|
Themes, Style, and the Historical Background
by Iris Wachs |
This essay is intended to aid the reader to understand and appreciate the exhibition prints in the context of the historical milieu in which they were produced. Prints dating from before 1980 have been chosen because they were model works made by artists who intended to fulfill Mao Zedong's instructions in the famous Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art of 1942. At the conference, Mao declared that the task of the artist was to "create a work of art which can awaken and arouse the popular masses, urging them on to unity and struggle and to take part in transforming their own environment."1 At the time these prints were created, their themes were contemporary national preoccupations. Almost all were given very great exposure, not only exhibited in galleries but reproduced in popular national newspapers and journals, as posters and even as stamps. They were designed to carry a message. This essay will discuss the nature of that message and also its relationship to style because, in China, style as well as content has political implications. The Historical Background Some knowledge of China's international, political and economic situation before and during the years covered by the exhibition is helpful in appreciating the art of the period. The twentieth century followed two-and-a-half centuries of rule by the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), alien Manchu emperors who co-opted the strictest aspects of the Confucian class system in order to strengthen their own hold on power. Through misconceived self-interest, they had kept China from entering the modern era and, from weakness and short-sighted policies, had given up large parts of Chinese territory to foreign powers. At their downfall, in 1911, their inheritance to the newly created republic was a lack of sovereign control over its own land, violent regional conflict, and extreme poverty of the masses of people. The Republican Period (l9l2-1949) did not bring major improvements to China. Nothing conveys the terrible social conditions of the first half of this century better than the acerbic writings of Lu Xun, the philosopher-patron-founder of the Creative Print Movement. An activist by nature, Lu encouraged many young artists, who had adopted revolutionary ideologies from Europe in their search for ways to modernize China, to use their art as a tool for revolution. (As Yan Shancun notes in his essay "History of the Modern Chinese Woodblock Print," Lu's advocacy of art in the service of revolution followed the well-established Chinese practice wherein art is a tool of pedagogy; the idea of "art for art's sake," is also ancient in China and was embraced by the literati a thousand years before its nineteenth-century appearance in the West.) A sizeable number of these artists took up the central European expressionist social protest styles of art that particularly attracted Lu because such styles lent themselves to descriptions of the plight of the people. Difficult and threatening circumstances attended their efforts: criticism of the government was not tolerated, and its critics were jailed and even killed. Lu Xun himself spent the last years of his life hiding from the Guomindang (Nationalist) government in the Japanese Concession of Shanghai. In the world of Chinese art, woodblock prints were the medium of choice for propaganda purposes, and the Creative Print Movement has retained in China until this day something of the heroic aureole earned by its revolutionary founders. One has only to read the biographies of the older generations of artists in our exhibition to glimpse the travails they undertook, selflessly and with determination, in order to aid their country with their art or in any other way required. During the war with Japan (1937-1945) woodblock artists in the Guomindang-controlled areas depicted enemy atrocities in prints that continued the social protest style introduced by Lu. Their art was designed to incite the people's feelings and urge them to resistance. After the war ended, in 1945, full-scale civil war ensued. The earliest prints in the exhibition date from the period of the civil war (1945-1949) and were made by artists with revolutionary sentiments working in the Guomindang-controlled areas. They continued in the same vein of social protest art, still with the aim of arousing resistance, but this time the purpose was to provoke outrage at the native regime. Prints from this period by Li Hua (cat. 26, A through D), Zhao Yannian (cat. 60 and 61) and Zhang Yangxi (cat. 52 through 55) focus on the exploitation and misery of the masses and the rage of starving people at their misery. The influence of Kaethe Kollwitz, particularly her series of prints called The Peasants' War, is especially evident in their designs. (Lu Xun had made Kollwitz's work known to young artists by exhibiting a set of her prints from his own collection and then having copies made and distributed to serve as models.) Even today, after all the vivid images of violence and oppression that we have become accustomed to seeing on television and in films, these prints are painful to view, a fact that, a few years later, was to bring about exclusion of this style from the category of approved art. On the other hand, the prints Stone Workers (cat. 28) and Chat (cat. 29), created in 1945 by Wang Qi, take workers as subjects but neither glorify them or depict them as abused. Wang Qi had been in Yan'an in 1939 before going on to Chongqing and was also familiar with the principles of art developed in the Communist base area afterwards, in the early 1940s, because prints were sent annually from Yan'an to Chonqing for exhibitions.2 According to the principles laid down in Yan'an in 1942 (discussed below), the masses alone were to be the subject matter of revolutionary art, and art was to be intelligible to the masses and avoid obscurity. These two prints by Wang have the lucid quality of the new style developed in Yan'an, but their "neutral" depiction of the workers is quite different from that of prints by artists who had lived and worked in Yan'an throughout the 1940s. Burning the Old Rent Contracts, 1947 (cat. 27) by Gu Yuan, is more typical in its theme than Wang Qi's 1945 prints: it celebrates the "new life" of those in North China, who were already living under the Communist regime. As Yan Shancun notes in his essay, following Mao Zedong's Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art, delivered in 1942 as part of a political rectification campaign, style and content had changed in Communist controlled areas. The Yan'an Talks, as they are called, provided guidelines for all cultural policies and, when the Communist forces emerged victorious from the civil war and declared the founding of the People's Republic of China, on October 1, 1949, the principles of the Yan'an Talks became operative for the whole country. The authority of the Yan'an Talks was so great that virtually all Communist aesthetic criticism for almost forty years took them as reference. A review of,the major points of the Yan'an Talks will help us understand what the art authorities and artists had in mind when they discussed or created art in succeeding years. The Yan'an Talks The Yan'an Talks were delivered and subsequently published when China was in the throes of war with Japan. In the published version, Mao writes that artists must be "a cultural army, since this kind of army is indispensable in achieving unity among ourselves" (p.57). The masses require culture because they are in "a bitter struggle with the enemy and yet they are illiterate, ignorant, and uncultured as a result of prolonged feudal and bourgeois rule; their most urgent demand, therefore, is for a wide-ranging educational movement in the form of cultural knowledge and works of literature and art that they urgently need and can readily accept, which will heighten their ardor in the struggle" (p.71). The masses are be educated and helped on their way by the Party cadres, including its artists. Because all art serves class struggle, it must now "serve the masses," the workers, peasants and soldiers. Art that is of interest to, or serves the interests of, classes other than the masses, cannot be tolerated. "Art for art's sake, art that stands above class and party, and fellow-travelling or politically independent art do not exist in reality" (p.75). The masses also are to become the only subjects of art. According to Mao, the life of the masses must be ''the sole and inexhaustible source" of the raw material of art, and the artist's work is to process the raw material made from observations of the masses into a "more typical and more idealized" form (pp. 69 and 70). ("Typical" is defined in the Yan'an Talks, and in later official glosses on the term, as the idealized representative of the masses, not the average man.) To treat the subjects correctly, revolutionary artists must "go among the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers and into the heat of battle for a long time to come, without reservation, devoting body and soul ... to observe, experience, study, and analyze all the different kinds of people, all the classes and all the masses, all the vivid patterns of life and struggle ... before they are ready for the stage of processing or creating" (pp. 69 and 70). Artists are not, however, to ridicule or criticize the masses for their weaknesses; they are to praise the bright side of the proletariat only "and should obviously praise their toil and struggle, their army and their party" (p.59). Only "aggressors, exploiters, and oppressors" can be targeted for censure (p.80). Mao observes that to reach the masses, art created for them should have "effects that win the approval of the masses" (p.77)."Art shouldn't be obscure or devious, something that the popular masses can't understand" (p.81). The surest way to create popular art is to use the styles that "belong to workers, peasants, and soldiers themselves, and therefore, the task of learning from workers, peasants, and soldiers comes before the task of educating them" (p.68). The audience thus becomes the arbiter of style, and the artist must go to it to learn how and what to create. The initial task of the artist, furthermore, is "reaching a wider audience rather than raising standards, " but standards are not to be neglected, because the people "also demand higher standards" (p.71). Mao envisions an ongoing process in which popularization is followed by, and/or alternated with, technical and aesthetic improvement in the arts. The concepts expressed in the Yan'an Talks reflect aesthetic theories current in the Soviet Union, and Mao notes that "the experience of foreign countries, especially of the Soviet Union, can be used to guide our work of reaching a wider audience and raising standards, provided that their experience is good," and he later adds that "we advocate proletarian realism," the style developed in the Soviet Union (pp. 72 and 76). But he also makes it clear that he seeks adaptation, not elimination, of China's traditional arts. "We do not by any means refuse to use the old forms of the feudal class and the bourgeoisie, but in our hands these old forms are reconstructed and filled with new contents" (p.65). Foreign arts and classical arts should not be the primary sources of art, but can be used if adapted (p.69). "Make foreign things serve China" and "make the past serve the present" were two slogans constantly reiterated in the coming years. Mao saw the development of national culture as another aspect of the battle against imperialism, an idea he had already articulated in "The Culture of the New Democracy," in 1940. In the earlier essay Mao had written: "New-democratic culture is national. It opposes imperialistic oppression and upholds the dignity and independence of the Chinese nation....Chinese culture should have its own form, its own national form."3 Questions of how to reconcile these two different orientations-adoption of Soviet (i.e., foreign) art models while preserving native art forms-were to preoccupy artists and critics in the future. Mao does not specify what particular aspects of national art forms should be appropriated to create art for the masses. but the popular arts familiar to, and enjoyed by, the peasants, particularly in North China, were nianhua folkprints (New Year's pictures: see the essay "Explanation of Technical Terms") and papercuts; after the Yan'an Talks, their characteristics became the basis of the Yan'an style. Furthermore, because the masses were to become the central subjects of art, the ability to depict figures was to become a central technical requirement for artists (although realistic figure portrayal had not been of particular interest in traditional Chinese art) and figure depiction was to undergo rapid development in the coming years.
Setting and Disseminating Cultural Policies Over time, cultural spokesmen for the Party and, after 1949, spokesmen for both the Party and the government, the two bureaucracies around which China is organized, have interpreted and reinterpreted the Yan'an Talks and indicated what specific themes and styles are (currently) the correct expression of the Yan'an principles. The group that sets cultural policy is the Department of Propaganda of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. The Ministry of Culture, the executive arm that implements policy, is an organ of the government rather than the Party and works through the bodies under its supervision, including the academies of fine arts and publishing houses. Publishing Publishing has played an important role in the development of art in the People's Republic of China, as it provided the best medium for disseminating cultural policy decisions to artists. Published model works could be studied everywhere in the country, and reviews praising or criticizing them made cultural policies clear to all, advising them what to emulate and what to avoid. The close relationship betweeen publishing and art production can be seen in the number of artists in the exhibition, particularly from the older two generations, who worked for publishing houses at some time in their careers: Gu Yuan, Wang Qi, Yan Han, Zhang Yangxi, Zhao Yannian, Chao Mei, Huang Peimo, Feng Zhongtie, Li Shaoyan, Niu Wen, Lin Jun, Li Huanmin, Xu Kuang, Wu Qiangnian, and Huang Xinbo. The Central European expressionist style is rejected The styles and themes of prints introduced by Lu Xun and based on central European social protest art were declared unsuitable by the art authorities, because they were known to be unintelligible to, and disliked by, the peasants, who were the majority of the population. Social protest art depicted the masses as starving and in agony and thus also violated the instruction in the Yan'an Talks to portray "the bright side" of their lives. Commenting on the defects of the style, the artist and critic Wang Qi explains that because the artists who had practiced it were "not yet closely linked with the great revolutionary movement of the masses or conscious of its mighty strength, they reflected the tragic, desperate struggles [under the rule of the Guomintang]....In form they laid too much emphasis on the use of dark shadow....There was little optimisim in the woodcuts of this period and little of the national tradition of Chinese art."4 (When the subject of oppressed peoples later reemerges in art, the slaves are not Chinese, and they are depicted as vigorous, muscular fighters for their freedom, as in Zhao Yannian's Rise Up, Slaves! Suffering Hunger and Cold!, 1954/61 [cat. 62], and Jiang Zhi's Fighting Drum, 1961 [cat. 76].)
The nianhua Period The art authorities decided in 1949 that the nianhua (New Year's picture) format, with its black outlines and bright flat colors, was the best vehicle to make the new political and economic policies of the Party known to, and accepted by, the people, as this style was familiar to the peasantry and had "effects that win the approval of the masses." Most traditional nianhua had incorporated pedagogical elements, using images and text together to teach Confucian virtues. The content could be changed according to the Party's agenda, and thus the past could be made to serve the present. The term nianhua can refer to any picture created for the New Year, but in practice it was applied to the popular, mass-produced pictures created in traditional woodblock printing workshops. From 1949 to 1953, however, regardless of the media in which they normally worked, most professional artists, including woodblock artists, were set to producing pictures in the style of nianhua. The products were usually paintings, which were then reproduced mechanically in vast quantities as posters, or in publications from which they could be cut out and pasted up in the house as traditional prints had been. The journal China Reconstructs reports that in 1952 more than forty-million nianhua-style pictures were distributed around the country.5 The report makes clear the reason for this considerable investment in artistic talent and resources: "The pictures stay up all the year and become part of the environment in which the people live. Their influence is therefore very great (p. 26)." The examples reproduced in China Reconstructs do not seem to be nianhua woodblock prints but rather paintings in the nianhua style. In fact, few designs created at this time by professional artists who normally worked in the woodblock medium were actually printed by woodblock techniques, as Li Hua, Wang Qi and others have noted, because artists could not print them fast enough or in sufficiently large numbers.6 Some nianhua, of course, actually were printed by woodblock. Of these, most were produced by artisans working in the old traditional woodblock printing workshops, who long ago had developed techniques for printing great quantities rapidly and for whom the style was natural. Furthermore, the workshops had on hand designs that could be adapted easily to the new themes. Workshop-produced nianhua from this period are very rare, however, as such prints were traditionally torn down and replaced every year. Because they were not deemed to have artistic value, they were not preserved. Like all art created in the first years of the new state, workshop nianhua refer to the campaigns being mounted as China struggled to cope with her problems. In some places the army was still fighting, and the new, Communist regime had met considerable hostility from the outside world. Enlisting the support of the Chinese people for the People's Liberation Army and for the new regime was to be the artist's primary objective. From surviving examples we can see how the workshops relied on recasting old designs. The Family of the Glorious One, not dated, but from the early l950s (cat.3), honors the peasant families from which the army was largely recruited, co-opting a late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) design to do it: instead of a god of wealth and his attendants bringing gifts in a wheelbarrow to the home of a government bureaucrat (see the Qing original, fig. 1), villagers bring gifts to a soldier's peasant farnily. Hero in a Battle, not dated but from the early 1950s (cat. 13), recasts still another traditional design. In the Qing antecedent (fig. 2), a god dressed as a bureaucrat stands behind five boys as their protector; here, however, the god is replaced with a People's Liberation Army soldier and four children, one of whom is a girl. Both sons and the number five traditionally were considered lucky, and the change in number ("don't count on luck, but work hard") and the presence of a girl ("females have value") would have been quite obvious to a peasant, giving the print several educational messages. Traditional nianhua had often taken dramatic moments from Peking opera as subject matter. In The Children Are Playing, 1950 (cat. 2), the artist has created a political drama. The print identifies the people's enemies&emdash;feudalism, imperialism, and capitalism&emdash;and the action makes it clear how the People's Liberation Army deals with them. Admonishments to rebuild the war-torn economy through increased production and hard work, thriftiness, and cooperation appear in almost all of the period nianhua. Bountiful harvests are the promised rewards. In his review of New Year's pictures for 1950, the cartoonist and Communist art cadre Cai Ruohong comments: "New contents in place of old; man in place of gods-this is the prevalent trend throughout China's countryside today. This year when the peasants paste up their New Year's pictures on the front gate, instead of the old Door Gods they will paste up drawings of People's Liberation Army soldiers and liberated workers with red stars on their caps." 7 Long Live the People's Republic of China. 1950 (cat.l), is an example of the door gods referred to by Cai. The print is a "guardian door god of the outer gate," a type of picture whose traditional task was to protect a house from the entry of evil; however, a People's Liberation Army soldier replaces the gods, depicted in armour, who had been the mainstay of the type. The image of Mao Zedong, placed directly above the soldier, identifies his supremacy in the military hierarchy. Posters, which are pictures within the picture, are pasted on the gate in the background, labeled with appropriate slogans to make their meanings clear. Using this long-established convention, the text reinforces the message of the images, but an illiterate person can understand the meaning perfectly, as it is quite clear who is giving the grain to whom and what work is in progress. Unlike the other period nianhua discussed above, this print was created not in a traditional studio but by an artist working in the style developed at Yan'an (and called the Yan'an style), which is a modification of the pure nianhua style. The artist was probably one of the many art cadres trained at the *Lu Xun Academy of Literature and Arts who accompanied the advancing army and provided visual images when necessary. Though based on a traditional design, this print uses the oil-based inks and low point of view adapted from Western art, and naive elements are manipulated in a sophisticated way (compare with fig. 3). The Korean War as a Subject The outbreak of the Korean War (1950-1953) added another subject to the nianhua repertoire. The printmaker and art critic Li Qun, in a 1955 review of a 1954 retrospective print exhibition, commends artists who made the war the subject of their works: "Many prints are devoted to episodes in the struggle of the Chinese people for world peace. Some of the most effective are inspired by the campaign to resist American aggression and to aid Korea."8 In the pair of prints from Hebei, Protect the Country and Home and Resist America, Support Korea, from the early 1950s (cat. 9), the slogans urge support for Chinese soldiers fighting in the Chinese People's Volunteer Brigades. The peasants are pictured with red stars on their hats and farm tools in their hands, thus suggesting their dual roles as volunteer soldiers and providers of sustenance. The design itself derives from tradition, however: in their frontal posture and the way they hold the handles, the peasants recall their prototypes-armor-clad door gods grasping spears or lances who, like the gods on horseback, protected the home (fig. 4). The weapons have been transmuted by the artist into hoes. Yan Han's Long Live Harmony and Peace, 1952 (cat. 36), is a very rare example dating from this period of a professional woodblock artist's work that was actually printed by woodblock. It probably also was reproduced mechanically for mass distribution. It is Yan's personal synthesis of the Yan'an nianhua style and elements of socialist realism (see below), the latter by then a style well-known to him. Like the Hebei prints, Yan's also refers to the war in Korea because subjects of national importance were taken up by all artists, but the emphasis in Yan's creation-on peaceful aspirations-is indirect, because China never entered the Korean War officially. In Sichuan many woodblock artists created in Western rather than nianhua styles. Folkprints and papercuts had never enjoyed the same popularity in Southwest China as they had in the North and East; perhaps for this reason the local authorities considered it less necessary to use folk styles exclusively. The influential cultural cadre Li Shaoyan, himself a woodblock printmaker, seems to have encouraged alternatives to the nianhua style. The Korean War, however, was a shared national concern, and the Sichuan artist Lin Jun chose it as his subject in Xiao Guobao Blocks the Killing Gun, 1952 (cat. 83), which depicts a model Chinese soldier who sacrifices himself for his comrades.
New Subjects and Styles By 1953 the government had managed to rebuild much of the war-devastated infrastructure, bring hyperinflation under control, and orient the population to a degree of mutual cooperation not previously known. Intent on building a socialist state, it now entered the period of the First Five-Year Plan. The emphasis was to be on industrialization, and the Soviet Union was to provide the relevant technical advice and equipment. At the same time, most agricutural units were amalgamated into cooperatives. Increased Influence of Soviet socialist realism The new government had consolidated its authority, and the cultural authorities now felt that they could reduce the dominance of the nianhua style on Chinese art and encourage artistic variety and specialization. Simultaneously, a new wave of the Soviet socialist realist style, which had influenced Chinese art since the 1930s, swept into the country along with the influx of Soviet technology. It was considered a more "scientific" method of descriptive art than native techniques, more capable of realistic depiction of the work of socialism. In his report delivered to the Second Congress of Literary and Art Workers in September 1953, *Zhou Yang links the style to "raising standards." (Such reports were invaluable to artists, indicating as they did the policy lines to be followed.) Zhou cites the new nation's accomplishments in cultural fields since 1949 and adds: "The people have rapidly become more mature both politically and culturally....They demand that ... [art] works be of a high level."9 He endorses "the method of socialist realism as the highest criterion for all our literary and artistic work and criticism" (p.8) and urges artists to "study and assimilate the advanced experience of the literature and art of foreign countries in order to enrich our own tradition and make good our deficiencies" (p.10). The phrase "in order to enrich our own tradition" indicates the ultimate purpose of studying Soviet art-Zhou does not want to exclude Chinese art traditions. He finds them relevant to socialist realism by discovering "a fundamentally realistic tendency in Chinese ... art" (p.6), although he criticizes Chinese artists for still lacking the close contact with the masses that would enable their art "to depict the new people and their new ideology while fighting against the enemies of the people" (p.9). Having seemingly advocated Soviet art over other modes, Zhou nevertheless concludes his report with the declaration that now, in fact, there is to be "free competition of various artistic forms" (i.e., both Soviet and Chinese) and states that "'let all flowers bloom' ... is Comrade Mao Tse-tung's guiding principle" (p.8). (Mao had first used the phrase "let all flowers bloom" in the Yan'an Talks, and later commentators often referred to the well-known statement.) Zhou's report is short on the particulars of realizing the socialist realist style using the "realistic tendency in Chinese ...art," but publications reproducing Soviet examples were already available in quantity and Chinese artists presumably were aware of their own traditions. Many professional artists were now able to abandon the nianhua style, and some turned to creating art inspired by Soviet models. Rise Up, Slaves! Suffering Hunger and Cold!, 1954 (cat. 62), and Protest, 1956 (cat.63), by Zhao Yannian, recall the popular black-and-white Soviet poster style in both theme and dramatic composition; the prints reflect the policy called "leaning to one side," in which China identifies with the aims of the international socialist movement, in this case, as protector of oppressed peoples. Fraternal feelings and admiration for the workers of other socialist countries are implicit in Hungarian Ceramic Worker, 1955 (cat. 57), by Zhang Yangxi. The source of the print's style, however, is quite a different school of Soviet graphics from that which inspired Zhao: fullness of background detail and considerable negative carving of the block, popular devices in Soviet prints of the 1930s and 1940s, are used to achieve drama and tell the story. Zhang's prints from the 1940s had been modelled on central European social protest styles, and this work from the early 1950s follows Soviet print styles closely. In the very same year that Zhang created this print, however, he also was developing a new, "strongly national style" (see the discussion, below, of Bringing Lunch to the Field, 1955 [cat. 561), his own innovative synthesis of Chinese with Western styles. When creating Hungarian Ceramic Worker, he chose a style consistent with subject matter; that is, a worker from a European socialist country is depicted in the European socialist realist art form. Synthesis of Western and Chinese Styles The influx of so much foreign style troubled many in the art establishment. What kind and how much foreign art should be absorbed into Chinese style? What kind and how much of Chinese traditional art should be retained? These were and remain issues in Chinese art criticism. In an essay written early in 1954, a few months after Zhou Yang's speech, the influential art cadre Cai Ruohong argues for the legitimacy of different styles and techniques that had been endangered by the dominance of the nianhua style and/or were now in danger of being displaced by the new fashion for Soviet art. Apparently Cai still felt a need to contend with those art cadres who wished to see the folk style retain supremacy and laments that "many subjects and forms of presentation have gradually vanished from our art"10 (i.e., because of the nianhua dominance). "Stress is laid on using certain folk forms based on outline drawings and completely disregarding depictions utilizing light and shade" (p. 164). The latter, a Western technique much used in China in woodblock prints since the 1930s, had been avoided by professional artists-as instructed by the art authorities-in their nianhua creations of the early 1950s. Cai then also argues for a Sinified form of socialist realism that preserves and incorporates traditional Chinese lyricism, in spite of the fact that some say, "the 'public' considers that lyricism is befitting only to a leisured class, and is of no interest to the labouring people;" but this, Cai says, is throwing away "lyricism ... together with certain 'unwholesome sentiments associated with lyricism" (p.164). Cai's article is by no means easy to follow and seems to voice various grievances, not necessarily compatible, made known to him by artists seeking greater freedom in creation. He asks, for example, "Why are woodcuts ... out of fashion? Two woodcut artists have told me that since the large-scale use of offset-printing and photogravure there is no longer any need for the old method of woodblock printing" (p. 164). (It should be noted that when Cai refers to "woodcut artists" he, and other Chinese art critics, are referring to professional printmakers in the Creative Print tradition. Nianhua workshops are always discussed as a separate and different type of creation.) Many printmakers were still expected to make prototype paintings or prints for mechanical reproduction rather than to use the woodblock medium itself to produce a number of images. For veterans of Yan'an, like Cai Ruohong, where the woodblock print had been the supreme reproducing method, this must have seemed scornful treatment indeed. The dates on some prints in our exhibition, however, and those reproduced in Chinese publications at the time make it clear that after Zhou Yang's September 1953 speech, many woodblock artists returned to working in their own medium and to developing personal styles. The woodblock artist and art historian Li Hua also gives 1953 as the date when woodblock artists "again picked up their chisels," referring no doubt to the new wave of art started by Zhou Yang and also to the establishment that year of a separate printmaking department at the *Central Academy of Fine Arts. The fortunes of woodblock printmakers (and artists generally) were determined by the predilections of the art cadres who oversaw the places where they worked. In Beijing, Hangzhou and Chongqing influential art cadres were themselves woodblock printmakers and encouraged printmaking.11 In any case, a year after Zhou Yang's report, works in the National Exhibition of Graphic Art held in Beijing, in September 1954, as well as examples in our exhibition, are as if made in response to Cai's reproaches and Zhou's admonitions. In his review of the exhibition published in March 1955, the art critic Liu Yi-fang allocates praise, noting that "The synthesis of Chinese traditional line with western techniques, is giving rise to a strongly national style remarkable for its simplicity and clarity."12 He continues: "Altogether new to the Chinese woodcut were portrayals of the country's lovely scenery, the colorful life of the national minorities, working people at recreation" (p. 15). Most prints from this period merge elements from Chinese art with those of the West, although the variations in the mixture could produce a wide range of eftects. Typically, the faces have minimum chiaroscuro, which is reserved to indicate volume on clothing and on objects surrounding the people; there is much use of short lines to give texture and density; description, as in Soviet prints, includes considerable background detail, Western perspective is used to organize space, with triangular areas the focus of the compositions; and the prints are mostly in the black-and-white common to both classic Chinese book illustration and classic Western woodblock printmaking, foregoing the appeal of the bright colors of nianhua. Wang Qi's Selling Surplus Grain Crops, 1953 (cat. 30), is representative of this type of the hybrid style. With poignant simplicity, the artist exploits empty white paper in the traditional Chinese way to create a luminous ground for the fine outlining used to depict the peasants and their bulging sacks of grain; he places them, however, in a descriptive (Russian print style) background organized by Western perspective. Most of the prints from this period portray subjects "new to the Chinese woodcut" with quiet understatement, often bordering on lyricism. Li Shaoyan and Niu Wen's Finished With Medical Studies, She Returns, 1954 (cat. 79), Niu Wen's New Students For Beijing University, 1954 (cat. 80), and Li Huanmin's Winnowing Barley, 1957 (cat. 86), depict the "colorful life of the national minorities," with emphasis on the new opportunities being granted to them by the new state. Lin Jun's At the Foot of the Miao Mountains, 1954 (cat. 84) portrays lovely scenery in lyrical fashion but with the detail and rich texture of Soviet prints in the wood engraving style. Another print by Wang Qi, View of the Capital's Front Door, 1956 (cat. 31), shows a bustling cityscape, a "new theme in Chinese art," that has "depictions utilizing light and shade," (as called for by Cai). It has more affinity with Soviet than Chinese tradition and, like Li Huanmin's Winnowing Barley, uses the light brown colors favored by Soviet artists in both oil paintings and prints. (Both subject and style of Wang Qi's print were in fashion; in a 1955 review of the same 1954 Exhibition of Graphic Art, the printmaker and critic Li Qun praises a work by Gu Yuan, called Boulevard in a Peking Suburb, in words that could be applied to Wang Qi's print: a "delicately coloured print of a suburban landscape [that] conveys; the atmosphere of ... [the] prosperity of Peking."13) The type and degree of synthesis of Western and Chinese techniques thus varied according to the artist's predilection, the requirements of the subject matter, and current political-cultural policies. (The Suzhou nianhua called Eternal Life (cat. 14), created around the same time to convey the same basic message as Wang's Selling Surplus Grain Crops, uses exuberant color, in contrast to this group of subdued prints; nianhua continued to be produced in large numbers by popular workshops.) Zhang Yangxi's Bringing Lunch to the Field, 1955 (cat.56), achieves quite different effects from any of the foregoing because the synthesis of Chinese and Western elements derives from a different Chinese antecedent. Zhang was inspired by the art of Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) carved bricks and funeral shrines. In Han pictorial art, a shallow depth of field is suggested by overlapping figures shown in profile or threequarter view, and compositions are virtually devoid of landscape elements. These conventions are used in Zhang's print, which has no indication of ground. The influence of Chinese style is apparent also in the use of black outlines for the figures and minimum use of Western chiaroscuro. The articulation of the body forms, however, utilizes the methods of Western anatomical drawing. The synthesis of the two styles is seamless, and the print is a model of a "strongly national style remarkable for its simplicity and clarity," the qualities commended by Liu. The short-lived Hundred Flowers Policy Another important speech was delivered by Zhou Yang in September 1956, during the period of the Hundred Flowers Movement, which had been initiated by Mao Zedong on May 2, 1956. (Named after the phrase used by Mao in the Yan'an Talks, the movement introduced a brief period of liberal cultural policies but was followed a year later by the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which was characterized by severe chastisement of artists.) Zhou was understood to be a close interpreter of Mao Zedong's thoughts on culture, and his speech effectively explains the Hundred Flowers policy: "The Party's Central Committee has put forward the policy of 'letting flowers of many kinds bloom, diverse schools of thought contend.'"14 "In the struggles of the past when the situation was tense, it was required that artistic and literary activity be coordinated with urgent tasks at a definite time and place, so as to produce an immediate political agitational effect among the masses" (p. 181). But "the broad masses of artists and writers have now become more closely united on the basis of a common idea of serving the people" (p.180). Unfortunately, however, "doctrinairism ... in literature and art ... [has] seriously restricted the creative freedom of artists and writers" (p.180-181). "Doctrinairism ... manifests itself in vulgarizing and over-simplifying the Marxist view of aesthetics, and putting fetters and constraints on artists" (p.181). "In the choice of subject-matter and form, [artists] should be given an ample measure of freedom" (p. 182). Revolutionary fervor and revolutionary romanticism Zhou's speech continues his earlier advocacy of multiple art styles for Chinese culture. He repeats many of his earlier criticisms and instructions, including his directive that Chinese artists use Chinese national art forms as well as those of the Soviet union. Speaking of literature, but in a context that makes his remarks applicable to art, he says: "Soviet literature has exerted a profound revolutionary influence....Socialist realism is the most advanced creative method, and it is the method we advocate" (p.182). Further, "socialist art must be rich in ideals and must to a high degree combine truthfulness and revolutionary fervour. Revolutionary romanticism is what we need" (p. 183). (Revolutionary romanticism is defined in this speech and elsewhere by Chinese art theorists as a particularly intense and ideal form of socialist realism.) Zhou asserts, however, that "it is incorrect to regard the new art ... as ... not indigenous to Chinese soil" because "foreign forms, once they have struck root in our soil, gradually become our own. Our people have always been good at learning from foreign countries" (p. 186). The speech contains other important statements of policy, but its insistence on "revolutionary fervour" and the Chinese nature of socialist realism is germinal. Reactions to the Hundred Flowers Movement The Hundred Flowers Movement, meant to encourage greater freedom for artists, resulted in cultural workers criticizing official cultural policies to a degree that the art authorities had not anticipated. In May 1957 Mao Zedong initiated the Anti-Rightist Campaign to restrain this burst of criticism: "In the last few months, everyone has been trying to criticize dogmatism, but they have let revisionism escape. Obviously dogmatism should be criticized, but now we should begin to criticize revisionism....Some of the dogmatism being criticized ... is actually Marxism."15 In June 1957 the Central Committee issued a 'directive on organizing forces to prepare for a counter-attack on the attack made by the Rightists" (p. 50). Domestication of socialist realism in the Chinese art academies Neither the criticism that came forth during the Hundred Flowers Movement nor the countercriticism of the Anti-Rightist Campaign restrained the powerful influence of Soviet socialist realism on Chinese arts. Between 1955 and 1957 the Soviet oil painter Konstantin M. Maksimov taught a two-year postgraduate course at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, attended by Chinese art professionals from all over the country. Maksimov's legacy to Chinese art was to be enormous. Because the Soviet academic system stressed mastery of drawing, particularly the depiction of volume, as the basis for creation in all media, Chinese students in departments other than oil painting also had to learn it, including those studying printmaking, traditional Chinese painting and sculpture. Some of Maksimov's personal preferences also became influential. A portrait painter, he had a predilection for the Soviet device whereby a monumental quality in single-figure paintings is gained by depicting only the upper portion of the body, rendered as a more or less triangular section fairly close to the picture plane. The image in Yan Han's Old Shepherd, 1957 (cat.37), an adumbrated torso seen from a low point of view, exemplifies the powerful dramatic effect of these combined techniques. Yan had visited the Soviet Union in 1950, was familiar with these artistic strategems, and had already used this angle of view in his print Peace, from 1952.16 Yan also would have known Maksimov's work because both were on the faculty of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The Old Shepherd is a perfect realization of socialist realism in the mode of revolutionary romanticism, as advocated by Zhou Yang in his September 1956 speech. Its model qualities have made it one of the most reproduced prints from the period. A single heroic figure rendered in this dramatic way was to remain for decades a staple of Chinese printmaking, as in Jiang Zhi's Fighting Drum, 1961 (cat. 76); Wu Qiangnian's Our Group's Party Secretary, 1961 (cat. 88); Li Yitai's Marxism Is the Most Lucid and Lively Philosophy, 1974, (cat. 72); Li Huasheng's Ten Thousand Mile Voyage, 1975 (cat. 99); and Zhang Huaijiang's Pillar, 1981 (cat. 59), among others. Some of these artists adopt another trait found in many Soviet prints: the person's character is conveyed by the objects surrounding him, including, in the case of Jiang Zhi, tiny vignettes. Yan Han and Zhang Huaijiang, however, eliminate almost all background, in a more typically Chinese fashion. Created to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary, in 1957, of the Peoples' Liberation Army, Li Shaoyan's Breaking the Road, 1957 (cat. 78), adopts another compositional type popular in Soviet art and well-known in China through publications and exhibitions since the 1940s. (Maksimov also taught how to arrange figures in a convoy in his course at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.)17 A strong horizontal line, crossed by both large vertical elements and numerous small lines slanted in the direction of movement, crosses a long, horizontal format whose proportions resemble a classical Chinese handscroll; but, whereas the handscroll is viewed a section at a time, this print is meant to be seen in its entirety at a glance, in the Western convention. The print gains further dramatic impact by Li's use of the Soviet speciality of extensive negative carving of the block to produce large areas of black surrounded by, and articulated with, vibrating white. Art During The Great Leap Forward With the onset of the *Great Leap Forward, artists were presented with a host of new circumstances. Begun by Mao Zedong in March 1958, the Great Leap Forward consisted of a series of nationwide mass campaigns mounted to speed up the country's development. It was expected that steel production, especially, would be greatly increased and lead to the development of heavy industry; at the same time, the communization of agriculture was expected to bring increased crop yields. Cultural workers were also expected to increase their efforts. Artists were sent to aid workers and peasants, with the objects of assisting them to increase production, learning about their lives and teaching them how to create art. A period of rapid change, the Great Leap Forward disrupted the lives of many artists but also presented them with new themes and circumstances that led to considerable stylistic innovation. The Soviet Union considered the Great Leap Forward a divergence from the "correct path of socialist construction," and tensions between the two countries led, in 1960, to the withdrawal of Soviet technicians and the cessation of material aid to China. The dissensions evoked a heightened sense of nationalism, expressed in art as in other areas of national life. Although many artists continued to produce works in the socialist realist style (by this time thoroughly domesticated), the use of native art forms as sources for creation was seen as an expression of patriotism. Using native forms realized Mao's instructions, enunciated in the Yan'an Talks (and regularly quoted by art authorities afterwards), to "make the past serve the present." Nianhua workshops come under criticism The traditional workshops producing nianhua (which in the early 1950s had been the leading national art form to carry political content) came under criticism for lapsing from their political tasks. According to Maria Galikowski, a survey done by a Chinese art journalist in 1958 found that the workshops had reverted to the original pre-Liberation subject matter, and only 2.6% of the prints depicted "the lives of workers, peasants and soldiers and other political themes."18 A concerted effort was made by art authorities to see that the pictures again carried the correct political content. Water Reservoir, 1959 (cat.6), from Yangjiabu (in Shandong Province), is an example of a print to which political content has been added to traditional themes: a water reservoir and electric pylons have been introduced into a design with time-honored symbols of happiness and good fortune-fat boys frolicking on carps-to illustrate the rewards of the Great Leap Forward. By the mid-1960s the Shandong provincial workshops were being held up as models of reform, to be emulated by workshops elsewhere.19 The good life that comes when collectives are converted into communes became a central theme for reformed nianhua everywhere. The vigorous motion depicted in The People's Commune Is Good, from Yangliuqing (in Tianjin Municipality), undated but from about this time (cat. 11), conveys the quality of intense, all-out effort in which the peasants were engaged. Troupes performing the lion and dragon dances (both traditional at New Year's time as rituals to encourage successful crops) lead a triumphant group of celebrants across an elegant bridge, part of a new water conservancy project, the building of which was a main objective of Great Leap Forward mass peasant mobilization. The print is an exact pictorial realization of events as described in an editorial in Renmin ribao (People's Daily), dated September 1958: "Where the people's communes have already come into existence, the peasants, beating drums and gongs, celebrated the occasion with great joy, and their enthusiasm for production has reached new heights."20 The dances and the giant lotus flowers present the modern theme in the context of traditional peasant culture. Mass culture comes to the communes In The Commune's Club, undated but from the late 1950s (cat. 10), also from Yangliuqing, we see an outer wall adorned with the kinds of murals and posters that peasants were then producing with the help of professignal artists assigned to the communes. Such decoration realized the period slogan, "Every home a poem, Every household a painting." The choice of the club as the subject over other commune buildings underlines the emphasis on bringing culture to the rural population that followed a National Working Conference on Rural Culture, held in April 1958, in Beijing. During the conference, it was decided that the peasants were to participate in all kinds of cultural activities hitherto unknown to them, and that the commune culture club was to be the locus for this popularization.21 The print shows the peasants, who exude the same animation and exuberance as those in The People's Commune is Good, converging at the site. In the distance, industrial installations demonstrate rural development and self-sufficiency, another goal of the Great Leap Forward. Development of socialist landscape art In The Commune's Club, the artist combines Chinese with Western techniques, as so often recommended by the art authorities. However, the particular combination in this print is new. In places, it resembles a guohua landscape painting, that is, one executed with traditional Chinese painting media. Since 1949, guohua painting, whose typical subjects were birds and flowers, trees, scholars at their favorite pastimes, and landscapes, had been tainted as a reactionary form of art that catered to the tastes of the literati and landlord classes. Moreover, the Yan'an Talks had stressed that the masses were the only correct subject of art, whereas people were always subordinate elements in guohua landscape paintings. Guohua artists had been experimenting with ways to make the traditional form yield the required new political content and by this time had learned how to incorporate the works of man, evidence of the masses' contribution to socialist construction, into their landscapes in a way that corrected the defect. The landscapes in a guohua painting exhibition in Jiangsu in 1958 were praised in art journals, indicating not only that guohua artists had solved the problem, but that the incorporation of this national art form into the acceptable category was part of the general nationalist trend to "make the past serve the present" and develop "a truly national form."22 Having won approved status, the stylistic traits of landscape paintings were soon emulated in prints. The Commune's Club, for example, resembles in many particulars a painting in the Jiangsu exhibition called People's Commune Dining Hall.23 Trees, depicted as in traditional Chinese painting, decorate the environment; the viewer looks down into the courtyard from the traditional Chinese elevated point of view, while Western perspective and careful description lay out the commune before our eyes, as it had in the Jiangsu painting, although the point of view in the painting is from the side rather than down the middle. (The point of view, elevated and with convergence of the lines of perspective dead-center through the building complex, had been used by print workshops at the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911); it is the Chinese landscape elements and the subject matter that link this print to the new type of guohua landscape.) Reemergence of traditional Chinese techniques and style The Commune's Club was printed by shuiyin, the traditional Chinese workshop's method of woodblock printing. Shuiyin lends itself to emulating guohua painting because both use water-based ink and colors. The medium was brought into fashion in the late 1950s by professional printmakers seeking a nationalist alternative to the oilbased inks introduced with, and associated with, European printmaking. Huang Peimo, a woodblock artist from Jiangsu (a province in which the art authorities now were encouraging traditional landscape painters and where the landscape exhibition mentioned above had taken place), set out to develop new ways of using shuiyin to achieve effects similiar to the line and wash of guohua landscapes. Returning from Fishing on the Yellow Sea, 1962 (cat. 22), created after the crest of the Great Leap Forward had passed, is a model of how the expressive qualities of line and gradation of ink intensities of traditional painting can be emulated in a print. The work is politically correct as well, because the dominance of human activity in the foreground of the seascape suggests that man's mastery of the sea is being achieved through socialist effort. Shuiyin is also used to suggest the colored wash of traditional guohua painting in Giving Milk in the Field, 1959 (cat. 71), by Zhao Zongzao. To further the resemblance, the artist also prints lines that approximate the texture strokes and outlining of objects common in traditional painting and uses the vertical painting format. The theme, however, was taken from Soviet art: a mother who interrupts her work in the fields to nurse her infant, brought to her by elderly peasants. The theme of mother-nursing-in-the-field was taken up by artists during the Great Leap Forward, because the commune took over many household activities, including childcare, to free mothers for work outside the home. In All Four Seasons Are Spring, 1960 (cat. 70), Zhao again uses shuiyin, but this time appropriates the decorative aspects of peasant art to produce a different but new, original, nationalist style: from popular prints, he adopts their solid, bright colors and tilted-up ground, where near and far objects are almost the same size. Western elements are not obtrusive, but there is some convergence of the lines of perspective as in Western art, and the black ground that heightens contrast with the bright colors would never have been used in a traditional peasant creation. The message of the print is that the new commune system benefits the peasants raising silkworms. Traditionally, this had been a peasant family enterprise demanding extraordinary effort to feed and protect the growing worms but undertaken for the extra income it brought in; here it is portrayed as a commune activity that allows time even for relaxed study. Applied to the period theme, Zhao's stylistic innovation was also precisely what the art authorities sought. In a review of the National Exhibition of Chinese Art held in 1960, Deng Wen states that "the outstanding achievement of our woodcut artists lies in the fact that many of them have ... taken over the decorative feature of traditional art to establish an original style, thus acting as a vanguard to carry forward the national traditions and improve artistic technique."24 Emergence of amateur worker and peasant artists During the Great Leap Forward, much of the artistic productivity of professional artists went to aiding workers and peasants in the creation of ephemeral forms of art such as wall murals and the kind of posters glimpsed in The Commune's Club (cat. 10). Amateur art produced by the masses was featured and praised in art journals and in national exhibitions throughout 1958 and 1959, and many amateur artists became famous. At this time Song Enhou (a welder) and Chao Mei (an army agricultural worker) came to public attention. Both subsequently became professionals. Song Enhou's Again Good Quality Steel, 1959 (cat. 103), is a model print not only because it takes as its subject the Great Leap Forward campaign to raise steel production ("Everybody Is Making Steel" was the theme of an exhibition in 1958), but because it depicts a worker-hero in the style of revolutionary romanticism; that is, socialist realism with heightened intensity, idealized and more heroic.25 Such qualities had become the touchstone for portrayal of model workers since Zhou Yang's report of 1956 (quoted above). The striking use of red increases the dramatic impact of the print, but red also symbolizes the Communist ideology that motivates the worker's activity. The print is an early example of the emblematic use of the color that was to become so prominent in the *Cultural Revolution. For the Chinese viewer, the welder-artist Song Enhou was himself also a subject of the print, because the class origins of artistically talented manual laborers were made known and emphasized when their work was displayed at exhibitions, or when it was published. Worker-artists were proof that socialism could achieve its objective and erase the boundaries between classes, because workers could perform the same tasks as intellectuals. Another great project of the Great Leap Forward, the mass resettlement of demobilized soldiers in distant Heilongjiang Province in 1958, created the conditions for a new school of printmaking. Chao Mei and his colleagues developed an innovative pictorial language to represent its topography and, in the process, created a landscape style that was not only new to Chinese art but also gave a symbolic significance to landscape depiction that it had not enjoyed in traditional guohua landscapes. September in the North, 1964 (cat. 18), and Natural Defense of the Northern Border, 1978 (cat. l9), though created after the Great Leap Forward, exemplify the style Chao developed at that time. In September in the North we sense the vastness of the plains reclaimed for agriculture: fields stretch across the high line of the horizon and continue beyond the picture's edge. In Natural Defense of the Northern Border, compositional emphasis is reversed: the horizon line is low, and the vertical elements of the trees continue past the picture's upper boundary, asserting the awesome height of a type of forest specific to the region. The dramatically low or high viewpoints and horizontal division of these designs were devices borrowed from Soviet art depicting the vastness of Siberia, whose topography is similiar to that of Heilongjiang on the other side of the border.26 The color effects of Chao's prints, however, differ from the Soviet models known to him. Rather than the typically dull earth tones and dark greens preferred by Soviet artists, he uses rich colors. The opacity of his inks emulates the effects of oil-painting in prints and was a technical innovation pioneered by Chao for Chinese art. Chao's prints demonstrate how socialism has tamed nature and/or uses it for man's benefit, content that, as we have seen, made Chinese guohua landscape paintings and landscape prints politically correct. The expanse of red sorghum in September in the North fills the print with the color symbolic of Communism, thus reinforcing the political statement. In addition, the vast expanses and awesome forests in Chao's landscape prints are an expression of the use of landscape art to depict the noble land as an embodiment of national pride. This symbolic usage was new to Chinese landscape prints and, like the use of landscape to demonstrate socialist construction, it was preceded by its use and acceptance as a theme in guohua landscape painting. We shall take up the subject of landscape as a vehicle for nationalism at greater length when discussing landscape prints created in the 1970s, here noting only that the monumental qualities depicted in Chao Mei's prints are among the first expressions of revolutionary romanticism in prints that take landscape as their subject.
History Prints Nineteen fifty-nine was the tenth anniversary of the People's Republic of China and occurred during the Great Leap Forward. To celebrate the event, construction began in 1958, on or near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, of the Ten Great Buildings, one of which was the Great Hall of the People. Several of the buildings were museums of history; all required numerous commissions to fill their walls. Altogether, it was a period of intense art production focused on a review of the history of the Communist Party, which had brought about the revolution. Printmakers, of course, took part in this history art movement that continued for several years. Revival of the Creative Print Movement style One of the central themes of history art was the martyrdom of revolutionaries before Liberation. Important in the history of the revolutionary struggle in Sichuan, the Dung Heap was a notorious fortress-prison. A search was made for individuals who had been imprisoned there by the Guomindang and who could write a record of their experiences. The two authors who wrote the novel Red Rock, Luo Gongbin and Yang Yiyan, actually had been political prisoners; Luo had been incarcerated in the fortress as a child, like the young hero of the novel, and had escaped. Prominent Sichuan printmakers were commissioned to illustrate the book, including Niu Wen, Li Shaoyan, Li Huanmin, Wu Qiangnian, and Xu Kuang, who are represented in this exhibition. The novel's action takes place in the 1940s, before the founding of the People's Republic of China, and to illustrate it the artists revived the black and white expressionist styles derived from central European printmaking and favored by artists in the Creative Print Movement who worked in Sichuan at the time the events took place. As noted above, the use of chiaroscuro, large areas of black, and portrayal of the masses as debased and oppressed-characteristic of this art in the 1930s and 1940s&emdash;had been deemed in the Yan'an Talks to be unsuitable for art intended for the masses, and these characteristics had been removed from the category of acceptable styles. Apparently, however, the art establishment validated the expressionist social protest styles for prints depicting pre-1949 history, and most of the prints created to illustrate the novel have some of these characteristics (fig. 5). Niu Wen's Dream of 'Small Radish Head', 1961 (cat. 82), created as an illustration for Red Rock, conveys the disturbed nature of the child's dream in an expressionist style. Elements of a black and ominous cityscape are arranged according to principles from both European and Chinese perspective: we look almost straight out at the locked gate and at the same time down into the street with the multiple-viewpoints of Chinese perspective; but, with a technique taken from European expressionism, buildings, skewed and distorted, traverse the design along the diagonal created by Western perspective. The black ink that fills up almost all of the prints surface is patterned with white lines that are unconnected, uneven, and orientated in all different directions- effects that echo those of traditional Chinese North China paper cuts. Such patterning of discontinuous and irregular lines occurs in scissor-cut paper cuts because the scissor does not connect its snips one with the other in paper cuts-if it did, the paper would fall away; furthermore, the scissors, cutting rapidly, also leaves signs of its abrupt changes of directions in "bent" and irregular lines. The disturbing quality of Niu's print arises from combining distorted perspective, borrowed from Western expressionism, with the expressionist agitation of the many-directioned patterning of lines (created by negative carving of the block) native to the paper cut. Niu Wen, who had spent years in Yan'an and was familiar with paper cut effects, uses them to create a striking and original mixture, an "expressionist" print whose compelling nature owes as much to Chinese antecedents as to the West. A comparison of Niu Wen's style in Dream of 'Small Radish Head', 1961 (cat.82), with the same artistis print The East Is Red, The Sun Is Rising, 1959 (cat.81) also created with Yan'an paper cut effects in mind (discussed below) reveals what different aesthetic ends this gifted artist could achieve starting with the same artistic prototype. Xu Kuang, at the time a young artist, also revived aspects of the Creative Print Movement's themes and expressionist styles (though somewhat toned down) for The Hatred of the Boat Towers, 1964 (cat. 91), a series within a larger, group history series called The Crimes of the Capitalist Class Recorded. Created as part of the ongoing history campaign, Xu's contribution also recalls, stylistically, prints from the 1930s and 1940s in order to depict events from that period. The artist uses large areas of black and chiaroscuro, and the prints take oppressed people as their subjects. The designs have a static quality, however, and lack the sense of tension and conflict found in works of the earlier period, such as Li Hua's four prints from the series, Raging Tide, 1947 (cat. 26). The print styles of the 1930s and 1940s were natural to the older generation of printmakers, who had begun their careers working in these modes. Yan Han, who had studied Western art in Hangzhou before going to Yan'an, uses some techniques learned in his youth, along with others culled from both classical Western and socialist realist painting, for his series of illustrations for the narrative poem Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang, 1961 (cat.38, A,B,C), a tale set in the 1940s. Some prints from this series are remarkable for realizing the same epic quality in very small formats that was finding expression at the time in huge canvasses commissioned for the Ten Great Buildings; the scenes of charging horses (no. 9 in the series) and the depiction of peasants beating an evil landlord (no. 13) could serve as designs for monumental works. Yan also uses flaming red (as in no. 9) that adds aesthetic drama, while simultaneously alluding to the Party, in the practice popular during the Great Leap Forward. Huang Xinbo, one of the founders in Shanghai of Lu Xun's Creative Print Movement in the 1930s, also returned to his own earlier style (influenced, among others, by the works of the American printmaker Rockwell Kent [1882-1971] who, in turn, had influenced Soviet printmakers) for his history print recalling the struggles of early revolutionaries. In Keep Standing Up&emdash;Uprising of the Guangdong Red Army, 1961 (cat. 111), the volume on the faces is rendered with solid areas of black, while figures are constructed by blocks of black ink articulated by the white lines of negative carving. The two representatives of the masses, however, are portrayed as determined and capable rather than as the tortured and exploited victims who people Huang's early works. Using vivid red, Huang joins other artists during the period who use red for both its dramatic effects and symbolic allusion. Zhao Yannian, also a veteran of 1930s Shanghai, chose the image of the print movement's founder-patron to recall early revolutionary history. In Mr. Lu Xun, 1961 (cat. 64), Zhao's choice of subject and use of a modified expressionist style, so popular in the print movement Lu encouraged, is a double allusion to revolutionary beginnings: Lu was a leader in promulgating revolutionary ideas through his writings and also advocated using art to promote revolution; furthermore, he urged both writers and artists to use revolutionary styles to convey revolutionary messages. Lu was thus the quintessential revolutionary man. In the Yan'an Talks, Mao Zedong frequently cites Lu's arguments that art should serve revolution and indicates their parallelism with his own beliefs. In the closing lines of the Yan'an Talks Mao also quotes a famous couplet by the writer to imply that Lu shared his insistence that the artist be the servant of the masses- "Stern browed I coolly face the fingers of a thousand men. Head bowed I'm glad to be an ox for little children"-and urges that it become the motto for all cadres.27 Mao does take exception to what he calls the obscurity and deviousness of Lu's essay style, and warns his readers (writers and artists) to avoid such qualities. Zhao Yannian was certainly familiar with both the praise and the criticism allotted to Lu in the Yan'an Talks, and his print avoids the heavy chiaroscuro of his own early works in the expressionist style (long deemed obscure to the masses) for a more Sinified mode of modelling Lu's face. Soviet socialist realist painting influences printmaking Jiang Bibo turned to Soviet socialist realist painting for stylistic inspiration and translated its effects into her woodblock history print Taking Luding Bridge by Force, 1961 (cat. 98). Figures in dramatic postures struggle along the bridge, which is depicted with strong diagonal elements intersecting a line that rises slightly from the horizontal, a composition often found in Soviet epic painting. Symbolic red-made even more dramatic by being coupled with yellow-stands out, as if in relief, to the light, greyish-brown and black tones of the cliffs and river below, thus accentuating the deep distance of the latter. The greyed tones of the background recall classic woodblock printing inks and create the impression of a "painting" superimposed upon a print. Like Chao Mei, Jiang Bibo experiments with ink and colors to create a style totally new to Chinese woodblock printing. Style as historical allusion Artistic allusions to *Yan'an, the base area from which the revolution had expanded to the whole of China, were especially appropriate and could be stylistic as well as thematic. Niu Wen, who could work in a wide range of styles, used figures like those in peasant paper cuts made in Yan'an, the former Communist capital, to create The East Is Red, The Sun Is Rising, 1959 (cat. 81). In the print, black outlined figures of Tibetan children dance around a piano (a new instrument in their society) while singing a Communist song popular since Yan'an days. They are silhouetted on a blank ground and appear very like window flowers, paper cuts pasted on windows, so popular in North China. The continuous circle of the children's linked hands parallels the continuous ligatures between components of a paper cut design that prevent the elements from falling apart. The title of the print is also the title of a song-whose lyrics are a poem-and amplifies the picture's meaning; the use of poetry in this way is another example of elitist aesthetics being co-opted for popular art. The idea that poetry-is-painting-is-poetry is a literati concept dating from at least the Song Dynasty (960-1278). The critic Bo Songnian, commenting on the addition of poetry to the peasant wall murals then being created in many villages, commented, "Peasants say there is poetry in painting and painting in poetry. When you can unite painting and poetry, then you are a real expert."28 In this print, Niu Wen uses antecedents from both popular and elite art to "make the past serve the present" and allude to the history of the Communist Party. (In the present less politically-oriented period, the picture has been posted on the Internet with the title Happy Tibetan Children; the impact of the print is lessened by the new title, which does not evoke the original allusions.)
Art in the Early 1960s Great Leap Forward policies were reviewed and reevaluated throughout 1960, 1961 and 1962 and, in effect many were cancelled. Cultural institutions now reduced the excessive extra-mural work activities of artists and students and encouraged professionalism rather than amateurism. It was a period of renewed creativity for China's professional artists. Soviet art continues to influence Chinese artists The break with the Soviet Union that occurred in 1960 was reflected as a subject in Chinese art, although Chinese printmakers continued to create in Soviet print styles. In Fighting Drum, l961 (cat.76), Jiang Zhi, a veteran of both Shanghai and Yan'an, uses a Soviet print modality-tiny vignettes accompany the main theme as a gloss on the main action&emdash;to emphasize China's support of revolution in the Third World. Because the Soviet Union claimed for itself the role of tutor to oppressed peoples, and China now saw herself as the natural leader, there is irony in Jiang's use of a technique popular among Soviet printmakers in the l930s to dramatize this subject for the 1960s. The print was made into a stamp, so its message would be delivered, literally, to the nations to which Chinese assistance was being offered. (fig.6) Emergence of ethnic minority artists in Sichuan The first half of the decade of the 1960s marked the emergence of the first generation of professionally trained artists from among the minority nationalities living in China's southwestern provinces. The Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts had established special classes for them, and the print artists Ah Ge (of the Yizu people) and Qijia Dawa (of the Zangzu [Tibetan] people) graduated in 1964. They specialized in depicting the customs of their own peoples, and both received exceptional attention because of their origins. Ah Ge's print A Mother Is Learning, 1964 (cat. 96), conveys empathy and affection with great technical skill. But in a review of her prints written in 1977, when her art was already recognized for its excellence, only a few words were granted to the aesthetic aspects of her work. It is the artist's feelings about the Party on which the reviewer dwells: "Her first work after her graduation was 'My Mother,' a series of woodcuts depicting the sufferings her mother had endured in the old society. If it had not been for Chairman Mao and the Communist Party, her family would have been wiped out, and her people would have never become free."29 The tractor as a theme for art The peaceful atmosphere of Ah Ge's print, which focuses on a quiet moment in the mother's day, is paralleled in other prints of the time. For artists, the first few years of the 1960s were relatively tranquil, with few intense political campaigns. The untitled Tianjin nianhua, undated but probably from the early 1960s, (cat. 12), shows peasants gathered around a tractor to rest and eat; relaxation rather than intense activity is emphasized. With the tractor as a centerpiece, the print is a model of the reformed nianhua, which has neither theme nor design from pre-Liberation antecedents. The marvelous aid of the tractor to peasants doing strenuous field work was a period theme. The industrial sector recovered from the dislocations of the Great Leap Forward more quickly than agriculture and, by 1965, the level of output of heavy equipment was more than double that of 1957.30 The tractor symbolizes this achievement. It appears also in some Suzhou nianhua of slightly later date but, unlike the Tianjin print discussed above, the Suzhou prints retain strong links to traditional nianhua in both theme and style, while incorporating the latest appropriate political content. In the pair of prints for Bumper Harvest, 1963 (cat. 15, A, B), a performance of the lion dance (to bring on rain and a good harvest), accompanied by other traditional images, dominates the scene. The tractor peeks out from behind the pennant-carrying lad on the left but can scarcely be seen because it is surrounded by cotton and grain, the field crops featured in nianhua since 1949 instead of the traditional fruits and flowers that had been emblems of luck. One banner, however, praises commune life, reflecting a new campaign already underway to recommunize cultivation.31 Private plots, forbidden in 1957, had again been permitted since 1961, but now a reversal of the reversal had begun. The print has been updated accordingly and bears the latest slogans. The color red dominates the design. As the *Cultural Revolution grew nearer, the content of nianhua became increasingly more political. Another nianhua from Suzhou, Meeting the "Spring Ox", 1965 (cat. 17), has strong links to traditional nianhua in design and in some of its motifs, but a tractor, surrounded by grain and cotton, is now the central character, underlining the contribution of socialism to the peasants' welfare. The print contains symbols especially associated with Mao Zedong, the initiator and driving force of the Cultural Revolution, such as the sunflower that always turns to face the sun, as the Chinese people turn to face their leader; and, on the left, held up by a soldier, the little red book of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, already, in l964, being distributed to members of the *People's Liberation Army. The driver of the tractor in Meeting the "Spring Ox", is a woman. Women, this time armed, also are featured in the pair of Suzhou prints Chinese Sons and Daughters Have High Aspirations and They'd Rather Wear Weapons Than Pretty Clothes, 1964 (cat. 16). These prints reflect not only the feminism of *Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's wife, who was already playing an increasingly more active role in cultural matters, but also the fact that, in 1962, Mao had ordered that a civilian militia be formed and placed under the control of the People's Liberation Army.32 Because he believed in the power of the masses to accomplish almost any goal set for them, Mao envisioned a peasant militia as a potent force against China's enemies, even against the mechanized army of the United States. The mottos on the kites reflect Chinese concern about America's increasing involvement in Vietnam (which is on China's southern border), and American support for Taiwan; their militant tone is a harbinger of the atmosphere of struggle that accompanied the Cultural Revolution, about to descend on the nation. |
.jpg.tn){kind=link}
.jpg.tn){kind=link}
.jpg.2tn.){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}