Art for New China, 1950-1980
The People's Republic of China was established
on October 1, 1949. Following the principles established in Mao's Yanan
Talks on Art and Literature of 1942, the new government set about creating
a new art for the new nation. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt to
transplant the Yanan folk styles to China's cities, it was decided that
oil painting would be a primary focus, and that Soviet socialist realism
was the most appropriate model. Young artists were sent to Leningrad to
study and a Soviet artist, Konstantin Maksimov, was invited to Beijing to
instruct an elite class of young painters. In two major campaigns in 1959
and 1961, these artists produced major history paintings in the new manner
for the state buildings erected around Tiananmen Square. Establishing both
a Chinese socialist realist style and a revolutionary iconography, this
group of paintings determined the course of China's artistic development.
Its artists were dispersed to different parts of the nation, where they
continued to paint and served as mentors to China's next generation of painters.
Socialist Realist Guohua
The early 1950s saw a systematic program to replace classical Chinese ink
painting with an art that was socially useful and not tied to modes of brushwork
considered backward. The primary means by which this was accomplished was
through training a younger generation of painters in principles of Western
academic drawing, which they then applied to guohua figure painting.
The idealistic young artists created an unprecedented mode of Chinese painting,
in which new techniques were used to paint themes that had never before
been seen in traditional Chinese art. Early in their project they began
modifying the socialist realist idiom, realizing the expressive potential
of the blank backgrounds and rich ink tones typical of traditional Chinese
painting.
Traditionalist Guohua in Socialist China
While younger artists pursued the creation of a new figure painting, traditionally
trained older artists remained marginalized during the first years of new
China. They reemerged, with Zhou Enlai's assistance, in the late 1950s,
when institutes devoted to the preservation of Chinese painting were established
in a few major cities. Although there was still little place in the new
society for the private scale of small scroll paintings, guohua painters
who had been most influential in the 1930s and 1940s returned to their life's
work.
Worried by the damage to national morale of the psychologically devastating
1957 Anti-rightist Campaign and the exhausting 1958 Great Leap Forward,
Zhou Enlai took the role of spokesman for a 1959 policy which urged that
"one hundred flowers bloom and one hundred schools of thought contend."
In the art world, aspirations pent up for a decade seemed to burst forth
in a variety of traditionalist and quasi-traditionalist paintings. Pan Tianshou
successfully transformed his paintings into the monumental size needed for
public display. He Tianjian filled his classical landscapes with contemporary
iconography. The Nanjing and Shaanxi painters made innovations in socialist
landscape painting, while other artists, like Wu Hufan and Lin Fengmian,
remained committed to an apolitical realm of pure art.
The Iconography of the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution, 1966-1976
One of the great man-made calamities of
the twentieth century was launched in the spring of 1966, when Mao Zedong
and his close advisors mobilized the youth of China in his name to protest
administrators in every sector of Chinese society. In the course of answering
his mandate to root out bad elements, they completely destroyed China's
governmental and institutional structure, caused untold suffering to their
elders and each other, and left the military as the only source of social
order.
The great irony of this period is that many of the young people who answered
Mao's call were idealists, convinced by the political rhetoric of the time
that the generational warfare Mao had unleashed would save their nation
from its enemies. They threw themselves into the movement, contributing
their talents selflessly. Young writers edited propaganda journals, actors
performed in the model operas, and artists developed a new iconography for
the cult of the heroic Chairman Mao.
Oil Painting in the Late Cultural Revolution
Order was restored to the nation's cities in the late 1960s by sending virtually
all of China's teenagers to the most remote areas to become farmers or manual
laborers. Once again, most initially considered exile in Heilongjiang, the
Chinese equivalent of Siberia, or similar desolate spots, a great patriotic
adventure, and only after the disillusioning death of the Cultural Revolution's
chief architect, General Lin Biao, in 1971, did they begin to try to find
their way home.
As China's institutional structure was slowly reconstituted in the period
between 1971 and 1976, a series of national art exhibitions were organized
under the supervision of Mao's wife Jiang Qing. The new work was intensely
propagandistic in tone, and was required to adhere rigidly to the theatrical
and sometimes bombastic style that had been developed at the beginning of
the Cultural Revolution. However, these exhibitions brought into the limelight
a new generation of artists, those who had learned to paint while working
on farms, in military camps, and in factories, and who painted subjects
from their own unique experiences. One thus finds unprecedented sites and
professions represented in monumental oil paintings by these young artists.
The most common theme is a glorification of the contribution of working
citizens, be they male or female, rural or urban, civilian or military.
The End of the Cultural Revolution
Soon after Mao Zedong died in 1976, the administrators who supervised the
Cultural Revolution, including his widow, were arrested. The abrupt removal
of their dictatorial control of the arts plunged the art world into a newly
experimental mode, where artistic goals and their means of expression were
suddenly undetermined. Most work produced between 1976 and 1980 built upon
the strong realist foundation of the preceding era, but the themes were
unlike those seen in recent decades. Unresolved reflections upon recent
history and society and impassioned complaints about the Cultural Revolution
were among the more interesting products of this period. Foretelling the
art of the 1980s and 1990s was a turn outward to the international community,
and especially to the Chinese diaspora for an examination of alternatives
to the extremes of the preceding decade.
Text information prepared by Dr.
Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen
Last updated 27 February, 1998 by Janice
M. Glowski.
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