Modern Oil Painting Before the Pacific War
Western-style painting became a required part of China's national education
curriculum in 1902, initially taught by foreign instructors and later by
their students. Over the next half century many students studied art overseas,
principally in Japan and Europe. They brought back to China the full range
of modernist trends in which they participated abroad, and as attempts were
made to spread their knowledge, a lively debate erupted over the roles different
styles of oil painting might play in a modernizing China.
The French-trained Lin Fengmian, appointed director of the Hangzhou National
Art Academy in 1928, trained several generations of influential modernists.
His circles dominated the First National Art Exhibition of 1929, but, unfortunately,
the paintings produced in the academy's heyday were destroyed following
the Japanese invasion of 1937. Xu Beihong, who also studied in Europe in
the 1920s, was appointed to head the art department of National Central
University in the capital, where he promoted an opposing practice, that
of academic realism.
In addition to these two dominant institutional trends, other influential
artists who studied in Japan or Europe came back to China committed to styles
ranging from post-impressionism to fauvism and finally, in the 1930s, to
surrealism. Idealists such as the Paris-trained Pang Xunqin, for example,
fervently hoped in the 1930s that a great international artist would emerge
from within his modernist circles in Shanghai.
Oil Painting in the War Years, 1937-1945
The extraordinary pluralism of the Chinese
art world in the 1930s, and the cosmopolitan dreams that accompanied it,
were shattered by the outbreak of the Pacific war, which forced many artists
into an eight-year exile in China's impoverished interior, and threatened
the very existence of their nation. China's public institutions relocated
far inland, to Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan after the Japanese occupation
of the coastal cities in 1937. The truly desperate situation of China itself
and of its refugee artists left little energy for the luxury of pure self-expression.
For those who continued to paint, a new, self-reflective tone replaced the
joy to be seen earlier in the decade, and social commentary became a more
common theme in painting.
Graphic Design and China's Modernization
The impulse toward modernity in Chinese art was as multi-faceted as the
society from which it sprang. Commercial artists of the Republican period
(1911-1949), with one foot in modern industry and technology and the other
in literature and art, brought the most compelling aspects of Japanese,
European and North American design to China, and particularly to China's
publishing center of Shanghai.
The rise of artistically creative cover designs is often attributed to the
circle around the May Fourth writer Lu Xun, who designed covers for his
own books as early as 1909 and remained closely involved with the designs
of the many publications he authored or edited until his death in 1936.
All the works in this section of the exhibition were in Lu Xun's personal
collection.
Like Lu Xun, many of the designers who worked for the Shanghai publishers
had studied in Japan or were enthusiasts of Japanese art and technology,
but also informed themselves about modernist trends in Europe. Their covers
thus ranged from Japanese-style vegetal compositions to constructivist abstractions.
Many artists played with modern lettering and typography, for which the
Chinese script offered unique challenges and opportunities. Of particular
note in Lu Xun's own designs was his interest in archaeological motifs,
which he rearranged in a contemporary manner. Modern Chinese design, publishing,
and consuming had unique local characteristics, but Chinese design artists,
at their best, presented their urban audiences with fully mature products
of an up-to-date international design vocabulary.
The Birth of the Modern Woodcut Movement
The modern Chinese woodcut is a form of art that, from its inception, fully
synthesized the cosmopolitan aspirations of its practitioners with the particularities
of their Chinese situation.
The birth of the new Chinese woodcut movement is usually dated to August,
1931, when Lu Xun invited thirteen Shanghai art students to study print-making
techniques with the Japanese print-maker Uchiyama Kayoshi. Lu Xun further
made his growing collection of European, Soviet, and Japanese woodcuts available
to young artists for study in exhibitions and in reproduction albums.
An important thrust of the new woodcut movement was self-expression in a
modernist mode, but many of the young artists, like their mentor, were leftists,
and communicating social concerns to a broad audience was part of their
mission. The early prints were usually not numbered and were often given
away rather than sold. Those exhibited here belonged to Lu Xun and are thus
firmly dateable to the period between 1932 and 1936.
With Lu Xun's encouragement, the art of woodblock printing spread quickly
among China's young artists, and many abandoned their studies of oil painting
in order to devote themselves to its development by making prints, editing
journals, and organizing exhibitions. After the Japanese invasion, the young
printmakers scattered, some joining the Communist community based in Yanan
and others working for the war effort in various parts of the Nationalist-
controlled territory. Woodcuts, seen in the previous era as instruments
of social change, now became weapons of national salvation.
The Politicization of the Print
The communist army made its headquarters in remote Yan'an, in Shaanxi province,
for more than a decade during the 1930s and 1940s, and Yan'an became the
place where ideals of a Chinese communist society were first put into practice.
In 1942 Mao Zedong delivered a series of speeches in Yan'an that came to
be known as his "Talks on Literature and Art." In response to
his directives, communist artists made folk elements a distinctive aspect
of their prints. In order to better communicate with north Chinese peasants,
most of whom were illiterate, they developed clearly readable outline styles
that were familiar to their audiences, emulating in their simplicity the
woodcut posters made for holidays by peasant artists. Prints from the Communist-
controlled areas tended to be optimistic in tone and naive in style.
Many woodcut artists who returned to China's cities, particularly Shanghai,
following the Japanese surrender in 1945 devoted themselves to social criticism,
and often to criticism of the government. At the same time, artists such
as Li Hua sought to perfect his technique, creating work that was at once
sophisticated and visually compelling. Protest gave this art its power,
and the Communist victory in 1949, which was supported by many woodcut artists,
concluded its mission.
Text information prepared by Dr.
Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen
Last updated 27 February, 1998 by Janice
M. Glowski.
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