landscapes of the mid-1950s are lyrical explorations of color and brushwork. A distinctive feature of these paintings is strong textural contrasts, as in The West Wind Blows Red Rain (fig. 72) and Ode to Yuhua-

tai . In both, Fu juxtaposes tangled brushwork with blank sections of paper. Densely textured surfaces, while present in much of Chinese painting, are particularly evident in works by early Qing-dynasty artists who worked in the Nanjing area, such as Gong Xian (fig. 85) and Zou Zhe. The Nanjing landscape, even today, seems more heavily wooded, and thus visually richer, than that of many other parts of China.

Fu Baoshi was not a Nanjing native, but he is well known as a scholar of early Qing painting.^[165] Whatever artistic affinities he may have felt with previous artists were probably accentuated by his art historical awareness of the seventeenth-century "Eight Masters of Jinling," a loose collection of Nanjing painters centered on Gong Xian and famous in the early Qing period.^[166] Fu Baoshi ultimately became the focus of a latter-day "Jinling" group.

A second key figure in the development of the Nanjing school was Ya Ming, with whom Fu Baoshi collaborated in executing a military history picture in 1957.^[167] Unlike Fu Baoshi, who had studied in Japan and had a well-established academic career before 1949, Ya Ming was a product of the People's Liberation Army. He joined the New Fourth Army at age fifteen and managed to pursue his early enthusiasm for art during his military career. After liberation he was assigned to Nanjing, where he engaged in organizational work for the party. He used his spare time to study Chinese painting, and much of his work shows a good understanding of Fu Baoshi's technical innovations. Ya Ming was a particularly important figure in the establishment of both the Jiangsu Painting Institute, where he served as vice-director, and the local branch of the CAA.^[168]

Ya Ming's contribution to the 1958 exhibition, Peddlers (Huolangtu ), reveals an artist of ambition, technical skill, and enthusiasm for traditional Chinese art (plate 5).^[169] This large horizontal painting successfully synthesizes the contradictory critical ideals of his time, especially realism and romanticism, contemporaneity and tradition. The general theme, prosperity among minority peoples, was politically appropriate for its period.

In the work, a colorfully dressed cluster of tribal women excitedly inspects goods being sold by an itinerant merchant. The painting bears many evidences of a background in socialist realism. The women are all quite robust, as in much Soviet art. As in Western academic art, the figures form complex compositional groups in which dramatic gestures and bent torsos are essential organizational elements. Geometric forms, such as the rectangular rug and the merchant's cart, are rendered with vanishing point perspective rather than the "scattered point" perspective of ancient Chinese art. Moreover, although the work appears in reproduction to be a handscroll in the traditional small scale, it is in fact a large picture meant to be hung on a wall, Western style.

European influences aside, the picture is clearly intended first and foremost to evoke masterpieces of ancient Chinese figure painting. The most obvious

Image not available

Figure 86
Attributed to Emperor Huizong (1082-1135),
copy after Zhang Xuan, Court
Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk,
handscroll, ink and color on silk, 37
cm × 145.3 cm, Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston.

source is a handscroll attributed to the Song emperor Huizong entitled Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (fig. 86). This painting, which has been in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts since 1912,^[170] was reproduced in Meishu shortly before Ya Ming began work on his composition.^[171] Believed to be a copy of a picture by the Tang-dynasty master Zhang Xuan, the Boston painting exemplifies a genre of traditional painting dedicated to depicting aristocratic ladies engaged in graceful feminine occupations. Ya Ming's picture, though less obviously a "beautiful ladies" painting, nevertheless has strong links to the ancient genre. Of the five males included among its two dozen figures, none plays a dominant role in the composition: two are old merchants and three are small children.

The title of Ya Ming's painting, Huolangtu , leads us to classify it not as a "beautiful ladies" painting but as part of a different subgenre of traditional painting. The Song-dynasty artist Li Song is best remembered for a series of album leaf paintings by the same title in which children and a peddler engage in commercial exchange. The objects for sale are rendered with extraordinary detail and in minute scale. A typical example, dated 1212, is far less decorous than Ya Ming's work (fig. 87).^[172] In it the overburdened peddler frantically tries to bring order to his potential customers, a band of small boys who are about to smash a small snake with rocks and sticks. Meanwhile, one of their comrades appears to be stealing from the peddler's baskets. The youngest of the boys, on the fringes of the activity, are barefoot and untrousered, presumably because they are not toilet-trained. In this album leaf, as in Li Song's other peddler pictures, the interaction between the children and the peddler is the psychological focus of the work. Mothers and nurses, when present in Li's

Image not available

Figure 87
Li Song (fl. 1190-1265), The Knickknack
Peddler, dated 1212, album leaf,
ink on silk, 24.1 cm × 26 cm, Cleveland
Museum of Art.

other paintings, lack importance.^[173] Despite the depiction in the Ya Ming picture of a bare-bottomed little boy, his painting has few stylistic affinities with Li Song's work.

The title Huolangtu enriches the painting's meaning by emphasizing small-scale urban commerce. It probably also distracted critics from the fact that, although the subject was ostensibly minority customs, Ya Ming was in fact reviving a genre not considered politically progressive, that of beautiful women. Many of Ya Ming's earlier paintings, such as the undated Mending Nets , his best-known previous painting, also depicted pretty girls.^[174]

Similarities between Ya Ming's work and the Boston picture are explicit. Like most Tang and Song painters, Ya Ming chose to paint on silk with a me-

ticulous outline-and-color technique. While the dimensions of the two works are very different, both paintings are horizontal. Human activity is organized around bolts of fabric stretched across the composition and surrounded by lovely women. Ancient court ladies iron a section of cloth; modern women stretch a piece to inspect it before purchase. A large, flat-bottomed brazier defines the ground plane in the Song painting. In Ya Ming's work, a large wooden washtub serves the same function. In both pictures, a small child, who leans playfully to the left, animates and unifies the picture. Textile patterns, hairpins, and jewelry provide rich surface textures for both pictures as foils to the unpainted silk background on which the images are presented.

A prominent figure in Ya Ming's painting is the woman at right who turns her back toward us (plate 5). The beauty of her face is only suggested by its partial reflection in a hand mirror. This device, though not present in the Boston painting, appears in several surviving album leaves from the Song period. The best-known example may be Admonitions of the Instructress to the Ladies of the Palace , a handscroll owned by the British Museum.^[175] Ya Ming's painting thus reveals diligent study of early Chinese figure painting motifs and conventions, which were then synthesized with thoroughly modern forms.

At the National Cultural Education Heroes Meeting, reported in September 1960, four institutions were particularly singled out as progressive units. They were the Shanghai Art Film Company, the Lu Xun Academy of Art, the Jiangsu Provincial Chinese Painting Institute, and the print group of the CAA's Chongqing branch.^[176] Each of these four units, including the Nanjing group, was rewarded by an article praising its virtues.^[177]

That same month, thirteen Nanjing artists departed on a trip to sketch in China's northwestern and southern regions that was to last until December and cover a distance of twenty thousand li . In May 1961 they presented their new works in a Beijing exhibition entitled "The New Look of Mountains and Streams." Guo Moruo composed a laudatory poem for the occasion.^[178] Zhou Enlai specifically mentioned the Jiangsu painters in his important speech of June 19 as exemplars of China's rich and multihued culture. "I do not approve of saying that only Jiangsu guohua are good, even though I am from Jiangsu. We must say that every region has good guohua paintings."^[179]

In the face of such high-level support, critics presumably felt little inclination to make their own judgments about the paintings; their task was to explain why they liked them. Anonymous spectators were quoted as saying that the paintings conveyed the spirit of the Great Leap Forward, they made viewers love the fatherland, they carried on the excellent national painting tradition, and they advanced the art of guohua . Not only were the mountains and rivers new, but the look of Chinese painting was new. Some works boldly used watercolor and gouache techniques, yet without losing the special traits of Chinese painting.^[180]

Image not available

Figure 88
Ya Ming, Steel Mill, 1960, album leaf,
ink and colors on paper, 27.8 cm ×
40.1 cm, collection of the artist.

Fu Baoshi's works were predictably popular. Qian Songyan's Summer Light on the River was lauded for conveying a calm feeling in terms identical to those used by Zhou Enlai in an important speech of 1959;^[181] several of Qian's other works were judged by viewers to possess poetic meanings (shiyi ) as well.^[182] Ya Ming's Steel Mill album was singled out for its innovative use of the guohua medium (fig. 88).^[183] Indeed, this work is unprecedented, and marks an end to his concentration on female subject matter. Painted on extremely absorbent Chinese paper with ink and hot colors, Steel Mill conveys the feeling of having been painted from life (or at least from color photographs). The work makes little attempt to directly emulate the Soviet or Western styles prevalent in Chinese academies, yet it also completely breaks with conventions of Chinese painting. His only possible figural prototype is a pale one: Fu Baoshi's ancient figures, as we saw in his album leaf of 1956, are similarly slender.

We have attributed the rise of the Nanjing artists to a combination of decentralized artistic administration and the high-level connections of its leading

artists. The group's affirmation of the national tradition and other cultural policies of the period made its emergence particularly important. In addition, the guohua painting of Nanjing is a good example of regional artistic development in the period following the Anti-Rightist campaign. Several other regional groups that emerged during the same period were important for slightly different reasons. The printmakers of Sichuan and Heilongjiang, for example, fully assimilated Soviet models but used them to develop a distinctly regional iconography. The guohua painters of Xi'an, by contrast, developed a new way of painting landscapes in the traditional media. We will briefly survey these three groups before concluding with the spokesman and most important innovator in the Xi'an group, Shi Lu, who went beyond the bounds of regionalism to become an artistic individualist.

The Sichuan Printmakers

A surprising feature of regional schools of art promoted by the PRC art establishment is that most of the artists were not natives of the areas they came to represent. This is particularly true of the Sichuan printmakers, a group that included old soldiers from the northern Chinese campaigns and young graduates of the national art academies. One prominent exception, as we will see, is Wu Fan, a Chongqing native.

Artists from the Sichuan print group, despite their mutual influences, are stylistically fairly diverse. The most substantial feature that distinguishes this group from those of other regions is the high technical quality of their work and the subject matter on which many artists concentrated—namely, Tibetans. The latter was undoubtedly a key factor in the group's rise to national fame, for it gave them a domestically unimpeachable political stand on the side of national unity. The Tibetan rebellion of March 1959 led to diplomatic crises with India and the Soviet Union and gave the Sichuan prints a political weight they might not have carried in more peaceful times. The Chinese response to the crisis was one of the few issues on which the Chinese leadership seems to have been unified.

Several of the Sichuan artists, including Niu Wen (b. 1922) and Li Huanmin (b. 1930), were involved in the Communist conquest of Tibet in 1951 and 1952, and they based their work on their own experience there. One well-known Niu Wen print of 1959 (fig. 89) depicts Tibetan schoolchildren dancing and singing the Communist song, "The East Is Red." The composition's simplified spatial setting refers viewers back to the popularizing directness of the Yan'an print movement, of which the artist had been a part, and gives the work a naive charm.^[184]

The most powerful figure in the Sichuan art world was Li Shaoyan (b. 1918), a Shandong-born printmaker. Li himself attributes the great produc-

Image not available

Figure 89
Niu Wen, The East Is Red, the Sun Is
Rising, 1959, monochromatic woodblock
print, 36 cm × 34.5 cm, collection of the
Chinese Artists Association, Sichuan
Branch.

tivity of the Sichuan group between 1958 and 1966 to the secretary of the municipal party committee, Ren Baige, who encouraged artists to make prints rather than waste time on politics.^[185] As the Niu Wen print makes clear, however, art of the period is closely tied to politics. The difference between "good leadership" of the kind described by artists in Chongqing and Nanjing and the alternative, which artists at the Central Academy of Fine Arts seem to have encountered, is that artists in the two provincial cities were urged to be political in their art but not to give up making art to become laborers or ideologists.^[186]

By 1960 the local branch of the CAA supported at least a dozen printmakers in its print group, a substantial financial commitment.^[187] One artist claims that no other province had such a print group.^[188] Indeed, sums that went to maintain guohua in Nanjing, Xi'an, or Shanghai were allocated in Sichuan to printmakers. This support was justified when the Chongqing branch of the CAA was selected as Sichuan's "progressive work unit" delegation to the National Cultural Education Heroes Meeting in Beijing in 1960 and became one of four nationally publicized arts units.^[189] Four artists from the print group of the Chongqing branch, Wu Fan, Li Huanmin, Fu Wenshu, and Xu Kuang, also received prizes as progressive workers.^[190] Selection of the group for national recognition was undoubtedly influenced by concerns for geographic and administrative diversity: as mentioned earlier, the other three units were in Shenyang, Shanghai, and Nanjing and included an art college, a film group, and a guohua institute. Even so, the Sichuan group had clearly been remarkably active.

The primary reason cited for the group's receiving the award was its enthusiastic implementation of the Great Leap Forward policy of popularizing art.^[191] From the dozen or so Sichuan printmakers in 1949, the group had swelled to more than two hundred ten years later.^[192] The associated artists had completed over two thousand different prints, including many that depicted the liberation of the Tibetan people. Traveling exhibitions of Sichuan prints had been well received, as was a book of reproductions, Sichuan banhua xuanji .^[193] Propaganda activities had been continuous since 1957, with monthly exhibitions of propaganda prints on the street. The Sichuan printmakers also contributed to the beautification of people's lives by publishing, in 1959 and 1960, decorated stationery and matchbox covers. The print group of the Chongqing branch was particularly praised for its excellent combination of art and politics.^[194]

It is not immediately clear why Sichuan should have developed and supported such an active print movement, particularly when dogma of the period proclaimed guohua the national art form, but the reason appears to rest in large part in Li Shaoyan's leadership.^[195] Li began his career as an artist upon going to Yan'an in 1938.^[196] After learning the woodcut technique, he was assigned as a secretary to General He Long of the 120th Division of the Eighth Route Army, a support unit that traveled all over northern China.

Li's work was mainly clerical until He Long asked him to make a set of prints documenting their dangerous journeys in 1940 and 1941. Li consulted a Lu Xun publication of Soviet prints to teach himself how to compose such illustrations. Many of his pictures for this project are quite beautifully carved and organized, though the influence of the Soviet models is strong. The completed series, entitled The 120th Division (Eighth Route Army) in Northern China , of which we saw one example in chapter 2 (fig. 39), was exhibited in Yan'an in 1941.

He continued to work as a woodcut artist in the 1940s, making portraits of leaders and illustrations while art director for the Jin-Sui Daily (Jin-Sui ribao ), the Communist newspaper for parts of Shanxi and Inner Mongolia. He served as leader of the art work group at North China United University and later as director of the art section of New China Daily (Xinhua ribao ) in Chongqing.^[197]

After participating in the liberation of Sichuan by He Long's army, Li Shaoyan remained in the province as an administrator. He eventually rose to a high position in the provincial propaganda department^[198] and became chairman of the local branch of the CAA, which was founded in 1954.^[199] Many of the artists who went to work at the new CAA branch were transferred with Li Shaoyan from the art section of the New China Daily , where they had worked under him.^[200] As in other regions, then, the core of the Chongqing CAA branch had a background in CCP propaganda publications; in addition, the artists had apparently absorbed Li Shaoyan's commitment to making wood-block prints, a feature that stamped the branch henceforth.

Li Shaoyan's prints of the early 1950s depict Tibetans in the same Russian print style he had employed for the 120th Division series.^[201] By the end of the decade, though, he was concentrating on more boldly conceived illustrations.^[202] One of his most charming prints is the somewhat atypical Old Street, New Look of 1958, an uncharacteristically apolitical image at first glance (fig. 90).^[203] The viewer looks down a cobblestone street lined with unevenly tiled stucco houses. A timeless mood is conveyed by the old-fashioned architecture, the only exceptions being two almost inconspicuous modern details: a telephone pole and two distant steamships on the Yangzi River. What is really new, however, is that the narrow lane appears to be completely roofed with bamboo poles from which drying string hangs. The striking sight is clearly the result of communal effort, probably that of housewives who have opened a neighborhood factory.

Several other woodblock artists found themselves in Sichuan as part of military propaganda activities. Li Huanmin, a young veteran of the Communist army in northern China,^[204] attended the cadre training class at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1950 and 1951. After completing the course he was sent to the south to help liberate areas not yet under Communist control. Assigned to work under Li Shaoyan in the art section of the New China Daily , in 1952 he began underground propaganda work for the Communist conquest of Tibet. He reportedly learned to speak Tibetan and to dance Tibetan dances, and claims to feel a great attraction to the Tibetan people.^[205] He indeed became a specialist in the depiction of Tibetan life, usually focusing on images of women at work. One charming image is his Tibetan Girl of 1959 (plate 6). This work, a nostalgic portrait of a youngster who had peeped into his tent after the Tibetan uprising of 1959, recalled his early days in Tibet, when only children dared to come near the Communist cadres.

Image not available

Figure 90
Li Shaoyan, Old Street, New Look,
1958, polychromatic woodblock print,
24.2 cm × 38.3 cm, collection of the
Chinese Artists Association, Sichuan
Branch.

Image not available

Figure 91
Li Huanmin, Weaving a Rug, 1952,
woodblock print, 27.5 cm × 19 cm.

Much of Li's work shows the strong influence of the Western-oriented curriculum at CAFA. As we have seen, specialized training in media such as the woodcut was not part of the pre-1953 CAFA curriculum. Although Li Huanmin undoubtedly was introduced to the genre while in the army in the late 1940s, the young artist turned his attention back to woodcuts only after arriving in Sichuan. By 1952 he had begun making woodblock images of Tibetans at work. Weaving a Rug of that year displays a great interest in the technical possibilities of the medium, as the artist explores textural contrasts between

Image not available

Figure 92
Li Huanmin, Golden Road, 1963, polychromatic
woodblock print, 54.3 cm ×
49 cm, collection of the Chinese
Artists Association, Sichuan Branch.

fiber, wood, and foliage (fig. 91). While the theme of the picture is human labor, the figures occupy a comparatively small part of the composition and do not engage in dramatic gestures; Li had not yet absorbed the heroic aesthetic of mid-1950s socialist realism.^[206] His later work, such as Golden Road of 1963 (fig. 92), places figures in a much more dramatic and central position, an

indication that even the most remote parts of the Chinese art world had learned about up-to-date Soviet art.

A CAFA-trained artist of a later generation arrived in Sichuan in 1958. Xu Kuang had studied at the privately run Shanghai Tao Xingzhi Academy of Arts, a school for gifted children, between 1951 and 1954. In 1954 he was successful in admission examinations to the CAFA middle school, where he gained a firm grounding in socialist realist theory, in Soviet-style drawing, and in oil painting. A number of his classmates at the CAFA middle school were admitted to the college upon graduation. During the 1957-1958 movement, however, Xu Kuang was identified as a rightist and sent to work in Sichuan.

Once he arrived in Sichuan, the leadership apparently valued his talent sufficiently to encourage his art rather than punish his adolescent political errors, and by 1960 he was honored nationally as a "progressive worker." An early print, his 1959 Awaiting the Ferry , depicts four students at the wharf (fig. 93). As is typical of academically trained artists from the mid-fifties onward, his figures are large and dramatically posed, conceived to maximize psychological contrasts. A powerfully muscled standing youth waits with hands on hips and face turned to search the distant waters. A seated girl crosses her arms in a more resigned gesture of impatience. Two other girls happily read, as though oblivious to the passage of time. Large, theatrical figures are typical of Soviet art of the period, but the young printmaker has Sinicized the image somewhat, minimizing shadows on faces and adopting a palette based largely on inklike shades of gray. Although Xu Kuang was probably too young to influence the established printmakers of the local CAA branch, it is interesting to observe traces of the heroic academy style appearing in their works during subsequent years.

Wu Fan, the only Sichuan native in the group, contributed a rather different approach. He was trained at the National Hangzhou Arts Academy between 1944 and 1948, the first two years of which the academy was actually in wartime exile in his native Chongqing. Enrolled in the guohua major until the school returned to Hangzhou, he subsequently switched to the Western painting major. The prewar academy in Hangzhou, as we have seen, encouraged experimentation and individuality; all that changed only in the 1950s, when the curriculum became much more circumscribed.

Wu returned to Chongqing after graduation to work as a middle school art teacher. According to Wang Zhaowen, Wu had an early interest in communism. He was immediately given a cultural position by the Communist government in Chongqing, and in 1950 he began to work as an editor for the Chongqing Municipal Federation of Art and Literary Circles. In 1956 he was transferred to the Chongqing branch of the Chinese Artists Association, where he was affiliated with the print group.^[207]

Most of his published prints date to the period after 1956; in fact, it

Image not available

Figure 93
Xu Kuang, Awaiting the Ferry, 1959,
polychromatic woodblock print,
40.3 cm × 33 cm.

appears that his emergence as a printmaker was the result of the artistic opportunities afforded by his new position. The distinguishing feature of his early prints is their great variety, probably an indication of both personal exploration and political zeal. They proceed from an up-to-date Soviet-style "girl-and-tractor" picture, in which the viewer looks up at the heroine as though from a rabbit's-eye view, to a series of sympathetic studies of young working women, mainly dining hall workers and bus ticket vendors, to sweet images of peasant children at play and work.^[208] His stylistic breakthrough occurred around 1957, a result of the national emphasis on indigenous styles. He began experimenting with Chinese water-based ink and pigments (shuiyin ) rather than with the more commonly used European-style oil-based printing ink. A 1957 effort, Planting Season , depicts peasants planting rice shoots on a green hilltop

Image not available

Figure 94
Wu Fan, Planting Season, 1957, polychromatic
woodblock print, 35.2 cm ×
16 cm, collection of the artist.

(fig. 94). Pale ink gives the impression of a spring drizzle obscuring distant mountains. The work has the flavor of a guohua painting, an effect created, in part, by carefully varying the tones of diluted ink applied to the block. The accidental quality of the technique thus makes each print vary slightly from every other.

Wu Fan's best-known work is Dandelion , executed in 1959 (fig. 95).^[209] A peasant girl, presumably sent by her family or commune to gather grass, has put down her empty basket and hoe to play with a dandelion. The piece won first prize at an exhibition in Leipzig and may be the most frequently reproduced of all Chinese prints. Most of Wu Fan's colleagues, including Li Shaoyan and Li Huanmin, attempted prints in the shuiyin technique in 1958 or 1959, and even Xu Kuang sought shuiyin effects in some editions of his oil print Awaiting the Ferry . Although Wu Fan made several standard socialist works, his lyrical shuiyin prints define his personal style, one in which drama is removed from his subjects and replaced by an introspective calm.

Ellen Laing has observed that the calligraphic lines of the carving and the simple color scheme of Dandelion recall Qing-dynasty books and stationery, as does the shuiyin technique itself.^[210] These characteristics run through Wu Fan's later prints, even those that differ most obviously from traditional compositions and themes. His Small Bus Station of 1964 depicts a pretty young ticket seller from a long-distance bus taking a drink as she waits for passengers

Image not available

Figure 95
Wu Fan, Dandelion, 1959, polychromatic
woodblock print, 54.6 cm × 36.5
cm, collection of the Chinese Artists
Association, Sichuan Branch.

Image not available

Figure 96
Wu Fan, A Small Bus Station, 1964,
polychromatic woodblock print,
34.6 cm × 16.3 cm, collection of the
artist.

to board (fig. 96). As in his earlier prints, black and gray are the predominant tonalities, but this print also includes touches of the bright red that characterizes art of the Cultural Revolution era. The theme is similar to those of Wu's earlier prints—the small pleasures of the laboring life—but he has focused the composition in a more heroic manner by emphasizing the diagonal lines of recession that encircle his figure. By 1964, a more uniform revolutionary style was enforced nationwide, as we will explore further.

Sichuan prints between 1949 and the Cultural Revolution thus run the gamut from the Yan'an-style woodcuts of Li Shaoyan and Niu Wen, to the Soviet-inspired academic propaganda prints of Li Huanmin and Xu Kuang, to the more evocative pictures of the Hangzhou-trained individualist Wu Fan. Although Sichuan prints are stylistically diverse within permitted limits, they do share common themes. Tibetan subjects may be most distinctive, but scenes of everyday life in the region, be they images of mountain agriculture or life on

the River, all touch on local concerns. In 1960, Li Shaoyan and Wu Fan were named to the directorate of the national Chinese Artists Association (appendix 2). The success of the group was based on three factors: the energetic leadership of a well-connected leader, Li Shaoyan; strong provincial support; and a core group of skilled artists. Without the conjunction of these factors it is unlikely that any individual would have emerged to prominence.

The Prints of the Great Northern Wastes

The woodblock print movement of Heilongjiang shares several characteristics with other regional art. Its rise to national fame was made possible by strong support from local authorities, by favorable attention from national arts administrators, and by the political circumstances associated with the Great Leap Forward. The works themselves are filled with local color, both literally and figuratively. What is unique about the Heilongjiang printmakers is their youth and the circumstances of their artistic activity, for they constitute an extreme example of transplanted artists developing a new regional style.

In March 1958, one hundred thousand demobilized soldiers were sent to the virgin forests of China's northeastern border, an area that came to be known as Beidahuang, the Great Northern Wasteland. The primary purposes of this relocation were to solve the soldiers' employment problems and to promote agricultural development.^[211] In keeping with the mandate of the Great Leap Forward, it was claimed in a 1960 slogan that the Great Northern Wasteland had been converted into the Great Northern Granary (Beidahuang, beidacang ) in only three years.^[212] Beyond these economic goals, some settlements were envisioned as contributing to national defense and to social stability.^[213] Increasing tension with the Soviet Union was of course the primary military concern behind moving settlers into the border areas. As for social stability, that reference pertained not only to issues of employment but also to the rightists who were sent to work alongside the soldiers in Beidahuang.^[214]

Organization of the demobilized soldiers lay in the hands of the local agricultural reclamation bureau, which retained many aspects of its military origins. Soon after arriving in Heilongjiang, the regional authorities made inquiries of their superiors at the Agricultural Reclamation Ministry in Beijing about initiation and administration of cultural activities. Permission was granted to organize personnel for the purpose of publicizing the production and construction projects in Beidahuang. By the following year, almost five hundred people had been assigned to various art, drama, film, and cultural work teams, an organizational structure modeled on that of military districts. From the beginning, Beidahuang printmakers received strong support from the highest levels of regional government.^[215]

In late 1958, the leading arts administrator of the region was Zhang

Zuoliang (b. 1927), a Shandong native. Zhang had joined the Eighth Route Army in 1944 and subsequently worked for the military as a propagandist. In 1952 he was appointed an art editor of Beijing's Jiefangjun huabao (Liberation Army Pictorial).^[216] Zhang volunteered to move to the border region in early 1958; immediately upon his arrival in Heilongjiang that March he was assigned to organize publications and propaganda in the area.

The most important artist in the border region was the young printmaker Chao Mei (b. 1931), who had recently been transferred to Heilongjiang from Harbin. Though originally sent to do farm labor, upon Zhang Zuoliang's request in late 1958 Chao was assigned to the newly established Beidahuang Pictorial Publishing House. Chao Mei, also a Shandong native, had grown up in Nanjing. He joined the People's Liberation Army in 1949 and, like Zhang, worked in art propaganda. During the 1950s he was an art cadre at the Harbin Military Engineering Academy.^[217] After their relocation to Heilongjiang the two young men oversaw an active print movement. Indeed, prints by Zhang Zuoliang and Chao Mei came to represent the new territory.^[218]

In September 1958 it was decided to publish two new propaganda periodicals, Beidahuang Literature and Arts (Beidahuang wenyi ) and Beidahuang Pictorial (Beidahuang huabao ), which, moreover, would boast reproductions of original prints on their covers. The earliest such images were collaborative works, most frequently designed by Zhang Zuoliang and executed by Chao Mei.^[219] Their standard format was a dramatic steppe or forest landscape altered in some way by human activity. Beidahuang Literature and Arts first appeared in November 1958,^[220] and Beidahuang Pictorial , a glossy publication modeled on Beijing's China Pictorial and originally intended for national and possibly international distribution,^[221] in July of the following year; both were under Zhang's direction. The latter, however, ceased publication after one issue, probably because of the region's economic difficulties.

Chao Mei's Beidahuang prints were grabbed up for publication in national magazines soon after he began making them. His Sea of Grain , for instance, which depicts wheat fields being harvested by tractor, was reproduced in the April 1959 issue of Banhua (Prints ),^[222] and his Golden Sea was selected for the August issue.^[223]Golden Sea depicts two figures wearing striped knit shirts, the informal uniform of the Chinese navy, standing in front of a vast wheat field. The theme of both works is the agricultural success of the demobilized troops. Golden Sea was reproduced in a 1959 anthology intended to record the best prints of new China's first decade.^[224] Thus the Beidahuang printmakers were deemed historically significant by the national art establishment within the first year of their activity.

In September 1959, the regional authorities decided to devote more financial resources to art for the purpose of mounting an exhibition. Administration of the project was assigned to the Beidahuang Pictorial Publishing House, with

Zhang Zuoliang as director and Chao Mei as vice-director. Zhang Zuoliang began to assemble artists from among the soldiers and other immigrants who had been assigned to work in the fields;^[225] individuals whose talent came to his attention were removed from the agricultural labor force, fed and housed by the local government, and assigned to make art. Even amateur artists, such as the young oil painter Hao Boyi (b. 1938), were given the opportunity to develop their talents as printmakers. Such local bureaucratic support for artists was undoubtedly an important element in the high productivity, high standards, and critical success of the group.

Works by the Heilongjiang printmakers appeared in the northeastern regional exhibition held in Harbin in September 1959. The exhibition was attended by Hua Junwu, chief of the national CAA secretariat, and the Beidahuang artists received favorable critical attention in Meishu .^[226] Hua Junwu came forward as a strong advocate of the group and, in his role as chief of the art and literature section of the People's Daily , was responsible for much of their favorable publicity.^[227] The exhibition opened at the National Art Gallery in Beijing the following April. In October 1959, prints by Zhang Zuoliang, Chao Mei, and their colleague Xu Leng were exhibited at the Fourth National Print Exhibition, the first time Beidahuang art had appeared in a national show. The Second National Military Exhibition of February 1960 and the National Art Exhibition of June 1960 included works by Zhang, Chao, and other Beidahuang printmakers. As evidence of their rising status, Zhang and Chao served as delegates to the Third National People's Congress in July.

Beidahuang suffered great natural calamities that severely diminished harvests in the fall of 1960. Zheng Kangxing, a high-ranking propaganda official at the time, recalled in 1988 that the weather reduced the Great Northern Wasteland to true desolation.^[228] Despite local criticism, however, party authorities continued to provide financial support for artists and other cultural workers throughout the famine and near economic collapse of 1959-1961.^[229]

During the latter part of 1960 and most of 1961, the printmakers were sent to live in Harbin, where they were assigned to decorate the Eastern Mansions, a hotel, with prints. This support presumably gave them adequate nourishment and time to complete works exhibited in the Second Northeastern Provinces Art Exhibition, held in October, and prepare for their greatest national triumph. The exhibition "Artworks from Beidahuang," which opened at the National Art Gallery on November 12, 1960, was cosponsored by the Chinese Artists Association and the local government, the Peony River Reclamation District. A national symposium was held in conjunction with the exhibition.^[230] The next summer a second exhibition under the same sponsorship was held at the National Art Gallery.^[231] An anthology of Beidahuang prints was published in 1962,^[232] and the group remained active and nationally visible until 1966.

Image not available

Figure 97
Chao Mei, Black Soil Steppe, 1960,
polychromatic woodblock print,
36.2 cm × 26.4 cm.

Chao Mei was the group's most influential artist, both because of the national reputation he developed and because many other Heilongjiang artists emulated his style. A typical example of his work is Black Soil Steppe of 1960 (fig. 97). Here the artist adopted a very low viewpoint, as though he were lying on the ground, in order to accentuate the dramatic expanse of earth and sky before him. The thick, tangled grasses and wildflowers in the foreground are juxtaposed against the dark gray earth of the newly tilled soil. Above them has been rendered a deep blue early-morning sky. The visual appeal of the work comes from the vastness and beauty of the natural environment, especially the chromatic and textural contrasts between the purple, white, and deep green steppe grasses and the rich black soil from which they grow. The political message of the image is that human labor, particularly labor aided by mechanization, is praiseworthy: the beauty of the deep black soil would remain invisible if the land had not been tilled; such glorious sights would remain unseen if the land had not been settled.

Image not available

Figure 98
Valentyn Lytvynenko, Ode to Hunting,
linoleum print, 37 cm × 47 cm.

Chao Mei's work of the late 1950s and early 1960s is highly reminiscent of contemporary Soviet art. The similarities between the landscapes of Soviet Asia and northeastern China make such stylistic affinities natural, even in the absence of political factors. Yet in addition, both the USSR and China encouraged or mandated settlement of their border areas by citizens from the nation's heartland.^[233] The Siberian settlers and the Heilongjiang farmers thus embodied many experiential and political parallels that made Soviet art an obvious reference for Beidahuang artists.

One of many possible Russian counterparts to the prints of the Beidahuang artists, and particularly of Chao Mei, was published in a 1959 issue of Banhua .^[234]Ode to Hunting , by a Soviet artist who visited China in late 1958 and early 1959, is a romantic image of small human figures camping in a lonely forest (fig. 98). Against the evening sky appear in silhouette a pair of migrating geese and bare tree branches. The drama of the dusk is accentuated by the reflection of sky and trees in a foreground pond. The work is pervaded by a

lonely calm in the face of the wild winter landscape. Compositions in which the loneliness and beauty of the natural scenery envelop the human figures are fundamental to many Beidahuang prints as well. A second element that Chao Mei shares with Soviet artists is his low point of view. An extreme example of this device may be seen in Zhan Jianjun's Five Heroes of Mount Langya (fig. 73). A 1961 oil by V. N. Basov, Greetings, Earth , depicts a cosmonaut standing in an early spring wheat field.^[235] The viewer, as though lying on the ground, sees a low horizon and a very tall human figure. This perspective device increases the drama of the landscape scene by making foreground elements seem larger and the distant elements farther away.

The Beidahuang prints were funded by authorities who justified their production largely on the basis of their propaganda function. Pointing out the beauties of the new environment and the significance of their work might, it was felt, improve the settlers' morale. Indeed, such propaganda was believed to provide spiritual sustenance for the farmers. A second aspect of Beidahuang propaganda was aimed at a national and even international audience. The purported agricultural successes of the northeastern resettlement attested to the value of the Great Leap Forward, and the romanticized view of farm work conveyed by Chao's beautiful landscapes occasionally lured young people from other parts of China to migrate to Beidahuang.^[236]

In 1962 the Chinese Artists Association sent Chao Mei and several other Beidahuang artists on a sketching trip to Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan). The results of their journey were exhibited in Beijing the next year and were part of a nationwide propaganda campaign to resettle Han Chinese in this predominantly Muslim border area.

One of Chao's best-known prints, Apricot Orchard (fig. 99), was based on his Xinjiang experiences. For this print, in contrast to Black Soil Steppe , he adopted a greatly elevated point of view, so that no horizon line is visible. Instead, the female fruit pickers and their donkeys are completely ringed with heavily laden apricot branches. Colors and textures are simplified for dramatic effect. The yellow soil from which the trees grow is contrasted with the black shadows under them. Densely textured foliage and fruit emerge into the sunlight from the flat shadows. The exoticism of the inhabitants is suggested by their long veils, but the small scale of the figures prevents them from appearing threateningly foreign. While the subject of the picture is not only agricultural abundance but also backbreaking labor, the visual beauty of the picture negates all hardship. Here, Chao Mei's work would seem to combine revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism in yet another way.

The factors that lay behind the rise to national prominence of the Beidahuang printmakers range from international politics to personal ambition. Settlement of Heilongjiang occurred in the context of deteriorating Sino-Soviet

Image not available

Figure 99
Chao Mei, Apricot Orchard, 1962,
polychromatic woodblock print,
58.5 cm × 43 cm.

relations, including border disagreements, the grandiose economic schemes of the Great Leap Forward, and the exile of intellectuals marked as "rightists" in the ideological campaigns of 1957 and 1958. The strong tradition of cultural activity as a part of military propaganda within the People's Liberation Army opened the door to developing woodblock print artists. As in other provinces and locales, emphasis on regional artistic expression led to support of the artists by local authorities and recognition by national arts leaders.

Prints of the Beidahuang artists appeared on the national stage primarily because local and national leaders encouraged the production of propaganda. Their ideological approach was fitting to the Great Leap era, when their movement first emerged on the national scene. The romantic appeal of Chao Mei's landscapes, however, was suitable to a less ideological era as well; this stylistic trait permitted his work to maintain some measure of popularity, even when its political value had receded.

The Xi'an School of Guohua Painting

A second major regional school of guohua to appear during the early 1960s was centered in Xi'an and was often referred to by Chinese critics as the Chang'an group, from the Tang-dynasty appellation for the city. The Xi'an school ultimately transcended the regionalism of the Nanjing painters to produce at least one remarkable individualist, Shi Lu. Unlike the Nanjing school, which emerged against a background of high-level patronage of known talent, this group of painters seems to have come to national attention primarily through the intensive efforts of Shi Lu, the new chairman of the local branch of the Chinese Artists Association. Whereas Fu Baoshi's reproduction albums bear prefaces by Guo Moruo, Shi Lu's are introduced by a much less influential figure, the critic and CAA official Wang Zhaowen, who in 1983 admitted that his contacts with the artist had been professional, sporadic, and relatively recent.^[237] Shi Lu's emergence in the late 1950s, then, seems to have occurred without the benefit of influential pre-1949 political or social contacts. It seems, in short, to have been the emphasis on professionalism and quality mandated by the 1961 reevaluation of cultural policies that gave the Xi'an artists their opportunity.

In Nanjing, the primary art administrators were the older, well-established guohua artist Fu Baoshi and the young, ambitious military man Ya Ming. This pairing of experience and revolutionary fervor was important in Xi'an as well, but there it was differently constituted. The senior artist in Xi'an, who, like Fu Baoshi, played the role of artistic mentor and model to younger artists, was Zhao Wangyun. Like Fu, he was an early practitioner of the new guohua , depicting contemporary society by means of his sketches from life. A marked difference between the situations in Nanjing and Xi'an was that Zhao Wangyun was purged in the anti-rightist campaign, leaving the younger Shi Lu as the dominant administrator on the local art scene.

Zhao Wangyun was, between 1954 and 1957, chairman of the Xi'an Branch of the Chinese Artists Association^[238] and a director of the national CAA. Many Xi'an artists, including Fang Jizhong and Huang Zhou, had studied with him, were recruited by him, or had worked alongside him in the Chinese Painting Research Society. In spite of his post-1957 invisibility, his stylistic influence remained strong among the other artists in Xi'an.

Zhao, the largely self-taught son of a poor family, had become famous in the 1930s for his guohua sketches of rural life.^[239] After his work had been serialized in Beijing's major newspaper, Dagongbao , he was approached by the warlord Feng Yuxiang, who proposed a collaboration in which Feng would provide poems to accompany Zhao's guohua sketches. The results appeared in 1934 in a book entitled Zhao Wangyun saishang xiesheng ji (Zhao Wangyun:

Sketches from the Border).^[240] The two men collaborated on similar projects until about 1940, when the journal they published, Resistance Pictorial (Kangzhan huakan ), was shut down by the Nationalist government. Zhao's work appeared in the 1937 national art exhibition.

In 1943 an exhibition of sketches Zhao had made in travels around northwestern China was held in Chengdu. Zhou Enlai purchased one piece, and Zhao presented him with a second as a gift. Guo Moruo wrote a poem in praise of Zhao's innovative style, which he termed "neither Chinese nor Western, but created by the heart."^[241] Six years later Zhao was arrested by Nationalist authorities in Xi'an because the painting he gave Zhou Enlai had been seized during a raid on a Communist office.

Zhao remained incarcerated for over two months, until the Communists took Xi'an in May 1949. Upon his release from jail he reportedly urged his painting students to join the Communist army. Zhao was sent by the regional military government as a delegate to the 1949 Congress of Literary and Arts Workers in Beijing. When the Northwest Art Workers Association was founded in 1950, he was chosen vice-director; his job assignment was to direct the regional Cultural Relics Office.^[242] For the next several years he devoted himself to museum administration and archeological work. Between 1950 and 1953 he was responsible for establishing the new Chinese government's control over the ancient Buddhist cave temples near Dunhuang, Gansu; for organizing the Northwest Historical Museum, forerunner of the current Shaanxi Provincial Museum in Xi'an; and for organizing the excavation and display of artifacts from the neolithic village at Banpo, near Xi'an.

Zhao's applications to join the Communist party were not accepted, but on party instructions he engaged in United Front activities, joining the Democratic Alliance in 1952. With the greater formalization of artistic activity following the Second Congress of Literary and Arts Workers of 1953, Zhao resumed painting and organized a Chinese painting research society. He was elevated to the position of chairman of the Xi'an branch of the CAA and became a standing director of the national CAA. He was selected as vice-chief of the provincial Cultural Bureau in 1955.^[243] His work was exhibited in the national guohua exhibitions of 1953 and 1956. He and Shi Lu were honored by a government-funded trip to Egypt in 1956, which resulted in the exhibition and publication of the two artists' travel sketches.^[224]

The following year, Zhao was ousted from his positions for extreme right-ism; according to a former colleague, he was classed only as an "internal rightist," which presumably protected him from some of the public humiliation suffered by Jiang Feng and others. Although he continued to participate in some artistic activities, he had no administrative influence and remained under a political cloud until shortly before his death. Shi Lu, chief of the Northwest

Pictorial magazine and a fellow vice-chairman of the Xi'an branch of the Chinese Artists Association, assumed Zhao's titles and by the conclusion of the Anti-Rightist campaign had emerged as the spokesman for Xi'an artists.

Shi Lu was the runaway son of a wealthy landowning family in Sichuan. He had received an excellent traditional education, including training in Chinese painting at an academy run by his elder brother. His youthful inclination to participate in the anti-Japanese resistance coincided with an unwelcome arrangement of marriage by his family. He consequently left home, assumed the name by which he is now known, and became involved in Communist propaganda activities in various parts of China's north and northwest, especially Shaanxi. He began making woodcuts in the mid-1940s.^[245] His acquaintance with the critic Wang Zhaowen, who subsequently became, in effect, his sponsor, writing various articles explaining or praising his work, dates to a series of lectures Wang delivered in the early 1940s to the art group of the Northwest Cultural Work Team, which Shi Lu headed.

After the liberation of Xi'an, Shi Lu, like Zhao Wangyun, was sent as a delegate to the First Congress of Literary and Art Workers. He exhibited several prints in the First National Art Exhibition, which had been prepared to coincide with the congress. Over the next several years he made trips to China's northwestern border regions, during which he took the opportunity to sketch. He also wrote poetry and screenplays. With the growing emphasis on specialization by 1953, Shi Lu gave up printmaking and returned to the traditional Chinese media. His efforts to develop a new and politically useful form of guohua were rewarded by national recognition for his Beyond the Great Wall , completed in 1954 (fig. 53).

Shi Lu's rendering of the human figure, which we first saw in figure 43, remained awkward, hackneyed, or even bizarre throughout most of his career. This weakness mars Beyond the Great Wall , in which the figures gesture emphatically and somewhat indecorously, as they might in a Flemish painting.^[246] Nevertheless, the concepts behind it were extremely important to the Chinese art world. The critical recognition the painting received was probably based more on the artist's goals than on his success in attaining them. As might be expected, the subject matter of Beyond the Great Wall is politically appropriate. Minority tribesmen react with joy at the sound of a train roaring toward them on tracks cut through the crumbling Great Wall. The picture thus propagandizes for success in bridging the physical and psychological boundaries dividing the Han people from the national minorities.

In style and format the work attempts a new form of internationalism. It is a landscape painting executed on Chinese paper, with Chinese pigments, but it is large and horizontal, meant to be displayed like a Western easel painting. Even the most traditional elements of the painting, the mountains, are not ex-

ecuted in traditional Chinese style. Shi Lu did not rely on conceptualized, conventionalized cun , or ink texture strokes, for modeling the physical relief, but used ink in a very empirical way. In the mid-1950s, Shi Lu clearly sought a new, more realistic way of painting.

Zhao Wangyun and Shi Lu's colleague He Haixia views the Egyptian trip of 1956 as a turning point for both artists. The two spent an extended period of time sketching together, an experience that produced profound mutual artistic influences. Their travel sketches were exhibited in Beijing in the same year. Some of Shi Lu's sketches are lyrical landscapes that may foreshadow his later success in that genre. Though executed in the traditional media of ink and color on Chinese paper, other sketches resemble Western watercolors more than traditional Chinese paintings,^[247] a trait they share with the works of Li Keran and Zhang Ding during this period.

After Shi Lu succeeded to the chairmanship of the local CAA branch in 1958,^[248] he came to national prominence as an administrator, a theorist, and a painter. Among Shaanxi artists, he served as spokesman for the Great Leap Forward; on the national scene, he was quoted as an art authority. A symposium held in the fall of 1959, in tune with Zhou Enlai's May 3 speech, investigated ways to raise cultural standards among artists. The group, which included Wang Zhaowen, Fu Baoshi, Ye Qianyu, Hua Junwu, Wu Zuoren, and Shi Lu, exhorted the young to develop their cultural level by reading more books and learning to carve seals, write calligraphy, and compose poetry.^[249]

Shi Lu's report on the achievements of Shaanxi artists during the Great Leap Forward exemplifies the artistic line of the period yet foreshadows his later independence.^[250] First, he reiterates such standard cultural doctrines as praise for the thought of Chairman Mao, emphasis on the primacy of politics in art, rejection of truth as the highest standard of art,^[251] and repudiation of forms of realism associated with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European capitalism. Shi Lu's conclusion is that such erroneous forms should be replaced by Mao's combination of revolutionary romanticism and revolutionary realism. Much of this dogma may of course be found in literary theory of the post-1957 period and, as D. W. Fokkema has shown, is an implicit rejection of Soviet literary doctrines.^[252]

Having thoroughly digested contemporary cultural theories, Shi Lu applied them to art. He praised new trends in art during the Great Leap Forward, including an emphasis on the contemporaneity (shidaixing ) of painting's subject matter. According to Shi Lu, depictions of actual life during the Great Leap Forward and revolutionary history paintings exemplified new trends. Classical art forms were to be continued and reformed. Four particularly important facets of art during the period were, in his view, the steadily rising standards of political thought, the nationalization of art forms, the popularization of art,

and the strengthening of local color in art. In keeping with the high-level retreats from Soviet influence, Shi Lu saw these traits as evidence of the independence and maturity of China's socialist art.

National forms and local color are particularly important developmentally both to Shi Lu's own painting and to the work of artists under his direction in Xi'an. Another issue that he addresses is the distinction between genre or style (huazhong or yangshi ) and subject matter (ticai ). Within the genres of figure painting, landscape painting, and bird-and-flower painting, Shi Lu said, the artist may depict various different kinds of subjects—thus implying that none of the traditional genres is intrinsically superior to others for modern purposes. In so stating, he makes his opposition to the emphasis on figure painting so prominent in critical literature of the early 1950s fairly clear.

Shi Lu's best-known works of the Great Leap period are his Fighting in Northern Shaanxi (plate 3) and Watering Horses at the Yan River ,^[253] both painted in 1959. The former, as we have seen, was painted for the new Museum of Revolutionary History, while the latter was commissioned for the Shaanxi hall of the new Great Hall of the People. Although these two paintings made Shi Lu a star, it was not until the cultural atmosphere eased in mid-1961 that the contributions of the Xi'an artists were acknowledged as forming a uniquely creative regional school. Furthermore, as Shi Lu's own paintings became more individualistic, his theoretical defense of his art became less compromising. While he remained central to the regional school, he ultimately developed a distinctive individual approach to art.

The Chinese painting research studio of the Xi'an branch of the CAA flourished during the Great Leap Forward. Its library and facilities were the envy of Beijing artists, an indication that it enjoyed substantial financial support from local authorities. In 1961, the group held an exhibition of their "studies" (xizuo ) in Beijing. Many of the pictures were completed works of art, but attention was brought to their experimental character by the group's disinclination to call them "paintings" or "creations." This exhibition was a turning point, for it marked official recognition that a regional guohua school existed in Xi'an.

A symposium chaired by Wang Zhaowen, and attended by Xi'an artists Shi Lu, Fang Jizhong, Li Zisheng, He Haixia, and Kang Shiyao, brought further attention to the group.^[254] (Although paintings by the rightist Zhao Wangyun were displayed, he did not attend the conference.) Wang Zhaowen praised the group for its regional characteristics. Other CAA officials and Beijing painters mentioned their attention to the national tradition, their lively intellectual atmosphere, their study of poetry and other arts, and their close involvement with rural life.

What other artists found most noteworthy, however, were the strange new techniques the artists were using. Color was applied sparsely, yet it appeared

rich. More important, pigment was used to texture the landscape or describe waves in water, thus breaking a taboo in traditional landscape painting. In older painting, the foundation strokes used to frame the landscape and to model the mountains, as well as the traditional texture strokes, cun , which gave form and volume to the mountains, were usually executed in ink. As a 1959 painting by the Shanghai artist Wu Hufan (plate 9) demonstrates, color might be added to a landscape only when it was almost complete. Ye Qianyu compared Shi Lu's innovative use of earth-toned pigments to the work of the Nanjing painter Song Wenzhi, who applied green pigment instead of ink textures to his Sichuan landscapes. Several Shi Lu paintings of 1960 and 1961 exemplify this technical innovation, including On the Road to Nanniwan (fig. 100), Going Upstream at Yumen (fig. 103), and Autumn Harvest .^[255] In all, strokes of an earthy red-brown pigment have been substituted for some of the ink strokes that would normally outline and model the forms.

Critics of the exhibition were generally approving, though the unanimity they expressed in response to the Nanjing exhibition of 1961 was lacking. Some painters, such as Ye Qianyu, praised the boldness of the Xi'an painters but continued to criticize their wildness, disorder, and shallow technical foundation. Furthermore, several artists believed that although a regional style was evident, the artists did not present sufficiently varied individual styles. Indeed, mutual influence was so strong during this period that motifs such as tangled branches, techniques such as colored cun, and general compositional types are difficult to attribute to a single artist.

The Xi'an painters included artists of varied backgrounds. He Haixia, who displayed an extremely conservative landscape in the 1937 National Exhibition,^[256] was a pupil of the brilliant painter and forger Zhang Daqian, who fled China after liberation. He Haixia, in fact, freely admits to having worked as a forger himself,^[257] a claim that only reaffirms the strength of his traditional training. Zhao Wangyun's early work, in contrast, concentrated on figure painting in a sketchy and abbreviated style. Shi Lu, as we have seen, attempted to make socialist realist pictures using the traditional media. He was the ranking party bureaucrat in the group and, by virtue of his administrative function, might seem to have brought the least to their artistic goals. He Haixia recalls, on the contrary, that Shi Lu contributed a great deal, supervising their work closely and even supplying his own compositions to artists who found themselves unable to fulfill official thematic requirements. In interviews, however, some younger Xi'an artists present a different view, suggesting that Shi Lu plagiarized the compositions of his colleagues. Whatever the truth of the matter, Shi Lu's surviving work supports the view that he was an important participant in the Xi'an stylistic breakthrough; and although commonalities of style among artists in the group make clear that the collaborative development of the new style was a complex process, it appears that Shi Lu, in

Image not available

Figure 100
Shi Lu, On the Road to Nanniwan,
ca. 1960, ink and color on paper, 67 cm ×
67 cm, Chinese National Art Gallery.

equal parts artist and bureaucrat, was the driving force behind the new Xi'an painting.

Two striking compositional types emerged in the work of Xi'an painters during this period. In one, exemplified by Shi Lu's On the Road to Nanniwan (fig. 100), mountains covered with autumnal trees fill the surface of the picture. The trees have a ragged, unkempt, natural appearance. Shi Lu's potentially rather bleak image is enlivened by the red pigment used to describe cliffs and foliage and by the purposeful file of soldiers making their way through the

Image not available

Figure 101
Zhao Wangyun, Returning Herder in an
Autumnal Forest, 1961, ink and color
on paper, 46.8 cm × 69 cm, Chinese
National Art Gallery.

landscape. This landscape style is indeed wild and disordered, as Ye Qianyu suggested, but such qualities should be considered virtues rather than flaws, for they give a sense that the forces of nature permeate the living landscape. A similar feeling is conveyed by the best ancient paintings from the same region of China. In Shi Lu's painting one detects, further, the psychological presence of the artist. His originality of vision renders technical questions secondary.

While Shi Lu's version of this style and compositional type, first published in 1961, is particularly successful, it is possible that he did not invent it, since it also appears in the work of Zhao Wangyun and Fang Jizhong. Zhao Wangyun's similarly composed landscape, Returning Herder in an Autumnal Forest (fig. 101), however, completely lacks the determined optimism of Shi Lu's painting; in fact, it would be fair to say that it lacks the officially praised virtue of revolutionary romanticism. The picture, even more wild and chaotic than

Image not available

Figure 102
He Haixia, Yumen Gorge on the Yellow
River, 1959, guohua, ink and color on
paper.

Image not available

Figure 103
Shi Lu, Going Upstream at Yumen,
1961, ink and color on paper.

On the Road to Nanniwan , is quite desolate. A single human figure walks across a clearing toward broken, leafless trees. Shi Lu and Zhao Wangyun share a somewhat unsystematic, individualistic use of the brush. Indeed, the tangled tree branches seen in Zhao's work became a characteristic feature of much Xi'an work. Only He Haixia completely eschewed this textural chaos.

A second compositional type characteristic of the Xi'an artists was one developed to describe the cliffs of the Yellow River gorges. He Haixia, who

worked in the Municipal Sanitation Bureau from 1951 to 1956, was hired by the Xi'an branch of the CAA in 1956.^[258] Three years later, in 1959, he painted an image of the Yumen Gorge in which rowboats struggle against the river's mighty current (fig. 102). The artist looks down on his scene from high above, emphasizing the drama of the human confrontation with nature. His composition is very tidily rendered, with all the trees, rocks, and texture strokes bounded by the contours of the cliffs. Although he tries to minimize his references to old painting, he instinctively adopts foliage forms associated with the seventeenth-century master Shitao. This work, typical of He Haixia's painting of the period, displays greater technical discipline than that of Shi Lu or Zhao Wangyun.

Shi Lu himself tried the same composition two years later (fig. 103). His work is more dramatic than He Haixia's precisely because of his tenuous technical control. The edges of his forms—the boat, the cliff, and the stone path on which the boat pullers trudge—all bleed insubstantially into the paper, much as the river itself appears to do. The artist's precarious technique lends a measure of drama to the scene by equating human constructions and solid landscape forms with the wild water. He adopts a lower viewpoint than did He Haixia, so that the viewer, closer to the struggle, feels greater empathy with the struggling boatmen. He Haixia believes that Shi Lu had the most acute sense of observation of all the Xi'an artists, a theory that this work would support.

Despite occasional subtle differences of hand, the early innovations in Xi'an painting appear to have been communal rather than individual in origin. The group's works went on tour in 1962, which gave Shi Lu, Zhao Wangyun, Li Zisheng, Fang Jizhong, and the Beijing painter Li Qi an opportunity to travel to Nanjing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. They viewed paintings at the Shanghai Museum, an event that He Haixia considers the second turning point in Shi Lu's painting. An album by the late-Qing bird-and-flower painter Xugu was on display, and Shi Lu immediately recognized an affinity between the earlier master's technique and his own aesthetic explorations (figs. 104 and 105). Xugu's work, which typically depicts fish, small animals, vegetables, trees, and flowers, is constructed of dry, sharp outlines and rich washes of color. His angled brush stops and starts many times in one stroke, energizing his line and his pictorial surface. There is in his work a sense of barely controlled linear chaos. Colors are mixed in unusual ways, with green and tan washes bleeding together, or ink and rusty red pigment overlapping to compose a form. Shi Lu absorbed this style and during the next two decades made it his own.

During a long illness in 1963, Shi Lu composed an illustrated treatise on painting, most of which was destroyed when the Red Guard raided his home in 1966 and 1967. Three chapters of the unpublished manuscript, however, were hidden by a young art student, Ling Hubiao, who later collaborated with

Image not available

Figure 104
Xugu, Squirrel, 1895, album leaf, ink
and color on paper, Shanghai Museum
of Art.

Shi Lu to publish them. In the chapter on brush and ink, Shi Lu writes o Xugu's painting:

I look at a Xugu painting of a plum [tree], and its angles are all squared off. Why? He took their uprightness, constancy, and righteousness as his brush intention, absorbed their snow-weighted and ice-sealed manner as his brush principle, borrowed the patterns of their crossing fissures and grids as his brush method, and attained the beauty of their spirit consonance and life motion as his brush flavor. Thus we recognize that brush and ink are the host and guest, weaving a painting's threads of life.
If a painting has brush and ink, its ideas are alive; without brush and ink, its thoughts are dead. If a painting possesses my thought, it has my brush and ink, if it lacks my thought, it will be a slave of ancient men's

Image not available

Figure 105
Shi Lu, Spring Shoots, 1973, album leaf, ink
and color on paper, 35-3 cm × 45.8 cm.

and nature's brushwork.... Thought is the inspiration for brush and ink. If you rely on living ideas to do it, one [method] will produce ten thousand variations. If you rely on dead [methods] to do it, ten thousand will be the same.^[259]

Shi Lu's manuscript makes clear that his revolution in art had departed the realm of gentle regionalism and now demanded an imaginative individualism. Distortion or abstraction of form was justifiable for expressive purposes. His call for self-expression evokes not Mao or Stalin, but the two iconoclasts who

lie behind his pseudonym: the seventeenth-century painter Shitao and the early-twentieth-century writer Lu Xun.

As it later became clear, lack of individualism was not a problem from which Shi Lu suffered. Even at the 1961 conference, ostensibly called to seek suggestions for the improvement of Shaanxi painting, he felt obliged to defend stylistic characteristics that others believed to be faults. Wildness, in his view, was the antithesis of scholarly elegance, and was preferable.^[260]

This view was not universally appreciated, and by 1963 Shi Lu's work was mocked by some critics as "wild, weird, chaotic, and black."^[261] Shi Lu responded to this apparent insult sarcastically, making "wild, weird, chaotic, and black" a kind of personal motto. He wrote in a 1963 poem:

People may scold my wildness, but I'm even wilder.
Collecting the ordinary, I make marvelous pictures.
People rebuke my weirdness, how weird am I!
Disdaining to be a slave, I think for myself.
People say I'm chaotic, but I'm not chaotic—
The method that has no method is the strictest method.
People mock my blackness, but I'm not too black.
If black will startle the mind, I can move the soul.
"Wild, weird, chaotic, black"—not worth discussion.
You have a tongue, I have a heart and mind.
Life gives me new ideas, and I paint its spirit.^[262]

With his 1963 illness Shi Lu entered a period of personal and artistic development that was crucial to his painting but filled with psychological suffering. A scandal about a love affair made him a target of the leftist political campaigns launched in 1963. Beyond the personal turmoil it may have caused, this weakness threatened his leadership position in both the party and the art community. He sought to make an artistic comeback in 1964 with his monumental Ferry to the East , prepared for the National Military Exhibition. In this work Shi Lu sought to demonstrate his newly invented brush techniques, which involved building human forms from angular strokes of black or pink-orange paint.^[263] When the painting was reviewed by CAA leaders Hua Junwu and Cai Ruohong, however, they failed to appreciate his abstraction of the figure. Cai Ruohong reportedly made the tactless, if aesthetically justifiable, comment that Shi Lu had skinned all the people he painted. The disappointment of his failure to satisfy the official critics, combined with personal and physical problems, is believed by one colleague to have been the first step on a difficult psychological journey. On the way, Shi Lu produced his most original paintings; but by its end, he was freed from the constraints of party policy by madness.^[264]

The Artist as Individual, 1961-1962

Previous sections have described one of the most important phenomena of the period 1958-1964, the development of regional schools of art under CAA sponsorship. Equally interesting, especially from a qualitative standpoint, was the brief burgeoning of individualism and pluralism in the early 1960s. In this section we will turn briefly to the careers of three guohua painters, Li Keran, Lu Yanshao, and Wu Hufan, and to short-lived official efforts to encourage individual styles in the native media. This activity peaked in about 1962; we will conclude by describing its suppression in the middle of the decade.

The new trends in artistic practice emerged in a comparatively liberal political and bureaucratic atmosphere. The Eight Articles on Literature and Art, released in 1962, confirmed the cultural policies of 1961 and 1962. In March, Foreign Minister Chen Yi officially "uncapped" the intellectuals who wore "capitalist class hats." Although young rightists such as Yuan Yunsheng and Zhu Naizheng remained in Jilin, Qinghai, and other distant places, they were no longer considered criminals. (However, when one CAFA party member allowed to return to Beijing attempted to overturn his case, he soon found himself sent back to Heilongjiang.)^[265]

In May 1962, the CAA and Ministry of Culture held an exhibition in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of Mao's Yan'an Talks. It took the form of a retrospective of Chinese art produced between 1942 and 1962, and even included some non-Communist works from the 1940s. While focusing primarily on art in Communist-controlled areas, the 1,133 works presented an unusually objective survey of every artistic movement of the period.^[266] Among works in the national exhibition were Wang Shikuo's drawing Bloody Clothes (fig. 74), Yan Wenliang's Turner-like Evening Traffic on the Huangpu River , a Wu Hufan Bamboo , and Liu Haisu's Green Jade Gorge , in the style of Shitao. The painting that may best exemplify the feeling of the time was a Fauvist landscape, Strange Boulders by Hu Yichuan, a Communist printmaker who had returned to an oil painting style practiced in the Hangzhou and Shanghai of his youth.^[267] In April 1963, a retrospective of the painting of Lin Fengmian was held, an event politically justifiable only on the grounds of Lin's gently nationalistic aims in art.^[268]

The editorial policy of the CAA journal Meishu reflected the liberalization of 1962. As early as January, the magazine devoted a large number of color plates to reproducing contemporary still lifes and landscape paintings in Western media. The February issue reproduced still lifes, flower paintings, and landscape paintings in oil from the preliberation period. These included Wei Tianlin's White Peonies of 1938, Lü Sibai's Fish on a Blue Plate of 1943, Li Ruinian's 1944 landscape Sha'ping , Chang Shuhong's 1945 still life Thunder , Dong Xiwen's Kazak Herdswoman of 1948 (fig. 34), and Ai Zhongxin's Melt-

ing Snow, Forbidden City of 1947 (fig. 59). Dong Xiwen published an article on color in which he discussed the contributions of Monet to a scientific use of color. He commented favorably on the individual styles of various European artists, including Van Gogh. Other themes he discussed were color and class feeling, color and the spirit of the age, color and regional characteristics, and color and national customs. These, then, were the themes that might justify an expansion of artistic activity.^[269] In another essay, Wu Guanzhong, then a professor at the Beijing Arts College, discussed his rather modern landscape oil paintings.^[270] The March issue presented landscapes by Lin Fengmian, He Tianjian, Shi Lu, and Qin Zhongwen. In April, Li Shusheng published a short history of oil painters of the May Fourth era.^[271] The editorial effort seems to have aimed at raising standards and promoting variety by publicizing the best of twentieth-century Chinese art, regardless of the artists' political circumstances.

The combination of nationalistic support for guohua , which we discussed in preceding sections, and the new liberalization permitted Chinese landscape painters to develop and flourish between 1958 and 1965. It was in this exciting atmosphere that a range of artistic personalities, including the innovator Li Keran, the traditionalists Wu Hufan and Lu Yanshao, and the notorious individualist Shi Lu, emerged. In our preceding section we saw how Shi Lu pushed the boundaries of Communist art theory. Let us look briefly at less extreme developments in guohua .

Li Keran

The painting and career of CAFA guohua professor Li Keran underwent particularly noteworthy development during the period between the Anti-Rightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution. In chapter 3 we looked at Li Keran's 1954 initiation of the practice of sketching guohua landscapes from life. He spent eight months in 1956 on similar sketching journeys.^[272] The year 1957 was particularly significant for him. He was fifty years old, he traveled abroad for the first time, his teacher Qi Baishi died, and the Anti-Rightist campaign seriously damaged the institution at which he taught. As we have seen, Li's testimony was used to condemn Jiang Feng. The confrontational public stance that Li assumed in the 1957 campaign differed from his usual approach to collegial relations, in which he generally minded his own business and made few enemies. Although his bitter condemnations of Jiang Feng, who had supported Li's artistic experiments, may have been forced, the artistic approach he described does not seem insincere. Li Keran rarely engaged in such high-visibility politics in subsequent years, devoting as much effort as the Communist party would allow to his quest for a new way to paint the Chinese landscape.

The CAA held a one-man exhibition of Li's landscape sketches in Beijing during the PRC's tenth anniversary celebrations in 1959. The event may have

been conceived as a response to Zhou Enlai's April and May talks, which expressed support for landscape painting and announced postponement of the national exhibition. Li's paintings subsequently traveled to seven other cities; the exhibition and a book of reproductions published the following year made Li Keran nationally famous. His theoretical writings were also published in People's Daily ,^[273] and a film was made about his painting.

Despite his growing fame, the work he exhibited in 1959 was uneven in quality, merely foreshadowing but not attaining his mature style.^[274] Some of the sketches are descriptive and linear, rather like the work Zhang Ding had exhibited five years before.^[275] Other more personal works, however, reveal his increasing interest in the effects of light. His compositions go beyond what the eye can see, deemphasizing accurate spatial relationships and landscape details in pursuit of new compositional principles. In such works, light is rendered by contrasting blank, white paper with heavy washes of dark ink. Li experiments with various new ways of texturing mountains, but in the most successful efforts his texture strokes are all but obscured by black washes. An innovative composition that appeared in this period was a panoramic, almost maplike rendering of a misty river town, Morning Mist in a River City (fig. 106).^[276] A curved white stripe of road is flanked by simplified black-and-white dwellings. Beyond them recedes a gray wash of mist. The intense tonal contrasts give life to his study of optical effects.

Beginning in 1961, Li was privileged to spend part of each winter at Conghua in the southern province of Guangdong and part of his summer at the Beidaihe mountain resort near Beijing. He painted prolifically, and his personal style grew more pronounced. Rich washes of gray and black ink came to dominate his mountain textures, the intense contrasts of black ink against small pale areas of paper forming the basis of his compositional structure. Many of his paintings from this period are flatter than his earlier work, but they are pervaded with light and consistently well organized.

Li's student Du Zhesen divides Li Keran's mature work into two groups. The first is typified by his pale, panoramic view of Guilin, painted in 1962 (fig. 107).^[277] Li Keran experimented tirelessly with this composition, in which a strip of white river flanked by two rows of simplified rural dwellings divides a misty landscape. This composition is related to his earlier and more naturalistic Morning Mist in a River City (fig. 106), but in an increasingly abstract and imaginative way owing to his constant reworking of it over the years. The second landscape type is exemplified by his 1963 Ten Thousand Crimson Hills , a mountainscape constructed of dark washes (plate 7). As in a Song-dynasty painting, a massive peak serves as a looming screenlike backdrop to a tumbling, white waterfall. A mountain village of whitewashed houses, however, has a new luminosity. What is unique about Li's new style is that his landscape is constructed less of the overlapping outlined forms of old paintings, than of subtle axes of illumination that emerge from insubstantial washes.

Image not available

Figure 106
Li Keran, Morning Mist in a River City,
1959, guohua.

Image not available

Figure 107
Li Keran, Rain on the Li River, 1962, guohua.

Li was an exceptional figure in the Chinese art world of his time. He maneuvered his way through Communist theories of art and largely succeeded in bringing forth a new, modern, yet individualistic form of painting. The erratic political and cultural policies of Maoist China threatened the personal and artistic integrity of every Chinese citizen. Li Keran's painting is evidence that, without challenging the Communist party, he managed for the most part to preserve his artistic integrity. With the exception of his nianhua of the early fifties, Li Keran pursued his artistic goals consistently, evolving from his descriptive ink sketches of the fifties to his increasingly abstract and self-expressive paintings of the 1960s. For Li Keran, as for Shi Lu, the decision to pursue national forms of art led, in an inevitable way, to a retreat from realism. In the dreamlike quality of his later works, he expresses native concepts in new forms.

Traditional Artists: Lu Yanshao and Wu Hufan

The thriving state of guohua may also be observed in the institutes of Chinese painting. Lu Yanshao, whom we mentioned earlier as a newly retrained lianhuanhua artist, was given a position at the Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting when it was organized in 1956. Because he bargained for a higher living stipend than he was originally offered, he was declared a rightist in 1957 and demoted to a menial library job.^[278] In 1962, after rightists were "uncapped," he painted a hundred-leaf landscape album inspired by the poems of Du Fu (plate 8). It was seized by the Red Guard in 1966 or 1967, and about half the album was never recovered. Each carefully composed leaf in the surviving group has a slightly different composition, though all are clearly influenced by Shitao. In the leaf reproduced here, Lu made tidy innovations in the forms of his texture strokes, his tree arrangements, and his compositions. This enormous effort may indicate the artist's exhilaration at being freed from the social stigma of rightism and released from the demands of socialist realist figure painting by the new cultural policies. Although Lu's early works remain rare, this album is far superior in quality to known works of the 1940s and may offer evidence of his subsequent artistic development.

Wu Hufan was a rather different artist. Born of a wealthy, cultured, and high-ranking family in Suzhou, he was famous before liberation as a collector, connoisseur, and painter.^[279] He was close to Ye Gongzhuo and Huang Yanpei,^[280] two prominent cultural figures with Communist sympathies, and on their assurances decided to remain in Shanghai after liberation. The first few years, during which he kicked an opium habit, divested himself of much of his wealth, and underwent thought reform, were difficult. Largely unemployed, he lived by selling off his art collection. Mao Zedong and other government lead-

ers knew of his painting activity, though Mao's opinions of it may never be known. A friend presented one of Wu's fan paintings to Mao in the early fifties, to which Mao responded by sending Wu a coat and five hundred yuan cash. Mao received a set of Wu's published poetry in 1953, through the intervention of Ye Gongzhuo, and sent Wu a set of his poems in return. Such exchanges might be cited as evidence of Mao's appreciation for his work. It is equally probable, however, that they bespoke a party policy, later relaxed, that prohibited party officials from accepting gifts or bribes.

Although ignored by critics, Wu's works were exhibited in the national exhibitions of the 1950s. During the Hundred Flowers liberalization of 1956, one painting was reproduced in Meishu (fig. 63).^[281] As has been mentioned, the State Council approved the creation of an Institute of Chinese Painting in 1956. Originally intended to include artists from six provinces and Shanghai, the institute was under the organizational supervision of the Shanghai propaganda chief Lai Shaoqi. Ye Gongzhuo suggested that Wu be named director, but rivals lobbied against him on the grounds that he was from a landholding, bureaucratic family. He eventually became an ordinary institute painter. During the Anti-Rightist campaign his background made him an easy target; the fact that he had accepted Chairman Mao's payment for the fan painting, moreover, was considered a serious ideological problem. Nevertheless, for reasons that remain unclear, his name was removed from the list of rightists by high-ranking organizers of the campaign, even though his close friend Ye Gongzhuo, his son, and many of his students were condemned.

The situation had improved by 1959, when Wu painted his Twin Pines and Layered Green (plate 9). A traditional ink landscape was made more appealing to modern viewers by the addition of green and blue washes and red dots of foliage. Wu's delicate brush techniques are the result of a lifetime of studying ancient masters, particularly the "Four Wangs" of the early Qing period. His landscape is subtle, delicate, tightly structured, and entirely imaginary. Wu Hufan's work remained largely untouched by Communist aesthetic theories during the first fifteen years of the PRC.

Institute painters had to produce paintings from time to time, and Wu Hufan's Celebrate the Success of Our Atomic Bomb Explosion of 1965 (fig. 108) probably fulfilled such an obligation. This second painting, which, like Twin Pines , remains in the institute collection today, makes quite clear the thematic shift required of artists in the mid-1960s. The composition is based on magazine photos of the detonation, which was considered a great technical triumph in 1965, its negative implications subsumed by nationalistic fervor. As incongruous as it seems, this painting of the mushroom cloud is one of the most beautiful demonstrations of brushwork to be found during the period. Executed with casual, lively strokes and subtly varied ink tones, the ominous

Image not available

Figure 108
Wu Hufan, Celebrate the Success of Our
Atomic Bomb Explosion, 1965, hanging
scroll, ink and color on paper, Shanghai
Institute of Chinese Painting.

subject matter unwittingly tells of a destructive shift in art policy and marks the end of the guohua revival.

The artist's motivation in creating such a bizarre image may never be known. It has been exhibited and published as a straightforward example of his patriotic art.^[282] His student and friend C.C. Wang, however, considers it unlikely that he would paint such a thing without being pressured to do so. One of Wu's younger colleagues confirms this opinion, describing the picture as the result of his irritation at ceaseless demands by party officials to politicize his art. Finally, to quiet the cadres, he agreed to paint an atomic bomb.^[283] A story widespread in Shanghai supports this view of Wu's relationship with political personnel. According to this possibly apocryphal tale, when Wu was urged to strive for an art that was both Communist (hong ) and professional (zhuan ), he responded by painting a red brick (hongzhuan ). If Wu Hufan's atomic bomb was intended ironically, though, the subtlety was lost on those who judged the work.

Wu Hufan was a target of the Cultural Revolution, which was launched the year after he painted the atomic bomb blast. His art collection was not destroyed, as so many were, but was taken to the Institute of Chinese Painting, where it was carefully catalogued by young artists.^[284] Much of it is now in the Shanghai Museum. The artist himself was not so lucky. He suffered a physical collapse in 1968 and died by suicide in the hospital.

Young Artists

The primary function of the new institutes of Chinese painting was to support old guohua artists so that the tradition would not die out. To this end, five students were assigned to the Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting in 1960, with three more added in 1963. At the time, the institute encompassed a range of styles and approaches: the director was Feng Zikai, best known for his idiosyncratic cartoons;^[285] the vice-directors were traditionalists, the landscapist He Tianjian and the bird-and-flower painter Wang Geyi; and the xieyi bird-and-flower painter Tang Yun and the modern figure painter Cheng Shifa oversaw practical aspects of artistic activity. The students, who were as young as sixteen, each received an assignment to study with an old master—among them Wu Hufan, He Tianjian, Fan Shaoyun, Cheng Shifa, and Tang Yun. In Shanghai, the traditional master-apprentice system was taken very seriously; a formal ceremony at the beginning of the apprenticeship was attended by officials of the local culture bureau. As part of their professional training students did errands and other household chores. They also learned to write classical essays and play the zither. Meanwhile, the institute's collection of old paintings was available for copying, and teachers who had personal painting collections lent works for study as well.

Unfortunately, the experiment largely failed owing to the renewal of political controls on art in late 1963. The classical curriculum was criticized and students were sent to study at the Shanghai Art College. With the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, most of the institute's young painters became Red Guard,^[286] mandated by Chairman Mao to destroy the traditions they had studied.

A similar training effort was made at the Beijing Chinese Painting Institute, beginning in 1962, but with even less satisfactory results.^[287] After Qi Baishi died, the institute received no new director. Cui Zifan, a Communist soldier who had worked as a hospital administrator, was the party bureaucrat in charge. Although he had actually studied with Qi Baishi, the fact that he painted was not widely known, even to institute artists, until many years later. Most young artists considered the institute no more than a welfare agency for unemployable old painters.

Zhou Sicong, who graduated from the CAFA middle school and CAFA guohua department, was assigned in 1963 to study with a master who painted female beauties in the traditional outline style. Her nine years of study at CAFA left her extremely well trained in the new socialist guohua figure painting, and she confesses that she was not very receptive to her career change. In 1964, all the young artists were sent to the countryside; thus their brief traditional training came to an end.^[288] The Beijing Chinese Painting Institute was expanded to include oil painting, printmaking, sculpture, and other Western specialties, which substantially diluted the traditional component of the institute's activity.^[289] Its name was changed to Beijing Painting Institute, presumably to reflect the expansion of its role.

The Conflicts of 1963-1965

From a purely artistic point of view, the early 1960s constitute the high point of the first three decades of the People's Republic of China. We have seen the flourishing of regional schools of art, the accomplishments of a few of the many active guohua painters and illustrators, the continued support for Sovietstyle oil paintings, and the revival of art education. The year 1962 may have appeared to be the beginning of a new era of cultural liberalism; unfortunately, Mao set about reversing the party's course almost immediately.

The economic decentralization of previous years had led to corruption in some areas controlled by local cadres. Once the famine of 1959-1961 had ended, high party leaders agreed that such dishonesty must be curbed. Unfortunately, ideological differences between Liu Shaoqi and Mao Zedong about proper methods of solving the problem caused cataclysmic political conflicts. A

key point of contention was whether China's difficulties were to be blamed on the economic policies of Mao and the Great Leap Forward or on insufficient revolutionary indoctrination of the masses.

Many leaders of the CCP agreed with Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping that the problems were primarily economic and administrative. In their view, relatively laissez-faire cultural policies were not harmful; indeed, if they inspired good morale, they might even be beneficial. For the Maoists, including Kang Sheng and Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, such cultural policies were by contrast the very core of the problem, which was an ideological or spiritual one. Administrative errors, this faction felt, could only be the result of waning revolutionary zeal. Needless to say, artists, like writers, stood unwittingly at the center of this fatal political conflict.

The first anticorruption political movement, usually referred to by artists as the "Four Cleanups," was launched in 1963. Liu Shaoqi, Mao's designated successor, believed that problems with party cadres should be dealt with secretly, within the party, to avoid demoralizing the public. To Mao, however, it was imperative that corrupt cadres be censured in mass actions.^[290] The early stages of the movement were conducted in Liu's way, by secret investigations. Probably most troubling to Mao was the fact that inquiries were strictly controlled by the party bureaucracy to limit personal and politically inspired attacks.^[291]

The art world was racked by the same conflicts that ravaged the higher reaches of government. For serious artists, 1961 and 1962 were the most productive years of their postliberation careers, and sentiment in favor of continued freedom of expression remained strong. However, the leftward ideological swing of the Socialist Education Movement soon affected first the criticism of art, and then its organization and practice.

One indication of the coming storm may be found in an article published by the art historian Yan Lichuan in August 1963. Entitled "A Discussion of 'Wild, Weird, Chaotic, and Black,'" it defended the general practice of landscape painting and bird-and-flower painting in socialist China but criticized the specific innovations of Li Keran and Shi Lu as elitist. Yan mentioned Pan Tianshou and Fu Baoshi favorably; he also acknowledged that Li Keran and Shi Lu had overcome the conventionalization of the traditional landscape genre.^[292] Nonetheless, he largely affirmed negative opinions of the two artists' work—as reflected in the satirical description of Li Keran's 1959 exhibition by some viewers as "This Land So Black" (Jiangshan ruci duohei ), a play on a poetic line from Mao that served as the title for Guan Shanyue and Fu Baoshi's "This Land So Rich in Beauty" (Jiangshan ruci duojiao ; fig. 71).

Shi Lu's work, as we saw, had previously been labeled "wild, weird, chaotic, and black." Yan Lichuan agreed with those who criticized Shi Lu's painting as hard to understand; it was, he said, neither traditional painting nor ortho-

dox revolutionary art, and it was an unsuitable influence on younger artists. At best, it was a transitional phase in the development of new forms of art.

Yan then explicated the four terms used to castigate the artist's work and character. "Wild" meant technically immature; "weird" suggested abnormal artistic or living patterns; "chaotic" meant undisciplined composition and brushwork, as well as lack of rhythm; and "black" referred to lack of variety in ink and color, which resulted in poorly conceived relationships between emptiness and substance. Blackness, while it appears to be a purely stylistic concept in this discussion, also had political implications, as a contrast to the redness of communism. While such usages grew increasingly common in the subsequent Cultural Revolution period, it is entirely probable that the author fully intended these unflattering resonances. In conclusion, Yan Lichuan asserted that this style obstructed a law of traditional Chinese realism—that spirit be transmitted through form—and failed to win appreciation by the masses.

Of Li Keran's paintings, especially Spring Dawn in Jiangnan and Mist and Clouds on the Li River ,^[293] Yan noted that although Li's ink was not really black, his work had a monotonous ink tonality. Yan warned that Li Keran's and Shi Lu's work, because it was difficult to understand, threatened to create a new double standard for art. In traditional China, the difference in taste between the scholar-official class and the masses had been characterized as "elegance" versus "vulgarity." The new phenomenon, one of "refined" (wen ) versus "crude" or "wild" (ye ) leanings, represented a similar split in standards. Yan's implication was that the masses preferred refinement, whereas only a small number of artists and critics appreciated wildness. The new aesthetic split was between the general public and art world extremists.

A similar attitude is evident in a feature article devoted to viewer comments on Lin Fengmian's April exhibition. None of those quoted were art professionals. Most of the group enjoyed the exhibition but found it flawed politically. Among other problems, Lin's landscapes were felt to be "unhealthy," and his figures were not likable. His scenes of modern life were ugly. A scientist suggested that Mr. Lin participate in more activities in society. A soldier thought that the beauty of Lin's landscapes inspired escapist feelings, clearly a bad thing in the eyes of a military man. Another writer found the paintings gloomy, better suited to the preliberation era. A student did not like the paintings and asserted that peasants would not like them either. In the end, the article deemed the exhibition unhealthy and aimed at a petty bourgeois audience.^[294]

Within China's various art institutions, many artists recall being criticized in 1963. We have mentioned attacks on high-ranking party figures such as Shi Lu and on students of the Shanghai Institute of Chinese Painting. At CAFA, Chen Pei called a hasty school meeting during the Lin Fengmian exhibition

to criticize the paintings and their admirers. A printmaking student was astounded to hear the party secretary repeat verbatim a favorable comment the boy had made only that morning to a stranger who struck up a conversation in the Chinese National Art Gallery. When asked by his fellow spectator, who turned out to be a Ministry of Culture spy, what he thought of Lin Fengmian's painting, the student replied that it "struck a chord." Chen Pei, obviously speaking on orders from the ministry, compared Lin Fengmian's painting to a Japanese delicacy, raw blowfish, warning that it might appear delicious, but in fact it was highly toxic.^[295]

CAFA's recovery from the traumas of the 1957-1962 disasters was not complete when the party administration attacked it yet again. First, the hardline director of the Lu Xun Academy of Art in Shenyang was made a vice-director of CAFA in 1963,^[296] , perhaps a hint of policy changes to come. Then, in what seems to have been a nationwide move to recentralize higher education, the Beijing Arts College, which had been operated by the city of Beijing since 1956, was disbanded and its faculty and staff divided between CAFA and CAAC.^[297]

Mao's economic policies had been discredited by the famines, and with the liberalization of art and literature he lost control of culture as well. Both personally and through his wife, Jiang Qing, he began striking out at those who opposed him. His initial, unsuccessful efforts to regain control, taken in 1963, may lie behind isolated attacks against artists in that year. Zhou Yang and other officials of the Ministry of Culture failed to broaden the cultural campaigns he proposed.^[298]

At his insistence, a cultural rectification campaign was launched in August 1964.^[299] Western writers depict the rectification as a half-hearted affair, conducted by foot-dragging bureaucrats, that ultimately forced Mao into the excesses of the Cultural Revolution.^[300] While later Red Guard condemnations accused the cultural authorities of opposing Mao's "red line," all evidence points in fact to a strong leftward shift in the art world by 1964. Cai Ruohong, Hua Junwu, and other leaders who had promoted diversification during the period we have just discussed tried valiantly to steer the bureaucracy along the new, more centralized course Mao demanded. Numerous regional exhibitions were held throughout 1965. If works reproduced in Meishu are typical, the exhibited works were largely socialist realist figure paintings. One notable effort was made by a group of guohua painters, including Zhang Anzhi, Song Wen-zhi, Bai Xueshi, and Chen Dayu, who were dispatched to the south by Cai Ruohong to paint pictures of Mao's family home and other scenes from his life.^[301]

CAFA historians do not view the campaigns of 1964 and 1965 as halfhearted, but as a calculated prelude to the Cultural Revolution.^[302] Indeed, CAFA artists widely accept that their institution was chosen by Jiang Qing as a

test site for the mass mobilization of students against the party leadership that took place nationwide in 1966 and 1967. Former students likewise refer to the events of 1964 and 1965 as a small Cultural Revolution.^[303]

During this period, the director of the central party school in Beijing, Yang Xianzhen, had spoken at the CAFA middle school on his philosophical views. When Yang's views were attacked by young party members in July 1964, CAFA party secretary Chen Pei is reported to have said, "The venerable Yang is, after all, a Central Committee member." Ding Jingwen, the middle school director, allegedly suppressed the middle school radicals who wished to join the anti-Yang campaign. As ambitious young party members, led by a Soviettrained oil painting instructor, joined the attacks on Yang, some faculty and students at CAFA submitted a criticism of Chen Pei to Kang Sheng. According to a chronology prepared by the Red Guard in 1967, Kang Sheng responded to the letter by sending an investigation team to the school. On October 25, Jiang Qing was dispatched by Mao to meet three "revolutionary instructors"; she allegedly told them, "Chairman Mao supports your views." Kang Sheng promised to report suppression of the middle school radicals to the highest authorities. On October 26, he announced that a work team would be sent to mobilize the masses and to begin the testimony and struggle against those responsible.^[304]

Students had been informed that they were to move to the countryside near Xingtai, Hebei, in the fall of 1964 to implement the rural Four Cleanups campaign. As they prepared to depart, it was suddenly announced that the movement had been postponed; instead they were to attend a meeting on campus. The meeting was conducted by a work team of high officials, representing three administrative worlds. Song Shuo, deputy director of Beijing's municipal university department,^[305] Lin Mohan, vice-minister of culture, and Wu Jihan, of the Central Propaganda Department, seated themselves at the head table. Chen Pei, the highest-ranking administrator at the academy, was relegated to the front row of the spectators' seating. The focus of the meeting was an attack on "false socialist education," presumably that practiced during the preceding year. Chen Pei was the scapegoat for the academy's deviations, allegedly caused by right opportunism and evidenced by adoption of the Eight Character Directive, the Sixty Articles on Universities, and the Eight Articles on Literature and Art. The studio system was cited as a specific manifestation of "right opportunism." Following Mao's emphasis on mass mobilization, all normal academic and political activity was stopped. Students were urged to "bring out their knives" and attack the party committee and others responsible for the academy's faults. They were told to write big-character posters and to provide notes and other evidence that could be used against teachers and administrators. Dong Xiwen, Ai Zhongxin, and Hou Yimin, all men of bourgeois family background, were only a few of the teachers who were punished by exile to

the countryside. In many departments, prominent students were selected as scapegoats as well. Guang Jun, for example, was subjected to a mass criticism session in which every member of his graduating class was required to chastise him by turn. His studio mate Jiang Tiefeng was similarly criticized, as was the oil painting student Yao Zhonghua.^[306] Guang and Jiang were excluded from the class graduation exhibition. CAFA was labeled a "black dyeing vat," which implied that the young were turned away from revolutionary ideals during the course of their education.^[307] According to a Red Guard report, Zhou Yang attempted to protect Yang Xianzhen and Chen Pei but was overruled by Kang Sheng.^[308]

The mass criticisms of the Socialist Education Movement lasted from November 1964 to August 1965, utterly disrupting normal activity at the academy. One former student recalls that criticisms took place daily.^[309] Quoting an unspecified document, the Red Guard report states, "The Central Propaganda Department conducted, at CAFA, the first test site for the Four Cleanups in the national arts academies and schools, for the purpose of gaining experience to lead the nation."^[310]

This movement marked the end of CAFA's brief golden age. Chen Pei was replaced by an administrator from outside the academy. Some young instructors, motivated by Maoist zeal or factional opportunism, mounted particularly enthusiastic attacks on college administrators and colleagues. An issue that became a focus of great debate was the appropriateness of using nude models to teach life drawing. Those who "brought out their knives" attacked this and other curricular practices throughout the latter part of 1964. One victim of the campaign relates that his classmates did not speak to him for months.

The Red Guard claimed that the movement at CAFA was controlled by the Liu Shaoqi-Deng Xiaoping faction, its purpose being to suppress "the revolutionary masses."^[311] It suppressed many other people as well, however, and may have been intended as a demonstration to Mao and Kang Sheng that their leftist policies were indeed being implemented.

By the following year, criticism of higher-party authorities was prohibited and social relations between students became less strained. In the spring of 1965 Deng Xiaoping observed, "Some people just want to be famous by criticizing others."^[312] Although the graduation exhibition was held as usual in 1965, it is clear from the subject matter of student works that politics had strongly reasserted itself. A lyrical print by a Li Hua student, for example, depicted the People's Liberation Army helping the Viet Cong (fig. 109).

In 1965, the battle over the question of drawing from nude models even drew a response from Mao Zedong, who stated on July 18 that the evils of the practice were worth the positive results.^[313] The Ministry of Culture apparently found the nude model issue compelling, for a formal directive issued late in 1965 banned their classroom use.^[314] Once prohibited by "leftists," nude

Image not available

Figure 109
Gerald Zhixing Young, Warriors of the
People (The War in the South), 1965,
hand-colored woodblock print, collection
of the artist.

models became a political rather than a solely aesthetic or moral question. The issue retains some of its political sensitivity twenty-five years later.

The spring proscriptions against further attacks on the authorities did not result in peace at CAFA; instead a new movement arose against the college Maoists who had initiated the original campaign. By the time the academy finally repaired to the countryside, the small college was bitterly divided, the factions generally split into those who supported the mild liberalization of previous years, on the one side, and the radical Maoists, on the other. Most

difficult to sense from a mere chronology was the hostility felt by victims of each succeeding campaign toward those who had come forth to attack. With friendships and collegial relationships betrayed in the name of Chairman Mao, the academy's artistic and personal atmosphere was poisoned.

Students and teachers spent most of the next year and a half in the countryside working in the Four Cleanups campaign against rural corruption. Former students describe their primary activities during this time as auditing the accounts of local cadres and investigating any discrepancies they discovered. One artist recalls his team's diligent but unsuccessful effort to find out what happened to a missing commune pig.^[315] Art would not emerge from this political shadow, which became the dark night of the Cultural Revolution, for over a decade.

This chapter has taken us through some of the most interesting artistic trends of the three decades we have studied. The privileged status of oil painting declined somewhat amid the nationalistic fervor that accompanied the Great Leap Forward and the Sino-Soviet split. Nevertheless, the intensive emulation of Russian and Soviet oil painting techniques that had marked the early and mid-1950s did, by the early 1960s, yield technically proficient history paintings aimed at a Chinese audience. Most significant, however, was the critical and bureaucratic support for regionalistic and, within limits, even personal styles of guohua painting and woodblock printmaking. Although the chaos of the Cultural Revolution mowed down these movements, in most cases their roots remained to sprout another day.