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-

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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

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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.