Revolution of the Brush:
The Transformation of Chinese-Style Painting and Guohua Painters
Crisis and Transformation – The Path of Transformation - Fu Baoshi - Guan Shanyue – Li Keran – Shi Lu - Pan Tianshou -
Crisis and Transformation
For those traditional painters and calligraphers who lived in KMT-controlled areas, 1949 brought the first intimations of a crisis endangering their livelihood. In 1950, in the inaugural issue of People’s Fine Arts, Li Keran described how many people felt that the cataclysm had come for guohua:
From the moment when the People’s Liberation Army rolled into Beijing to the tumultuous welcome of the populace, absolutely everything in this renowned historical city, the bastion of residual feudal and dynastic thinking, began to undergo dramatic and unprecedented change. The Chinese art market, long sustained by comprador bureaucrats, suddenly lost its major clients, and many art shops switched to other lines of business, leaving painters with no means of support and plunging the world of traditional Chinese painting into unprecedented gloom that prompted fears for its future: ‘The advent of the new society will bring the apocalypse for Chinese-style painting in its wake’.[1]
However, Li Keran disappointed those pessimists by pointing out that guohua’s apocalypse would not be forthcoming; that event had already begun ‘six or seven hundred years previously, when Chinese painting accompanied feudal society in its decline, and it has been in decline ever since’. Li Keran adamantly insisted that traditional Chinese painting was already a heritage item with the arrival of the brand-new era and, as people’s needs had undergone change, so traditional painting too must be adapted. Indeed, following its seizure of political power throughout the country, the CPC required artists who originally lived in KMT-ruled areas to change their political standpoint, in order to serve the new regime. People noticed that this political measure conspicuously began in the second half of 1949 with the comprehensive launch of the New Nianhua Movement.
In that same inaugural issue of People’s Fine Arts (Renmin meishu), Li Hua, in an article titled ‘The Basic Problem of Transforming Chinese-Style Painting: From the Reform of Ideology Proceed to Create New Content and Forms’, argued lucidly for reform in the Chinese outlook, maintaining that the painter ‘must completely discard the baggage of literati painting and eliminate the thinking of the traditional scholar-official, replacing them with a new artistic view and new aesthetic’. He blatantly used political terms and frankly stated that, to transform Chinese painting, one must have painters ‘with a brand-new mindset and a brand-new world-view’.[2] Given these arguments, Li Hua was unsurprisingly also opposed to the continuation of traditions exemplified by traditional landscapes, flower-and-bird paintings, or works containing images of ‘the four gentlemen’ (si junzi, i.e., prunus, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum).
In his ‘Discussion on the Transformation of Guohua and the Initiative of Guohua Painters’, Hong Yiran issued a categorical warning:
It is absolutely imperative that guohua painters remold themselves by studying Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought and, more importantly, by taking part in the practice of the revolution and engaging in the struggles of the masses of the people. By doing so, they will establish for themselves a totally new and totally correct ideology and viewpoint, and they will strengthen their stance and attitude by completing their personal remolding.[3]
In April 1954, the Chinese Artists Association resolved to ‘help guohua painters take part in real life and create new works depicting the new face of the motherland’,[4] and mass organizations under the Party leadership provided traditional landscape painters with plein-air working trips to Huangshan in Anhui and Fuchunshan in Zhejiang. How did the works of these artists, including Wu Jingting, Hui Xiaotong, Dong Shouping, Zhou Zhiliang, and Wang Jiaben, brought back from their working field-trips, differ from those of ancient artists who painted during their artistic travels? Were they free to paint from nature on these organized trips? Had the scenes they visited in their travels undergone transformation, so that they were utterly different from anything painted in the past? In the account of the forum on painting from life (xiesheng) held at Huangshan on 9 June 1954 by the Guohua Group of the Creative Committee of the National Artists Association, it is recorded that the artists who took part, including Xu Yansun, Hu Peiheng, Wu Yike, Pu Songchuang, and Chen Shaomei, ‘unanimously believed that to be a painter in the New China, it was impossible to paint good works if one was divorced from real life’.
In his essay titled ‘The Experience of Painting Landscapes from Life among the Guohua Painters of Beijing’, the painter Xu Yansun succinctly encapsulated the content of Chen Yuandu’s experiments in painting guohua reflective of real life in the following image: ‘A train passes through the thick forests of the vast motherland’. Like Li Keran, Xu supported the Party’s call to artists to ‘continue to overcome their shortcomings, accumulate experience and develop guohua painting in new directions, by being educated ideologically in Marxism-Leninism and accepting the assistance of the CPC and the people’s government’.[5] The subject matter of Xu Yansun’s painting of the 1950s titled Ballad of the Army Carts, which was inspired by a poem of Du Fu, seems to have been an attempt to fulfill the painter’s interest in ‘ancient’ material and, given his clarity about the political demands of the new society made on subject matter, Xu’s depiction of the real tragedy of Du Fu can be explained as an indictment of ancient China’s feudal rulers. However, the images in the work are excessively sumptuous and meticulous, which led to the accusation that his treatment of this tragically harrowing theme had succeeded in turning the work into a flattering portrait of the prince and palace women on a leisurely hunting excursion.[6] In fact, the political demands of the new society were, unlike the Yan’an artists, beyond the comprehension of older painters such as Xu Yansun, long familiar with the life and pleasures of scholar-painter circles. As a result, Xu Yansun was singled out in the anti-Rightist movement as a ‘recruitment agent for the rightists’, and his everyday pronouncements and actions were construed as evidence of his hostility to the Party, his opposition to the Party leadership, and his efforts to undermine social unity.[7]
Group plein-air field-trips for landscape artists became a regular feature of the art scene, and in 1954 Li Keran, Zhang Ding and Luo Ming travelled to paint at the West Lake, Lake Taihu, Mount Huangshan and Fuchunshan Mountain. After returning to Beijing, they staged a three-man exhibition of their xiesheng ink paintings in the picturesque surroundings of Beihai Park, which ran from 19 September to 15 October. Most of their works demonstrated the efforts they had made to reject traditional formulae and to introduce perspective and the use of chiaroscuro into their traditional-style paintings. The universal phenomenon of introducing images and objects from everyday life into traditional-style paintings was assessed by Wang Xun in his comments on that year’s Second Exhibition of the Chinese Painting Society (11-25 July): ‘Some of the novel details that appear in the paintings, such as electric pylons, locomotives, realistically delineated houses, and cadre uniforms, explain the changes that have taken place in aesthetic thinking. However, it must also be pointed out that the real achievement of these landscape painting trips is the acquisition by the painters of new knowledge concerning brush and ink techniques’.[8]
From 1955 onwards, discussions touching on the inheritance of the traditions of painting drew in many painters and critics, and most of those at the center of the debate positioned the inheritance and improvement of skills and techniques as central among their many concerns, yet as Cai Ruohong made clear at the second enlarged meeting of the first council of the Chinese Artists Association (5-15 May 1955): ‘In order to ensure the progress of guohua creation, artists first had to improve the content and subject matter they depicted and, in landscape and figural paintings, most artists chose many subjects from actual life, delineating the style and features of our nation’s massive ongoing construction and depicting the pleasure the laboring people took in appreciating these beautiful things. Yet, even more valuable was the painters’ depiction of the noble and inspirational activities in the real life struggles of the Chinese people – their enthusiasm for hard work, the lofty ideals of socialism, the strength of will that enabled them to defy difficulties and hardships, their passion for fighting to safeguard peace … ’.[9]
The political motive succeeded in subverting the role of spiritual content and ink and brush strategies in traditional painting and, from the perspective of the demand of the leadership in the art world that art serve political goals, it was of no consequence whether or not a work was guohua or an oil painting, simply whether or not the work promoted healthy socialist thought. As Zhou Yang made clear in his report titled ‘Views on Work in the Fine Arts’ presented at the second plenary meeting of the committee of the Chinese Artists Association, the ‘advantage’ (haochu) of ‘the activities of painting from life undertaken by guohua artists’ is that they ‘have broken with the guohua tradition of stylistic imitation’. He called on painters to ‘create on the basis of life. If the reform and development of traditional Chinese painting are not able to effect the break and truly reflect the living demands of the new age, it will violate the needs of the people in this new era’.[10]
At the Second National Guohua Exhibition that opened on 27 March 1955, audiences could see guohua works that were far removed from works by ancient painters in terms of subject matter and content. Among these works were Li Hu’s Building Site Visit, Guan Shanyue’s The New Highway, Zhang Xuefu’s Turning Floods into Hydropower, Jiang Zhaohe’s Child and Dove, Zhou Changgu’s Two Lambs, and Cen Xuegong’s Raft.
The debate concerning ‘guohua’ and ‘traditional Chinese-style painting’ continued. At the same time as painters attempted to intuit and figure out political trends, they remained internally concerned about technique and expression. As a result of introducing realism’s methods to guohua, artists extended its range at the same time as they invented new brushwork techniques and modes of expression. As a result, the following innovative works made a deep impression on audiences at the Second National Guohua Exhibition which opened on 10 July 1956: Lu Yanshao’s Teaching Mother to Read, Liu Zijiu’s Prospecting for the Motherland, Fang Zengxian’s Every Grain Is Suffering, and Tang Wenxuan’s Whatever You Say, I Too Want to Join the Commune.
The Second National Art Exhibition was also regarded as ‘another great victory for artists in the New China implementing Chairman Mao’s policy of literature and art for the workers, peasants and soldiers’.[11] However, people were dissatisfied with the guohua displayed among the fruits of victory and audiences expressed misgivings about the effects achieved by guohua painters using ‘Western techniques’. Works by Tang Wenxuan, Jiang Zhaohe, Shi Lu, and Li Hu all attracted criticism. It was extremely tricky to use materials that were as difficult to handle as ink and wash on Xuan paper to depict the structure and shading of figural images, and audiences complained that the painters’ images left them ‘feeling tacky’ (wuchuo de ganjue). At the same time, the excessive use of Western techniques could lead to the charge leveled at Li Hu (Building Site Visit) and Zong Qixiang (Village Breakthrough) that their works were simply ‘Western watercolors’.[12]
At the outset, many guohua artists using the old techniques gave unsophisticated prominence to the figures in their landscapes but, under the influence of ideas of socialist realism, they experimented in developing new forms that could suitably accommodate the new content, in order to paint new landscapes ‘imbued with the new spirit’. The majority of traditional landscape painters did in fact attempt to effect this transformation. Among the lofty mountain ridges in The New Highway, Guan Shanyue included a highway, cars, and electricity pylons; in Spring Morning, Pan Yun depicted strolling commune members beside the pond in the foreground of his ‘mid-distance’ (pingyuan) village houses …Many of these guohua painters had been traditionally trained at an early date, but those now studying Western painting for the first time had not yet acquired a consummate grasp of its techniques. The list of artists engaged in this transformative work is impressive: Hu Peiheng, Wu Jingting, Liu Zijiu, Zhao Wangyun, Qian Songyan, He Tianjian, Lu Yifei Zhang Xuefu, Tang Yifang, Cheng Shifa, Zhu Meicun, Yuan Songnian, Wang Geyi, Shen Maishi, Tang Yun, Shao Luoyang, Zhu Qizhan, and Pan Tianshou.
The mid-1950s was an age of construction, and the large quantity of works that took construction as their theme formed the bulk of the change that guohua underwent at this time. In critics’ eyes, depicting real construction represented a critical transformation away from the attitude of disdain for real life that previously categorized traditional art. Pan Jiezi disregarded the style and brushwork of artists at the Second National Guohua Exhibition as he spiritedly acclaimed the subject matter of the works on display: ‘There are many scenes of building sites in genres that fall between landscape paintings and figural painting, and among the more outstanding are Li Xiongcai’s scroll painting Wuhan Flood Prevention, Feng Zhongtie’s Shizitan Hydropower Station Building Site, Xie Ruijie’s Survey Work at the Sanmenxia site on the Yellow River, Cai Damu’s Obstructing the Yellow River at Shizitan, and Liu Zijiu’s Prospecting for the Motherland. The most moving works in the exhibition warmly extol the working people of the motherland, their collective strength in overcoming difficulties, and their glorious spirit in transforming nature’.[13]
Some veteran Chinese painters disagreed with and even took angry exception to the advocacy of Western painting and the calls for the reform of guohua. Prior to 1949 they were indignant regarding the attitudes of Xu Beihong and some others, and later they reacted angrily to the teaching of Western painting and ‘watercolor painting’ in colleges. Understandably, this conservative attitude among traditional painters was a continuation of the traditionalism pervading the guohua scene in the 1930s, but in an age when art was controlled by ideology, debates and issues in the art world became easily entangled with political questions. The elderly painter Chen Banding was one of the traditionalists who throughout his painting career never deviated from his emulation of the ancients. He complained that ‘before Liberation Xu Beihong had already wanted to club the guohua scene to death’, and that ‘after Liberation’ guohua found itself in a shambles. At the second meeting of the CPPCC in 1956, Chen joined forces with Ye Gongchuo to propose that ‘we inherit tradition and boldly innovate by establishing a guohua painting academy’, a suggestion that was adopted and implemented with the founding of the Beijing Painting Academy (Beijing Huayuan) on 14 May 1957. At the opening ceremony, speeches by Zhou Enlai and the minister of culture Shen Yanbing, better known by his sobriquet Mao Dun, gave clear encouragement to the older generation of painters. In fact, the founding of the academy offered those older painters from the period of the KMT government a new living space. As Li Keran pointed out, nobody bought their works after liberation, but the new government provided them with material support and a salary. In these circumstances the painters who entered the academy were expected to fall in with the arrangements of the Party and government, and press their art into the service of the new regime. The establishment of the academy in Beijing also served the Party and government as a way of effectively managing those painters scattered throughout society, and other academies were subsequently set up in Shanghai, Nanjing and other cities. When the old painters jubilantly entered the new academies, they had no idea how the art they produced would, in the future, be progressively transformed.
The Path of Transformation
In the early autumn of 1960, a group of experienced painters from Jiangsu organized a painting field trip that took the participating teachers and students of the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts and the Nanjing Art Academy on a journey of more than 10,000 kilometers. The artists’ group comprised Fu Baoshi, Ya Ming, Wei Zixi, Song Wenzhi, Qian Songyan, Yu Tongfu, Ding Shiqing, Zhang Jin, Wang Xuyang, Ju Guanrong, Zhu Xiuli, Tai Qiyou, and Huang Mingqian. The field trip, which included visits, outdoor painting sessions and exchanges, took in Luoyang, Sanmenxia, Xi’an, Yan’an, Huashan, Chengdu, Leshan, Mount Emei, Chongqing, Wuhan, Changsha, and Guangzhou, a total of six provinces and more than a dozen cities. The stated purpose was to do practical work ‘observing how traditional Chinese painting can reflect real life’.
By then it was standard practice at Chinese art colleges for professors to organize student trips to Dunhuang as a part of the regular curriculum, but, when national politics required, the traditional curriculum subjects were readily put aside, as studies made way for tasks organized and arranged by the Party. This was relatively a relatively relaxed and personal activity, but it also chronicled the commitment to undertake and complete ‘an artistic Long March’ as a political task entrusted by the Party organization. [14] The realist fieldwork painting group visited peasant communes, hydropower building sites, and Yan’an, the holy land of the CPC, and the scenes and people encountered in these places were the very subjects the students were required to observe, depict and eulogize. This came at a time when the nation faced great financial difficulties, but the Party secretary told his classmates that, even if there were crop failures over 6 million hectares and the budget was reduced by 20%, the students’ field trip would go ahead, demonstrating how ‘the Party cares for you’. At the Zhengzhou Art Institute, the first stop on the journey, the group saw for themselves how teachers and students at the school were starving. According to Ya Ming’s account, the group saw for themselves in Zhengzhou how the students suffering from starvation and jaundice were digging up elm shoots from under old elm trees to alleviate their hunger.[15] Yet at the Sanmenxia power station, the group was deeply moved by the busy scenes at the building site.
In Yan’an, the members of the art team visited the dwellings that once housed the CPC leaders. After their trip to this holy site of the revolution, Fu Baoshi painted The Spring Colors in Date Garden, the name of the area where the cave dwellings of the Party’s top leaders were located. The secretary of the Yan’an Party committee presented a report to the art team on the state of development in industry and agriculture in the local area, in order to show how this holy land of the revolution was developing rapidly under the leadership of the Party. The Party secretary’s figures were subject to the ‘exaggeration’ that typified this period, although his lying was designed to win him a reputation as an ‘advanced Communist element’.[16] The painters observed the reality before them with the gaze of those who had already been educated and at the same time were influenced, as painters, by the colors and forms they saw: ‘Fu Baoshi, Qian Songyan, Yu Tongfu, Zhang Jin and Ding Shiqing were the five veteran artists who separately painted in and around Yan’an. Fu Baoshi and Qian Songyan strolled over the bridge that spanned the Yan River, observing the terraced fields on the surrounding hills and the poplars lining the river banks, bathed in green despite the approaching autumn. Looking westwards, they were moved by the undulating mountains that receded into the distance. Qian Songyan commented to Fu Baoshi, ‘If we were to accurately paint what we see, people would say we were depicting the lush countryside south of the Yangtze River’.[17]
In the spring of 1961, Ya Ming, representing the Jiangsu branch of the Artists Association and the Jiangsu Provincial Guohua Academy, travelled to Beijing to report to the CPC’s Propaganda Department on the 11,500 kilometer field trip, the visits and exchanges on the way, as well as on the ideological and artistic progress made during the trip. The trip won the full approval of the CPC’s Propaganda Department, and so it was decided that during the first weeks of 1961 an exhibition of the paintings made during the trip would be shown at the China Art Gallery in Beijing, under the title ‘The New Face of the Motherland’.[18]
After seeing this exhibition, Ye Qianyu lavished praise on the show, emphasizing its ideological importance: ‘After the Jiangsu painters returned from their 11,500 km long march, we can see that as their ideology changed, so too did their ink and brush work. This also demonstrates the truth that without a change in ideology it is very difficult to change one’s painting style. To truly innovate, ideology must provide that lead us’. Yet what was this ideology? In fact, at this time, the meaning of the expressed ideology had to be identical to the literary and artistic thought of Yan’an, as was described by Shi Lu who accompanied the art team during their time in Shaanxi: ‘The Party calls on us to express the Yan’an work-style and that is one of the important tasks facing the Party at present’. Obviously, whether or not an artist actively depicted prosperous scenes of socialism was the criterion of whether or not one was a painter in possession of the new ideology. Fu Baoshi believed that once a painter made the shift from the old ideology which depended on imitation of the works of the ancients to one grounded in ‘the detailed depiction of the socialist nation’, then the changes in the use of ink and brush would naturally follow.
Among those artists who depicted the socialist nation and who seemed to embody Fu Baoshi’s convictions regarding the change in technique that would follow a change in ideology was Qian Songyan. Before 1949, Qian Songyan (1899-1985) was one of numerous traditional painters who drew inspiration and knowledge from The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual (Jieziyuan huapu), but his paintings completed in the 1950s gave the impression of being ‘new wine in old bottles’; he retained the same brush work that he had once used to depict wildernesses filled with desolation and loneliness but now he used it to delineate a content which proclaimed the mechanization of agriculture, the establishment of the communes, the Great Leap Forward and other themes of contemporary construction. In 1960, Qian joined one of the guohua fieldwork teams led by Fu Baoshi. Recalling the journey in the following year, Qian revealed how the new-look society and the political atmosphere dissipated much of the training scholar-painters had accumulated over previous decades: ‘Through this significant journey, I felt that landscapes are not only needed to reflect the scenery of the motherland, but are also useful in recalling revolutionary history and extolling the new face of the nation. The broad masses of the people fundamentally love traditional landscape paintings and, as with paintings in other genres, our various concerns can alarm us needlessly. I suddenly realize that landscape painting is a chapter waiting to be written ….. The key to writing this chapter is submitting to the guidance of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, grasping the pulse of the times, the viewpoint of the masses and the characteristics of particular locales and, through rigorous artistic praxis, producing magnificent landscape paintings for the new era’.[19]
Qian Songyan’s understanding of painting had indeed begun to change. Technically speaking, accurate figural painting is invariably difficult, and now the revolutionary holy land provided him with the opportunity to dispense with the need to do troublesome figural work, because this holy land of itself signified revolution and politics and so there was no need to enlist the aid of images of peasants rowing boats or lugging manure baskets! He began to paint according to his own understanding of how revolutionary realism and romanticism were combined. Like the paintings of Fu Baoshi inspired by the poetry of Mao Zedong, Qian Songyan’s paintings depicted the holy sites of the Chinese Communist revolution. In March 1964, the painter was acclaimed when a one-man show of his work was staged.
Changes in education were an effective way of allowing people to forget about feudal culture and the old literati tastes. After Xu Beihong passed away and Jiang Feng became president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1953, Jiang, as representative of the Party, set up the ‘department of watercolor painting’ (caimohua xi), which had the express aim of integrating Western realist methodologies and Chinese-style painting. This artistic reform was carried out by virtue of his political and ideological authority, and its intent would seem to be a realization of the earlier artistic practice of Xu Beihong, Lin Fengmian, and others. What was different was that ‘watercolor painting’ now posed a lethal threat to traditionalist painters, because they were now subsumed within the category of either feudalism or capitalism and could at any time become the targets of denunciation. In terms of skills and technique, painters were troubled when they contemplated the integration of sketching and traditional painting, and the earliest result could be seen in the invasive effects of the Chistyakov sketching instruction on the use of light and shade in traditional brush and ink figural paintings. However, the characteristics of traditional Chinese painting materials were completely different from those used in oil painting, gouache or other Western genres. The difficulty of handling the Chinese brush with water and ink created problems for painters who wanted to produce accurate portraits and figural works, as Jiang Zhaohe and other veteran painters discovered.
At the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Jiang Zhaohe and Li Hu experimented with using sketches to produce guohua, and although Ye Qianyu and Liu Lingcang continued to stress the importance of line-work, their paintings constantly revealed the influence of sketching. People defended the new approach, and while Jiang Zhaohe acknowledged that an excess of sketching would displace guohua he did not agree that sketching be ignored, and even genuinely hoped that sketching could yield successful results in transforming guohua. As a result he proposed that ‘the use of sketching in teaching watercolor painting should fulfill our need to transform guohua’. Jiang Zhaohe believed that the solution of all these problems could be achieved through the complete understanding and practice of sketching and traditional painting.
Mo Pu, the vice-president of the East China Branch of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and Zhu Jinlou, head of the ‘watercolor painting’ department, promoted the use of sketching in the transformation of guohua. In 1957, Mo Pu explained the tasks his department confronted in ‘The Problem of Arranging Sketching and Copyist Work in the Watercolor Painting Department’: ‘The department was undoubtedly set up to train new painters who could serve socialist construction and also inherit and develop China’s painting traditions’.[20] In this article, Mo Pu demonstrated extraordinary patience, and disagreed with the view that there are contradictions between sketching and traditional Chinese painting, looking among traditional-style paintings for examples that proved that real painters could demonstrate a relationship with sketching in their works, and even searching for some consciousness of sketching that could be discerned in ancient paintings. Mo Pu had his own explanation of ‘brush and ink’ (bimo): ‘Analyzed scientifically, it is not simply intended, as some would maintain, to achieve delight in artistic expression, but also to fulfill all the demands made of sketching’.[21] In fact, Mo Pu was concerned about the purpose of the art, not about whether or not the concept of ‘watercolor’ should be used.[22] For a long time, despite Pan Tianshou’s complaints and criticisms, some painters continued to apply their contemplation of Western painting techniques to Chinese traditional materials. Under the influence of the academists controlled by the principles of Soviet socialist realism, the almost invariably ideological images demanded expression that was both sketched and realistic. Although some painters remained stubbornly opposed, it was not until after 1957 that they tactically dared to express their grievances, by which time the ‘watercolor painting departments’ (caimo-hua xi) had been renamed ‘Chinese-style painting departments’ (zhongguo-hua xi). By 1961, Pan Tianshou was proposing that colleges set up ‘Chinese-style painting departments’ with divisions specializing in traditional figural, landscape and flower-and-bird genres.
The concepts of tradition, heritage and acculturation or ethnicization (minzuhua) all became entwined with the aims of politics and ideology. To meet the needs of political struggles or movements, tradition, heritage and acculturation became weapons with which to flail the ‘enemy’, and as a result, in the ideological struggle Jiang Feng was targeted as an advocate of ‘national nihilism’ (minzu-xuwuzhuyi), and his advocacy of a new guohua that could harmonize sketching and watercolor was negated. In fact, in an age in which art was required to conform to the ideological principles of the Party, such political dramas were often orchestrated and played out, but, at the same time, this was not tantamount to saying that the embers of these traditionalist infatuations were allowed to be fanned back into life. In 1961, the art historian Jin Weinuo actively analyzed the class nature of flower-and-bird painting, reminding guohua painters that ‘understanding society, politics and economics was to understand profoundly the spirit of the times’.[23]
Regardless of the situation, painters in the traditional Chinese style at the beginning of the 1950s were still characterized by a complexity of artistic styles and schools, but nearly all painters belonged to a context that was being transformed. In the later transformation of Chinese-style painting, the earlier artistic differences that differentiated most painters, variously described as belonging to the traditionalists, the Shanghai school, Beijing school, Lingnan school, realist watercolorists, the syncretists (ronghe-zhuyi) or the other popular schools that followed a single master, disappeared incrementally in the ideological transformation of artists and on the path along which Chinese-style painting was being transformed into a instrumentalism (gongju-zhuyi). The majority of specific contentious debates, whether academic or political, only represented trials of strength between artists with different tastes, views and positions within the context of changing politics, or they were political statements in which an artist defended his own particular stance without reference to the overall picture. So, rather than reading what a theoretician at that time had to say about the issues of tradition and innovation, a more informative source on the ‘academic’ issues of the time is to read the language used in the critique of one painter by another:
The rightist clique of guohua painters headed by Xu Yansun exercises a monopoly over Chinese-style painting, opposing and denigrating its development and maintaining that Chinese-style painting is immoveable. They shatter the unity among traditional-style painters and spread poisonous doctrines such as ‘national quintessential-ism’ (guocui-zhuyi) with dire consequences. Their purpose is to drag traditional Chinese painting back into the feudal era, thereby effectively working to eliminate guohua. We cannot condone Jiang Feng’s nihilistic opposition to the national painting tradition, nor can we permit this feudal reactionary clique around Xu Yansun to exert control in traditional Chinese painting (guohua) circles! Only in this way, can guohua develop in a healthy way.[24]
In every situation, painters had to be highly sensitive in matters of politics, in other words demonstrate that they had ideological consciousness, and maintain a political stance consistent with that of the Party. Fu Baoshi understood better than many painters in the traditional Chinese style that the transformation of Chinese-style painting was neither an academic problem nor a technical question, but ‘a question of the world outlook and artistic outlook of guohua painters and a question of the struggle between the two lines and the two methodologies’.[25]
Fu Baoshi
As early as December 1958, during the Great Leap Forward, a group of traditional-style artists from Jiangsu held an exhibition of their paintings in Beijing, in which 161 works by more than 60 artists were on show. The exhibition had a tremendous impact and was described as ‘signaling a new stage in the development of Chinese-style paintings’.[26] At the time, the veteran painter Fu Baoshi (1904-1965), who had once been infatuated with traditional culture, proposed a slogan designed to rouse the unenlightened, namely ‘with politics in command, ink and brush change’.[27] He even creatively used the Party’s formulation of the ‘three-in-one combination’ to refer to ‘the Party leadership, painters and the masses’.[28] Fu Baoshi was a painter who loved traditional painting, and in his early years he won respect for his devoted research on traditional painting. After 1949, the Party envisaged the total liquidation of the old culture, with even what was regarded as the poetry of feudal society ripe for elimination. Painters versed in preserving the traditions of calligraphy and painting were faced with the dilemma of how to safeguard their own brush and ink work, while at the same time following the Communist Party. In that year, Fu Baoshi turned to Mao Zedong’s poetry, rather than to the ancients, for inspiration. In turning to Mao Zedong for inspiration, Fu Baoshi first drew upon Mao’s ci poem in the traditional Qingpingle meter titled Mount Liupan:
The sky is high, the clouds are pale,
We watch the wild goose vanish in the south.
If we don’t reach the Great Wall we’re not true men,
On our journey already reckoned to be 20,000 li.
On the highest peak of Mount Liupan,
Red flags flutter in the western wind.
The long rope is in our hands today:
When will we truss up the Black Dragon?
To capture the poetic spirit of these lines in a small album painting would be difficult for many artists, but Fu Baoshi’s skill in using the traditional delicate brush to encapsulate revolutionary poetic sentiments provided him with the experience in expression required to complete other paintings capturing the spirit of Mao Zedong’s poetic works. Until his death in 1965, Fu Baoshi completed illustrations for 36 of Mao Zedong’s poems. For the painter, the important thing was not the theme or subject matter but how one used the opportunity they provided to express oneself; the theme of revolution was unavoidable, and so he sought out the possibility of combining old methods and new ideas in the composition, skills and technique. As long as these themes did not inhibit the painter’s own brush, he was happy to continue treating these themes. As in the work expressing ‘the ideas presented in Mao’s poem Liupanshan to the tune Qingpingle’, the randomly sprinkled dots in the mountains signified the columns of the Red Army and the wild goose disappearing at the southern horizon were his explanation and understanding of the poem itself. The painter preserved tradition through his idiosyncratic use of cun brush-strokes, traditional xiaokai (small-seal) script to transcribe the text of Mao’s original work, and his personal seals that read ‘life renewed’ (qi ming wei xin) and ‘after drinking’ (wangwang zuihou).
On 19 July 1951, Fu Baoshi presented a specialist report to the art department of the teachers college of Nanjing University titled ‘A Preliminary Discussion of the Question of Chinese-style Painting’, written at a time when ‘guohua departments’ were being renamed ‘watercolor painting departments’ and discontent was being voiced by older painters, among whom Fu Baoshi was undoubtedly ranked even though he was not directly opposed to the changes in the system. He had realized many years previously that the Communist Party despised the art of the bourgeoisie; he now hoped that the Party would direct its attack at the fawning worship of foreign things that typified the period of KMT rule, when he for example had mocked the French Fauvists,[29] and that this would ensure a return to the protection of traditional painting. Fu Baoshi, cherishing great sympathy for and a sense of responsibility to the Party Central Committee, to the government, and to the teachers and students of the entire school, put forward a concrete proposal calling for the collection, classification and study of China’s painting heritage. He further requested that the Ministry of Education draw up criteria for junior high and primary school curricula that encouraged students to understand the main tools and the capabilities of materials used in Chinese-style painting. Fu Baoshi outlined a program for this work of inheriting, sorting and studying the tradition, hoping that it was possible to systematically preserve and inherit traditional calligraphy and painting.[30]
In 1954, Fu Baoshi clearly revealed his canny wisdom in a speech he made at the first congress of literature and art workers from Jiangsu province, arguing that everything labeled as feudal dross can be negated, but those things that can one day be described as ‘the outstanding legacy of tradition’ will probably be acknowledged. As a result he cautiously pointed out: ‘Because the development of Chinese painting is the product of a long enduring feudal society, it will undoubtedly contain much that is dross’. Fu Baoshi went on to say that a ‘conservative viewpoint’ (baoshou de guandian) and ‘self-referential emotions’ (zishang de qingxu) were shortcomings of Chinese-style painting, and he insisted that painters ‘must love new things above all’ and eschew ‘intoxication with the formal flavor of brush and ink’. His advice to the Party and government was that there were many old painters in the traditional Chinese style in Jiangsu who are ‘living cultural treasures deserving of attention and cherishing’ but who now faced difficulties and so should be helped and looked after. In 1956, Fu Baoshi participated in the second plenary session of the second Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), where he represented those older painters, who had been compelled to change their style of ink and wash and express their gratitude to the Party and government for whom they had compliantly changed the mode, style, subject-matter and flavor of their paintings.
In May 1957, Fu Baoshi led a delegation of Chinese artists to Romania and Czechoslovakia, and he interestingly used traditional ink and wash to depict the scenery in those countries. In the 1950s, Fu Baoshi was in fact experimenting with different techniques of perspective, and the liveliness and freedom of his brush technique became the prominent characteristic of these works. In June 1959, Fu Baoshi went to Shaoshan, the hometown of Mao Zedong, and in the course of his nine-day visit there expressed his emotional excitement through the works Shaoshan, Comrade Mao Zedong’s Former Residence and the series Eight Scenes of Shaoshan. At the conclusion of the 7 July entry in his Record of Painting in Shaoshan, he wrote: ‘At six on the 14th, we left the hometown of China’s great leader Chairman Mao, and even though I had only spent a brief nine days there, they were the most glorious and meaningful nine days, which I will never forget and never stop painting’.[31]
Fu Baoshi had won the trust of the Party and, on arriving back in Nanjing from Shaoshan, was commissioned to go to Beijing to complete for the Great Hall of the People a massive landscape painting inspired by the line from Mao Zedong’s poem Snow, This Land So Rich in Beauty. Measuring five and a half meters in height and nine meters in width, such a monumental work had never been attempted by any ancient Chinese painter, and now Fu Baoshi and his collaborator Guan Shanyue had to complete ‘this glorious and quite difficult task’ within less than a month. In fact, the completed massive work was not as vivid as the small draft on which it was based, not because its completion was not guided by the inebriation that allowed the emotion to be expressed in the smaller work, but because such an enormous piece was already a task beyond the scope of a scholar-painter versed in traditional brush and ink composition. Using traditional tools to produce such a gargantuan work broke with the style and function of the tradition itself. On 27 September, Mao Zedong prepared the calligraphy for the inscription reading ‘this land so rich in beauty’, and his signature conferred political protection. Indeed, compared with those artists classified as rightists or counterrevolutionaries, Fu Baoshi was able to safely pass through a number of political movements, and in 1960, when the Jiangsu branch of the Chinese Artists Association was established, he became its first president. In September, he led a group of Jiangsu and non-local artists on the ‘Long March’ realist painting field trip of national art circles.
Guan Shanyue
Guan Shanyue (1912- 2000), who collaborated with Fu Baoshi on the monumental landscape titled This Land So Rich in Beauty, was a native of Yangjiang county in Guangdong. When he was young, he attended the night classes of Gao Jianfu held in the art college of Guangzhou’s Zhongshan University. In 1938, following the Japanese army’s occupation of Guangzhou, Guan Shanyue went to live in Puji Temple in Macau where he conscientiously studied and copied items from Gao Jianfu’s collection.
After 1949, confronted with the tasks of extolling the new society and the new man, Guan Shanyue met the needs of the new art with facility, as he explained succinctly in the opening remark for an article he published in 1951 in South China Arts titled ‘How Chinese-style paintings Can Serve the People’: ‘Painting serves politics’. He even wrote that those self-proclaimed noble-minded artists ‘had directly and indirectly consolidated the regime of the reactionary classes’. He participated in painting for many of the political movements of the 1950s (the movement to resist US aggression and aid Korea, the Great Leap Forward, the people’s communes, the eradication of the ‘four pests’ and socialist production and construction), producing scenes replete with harmony, happiness, health and prosperity. He exerted himself to produce many effective figural images, and even though his figures might have been mere embellishments in landscapes or building sites, the painter succeeded in depicting them vividly. To resolve the problem of how landscape paintings could express socialism, he might paint a highway with trucks across a mountain escarpment (The New Highway, 1954), in the same way in which he had transformed a flower-and-bird painting into one treating the theme of eliminating ‘the four pests’ (Victory after One Day, 1956), demonstrating the facility in both politics and conception which artists in this period needed to possess. When he was appointed to collaborate with Fu Baoshi on the completion of This Land So Rich in Beauty for the second floor banquet room of the Great Hall of the People, Guan Shanyue joyfully accepted this political task. The sketches of the two painters were examined numerous times, the dimensions of the work were progressively increased, and eventually they accepted the requirement of Zhou Enlai that the dimensions of the sun in the painting be increased by one hundred per cent. Although such a massive painting in the traditional Chinese style had never been attempted, the two artists happily went on to fulfill the need for similarly massive Chinese-style landscape paintings of the Great Wall, the Yellow River and the Himalayas. Regardless of what the painters might have thought, Guan Shanyue and Fu Baoshi were regarded by the nation’s leaders as having fulfilled splendidly their important political tasks and so, in 1961, the State Council assigned a photography group to accompany the two painters on a field trip to China’s three north-eastern provinces to record how artists under the leadership of the Party had succeeded in using their brushes to depict the achievements of socialist construction.
What were the results of the painter’s constantly reiterated experiments and deliberations in the transformation and preservation of traditions? Guan Shanyue discussed the predicament he faced, in recalling in the 1970s his experience in painting Longyang Gorge:
Longyang Gorge is spectacular and the gorge itself extends along a fifteen kilometer corridor with precipitous cliffs on either side through which the water plunges, making it an ideal site for constructing a power station. I was very moved when I travelled to the site and on returning I completed the work ‘Longyang Gorge’ in five huge panels. … Now that I am old I ask: Why did I paint repeatedly such massive works? I had wanted to be able to achieve some new break-through in my art, and even though I painted five large panels I was dissatisfied with the results and felt that I had not discovered how to express the essential magnificence of the gorge. … When you keep on working to resolve an artistic impasse but fail to overcome it, it is quite depressing. … I had originally planned to call this work ‘The mountains and rivers smile with joy’, but I could never convey that idea and so I felt sad that I could not paint the scene I wanted to express.[32]
What was this ‘artistic impasse’? The subject matter was no longer a problem, but traditional brush and ink were obviously not the methods through which the painter could express the ‘essential magnificence’ of the scene he sought but which still lacked a ‘focal point’. The ancients had succeeded in conveying the idea that in the obscurity of mist there were thousands of mountains and ravines, but this approach presented problems for describing socialist panoramic landscapes. Later, the essence presented itself to the painter when he added a ribbon of highway to the slope of a mountain so that audiences were required to re-calibrate their vision. In the painting titled Spurring on the Flying Horses and Not Dismounting, completed in 1963, the painter faced a similar problem. To depict the sense of the mountains nearly touching the sky and the galloping cavalry horses, Guan Shanyue had to make use of the ‘middle ground’ and have the company of soldiers on horseback holding red flags galloping into the ‘distant ground’. Yet the concept of ‘romanticism’ could not be excessively indulged, otherwise viewers might prefer to see this work as depicting a herd of horses galloping through the clouds and mist. After constant compromise and experimentation, Guan Shanyue succeeded in handling the relationship between Western perspective and traditional visual angles in The Green Great Wall completed in 1973. He made use of the unique connotations of the vocabulary of the Great Wall. Guan explained how ‘this Great Wall can stand guard against the sands and winds, as well as hold back the enemy; it is an impregnable green bastion’. Obviously, Guan Shanyue was also using this ‘Great Wall’ to defend himself against possible criticism.
Li Keran
Li Keran (1907-1989) was a native of Xuzhou in Jiangsu, and he trained by learning to paint in the traditional style of painters like Wang Shigu. In 1929, Li Keran was admitted to the graduate student class at the West Lake National Art Institute. Under the new teaching program promoted by Lin Fengmian and others, Li Keran independently studied traditional Chinese-style painting, while devoting his main energy to studying Western painting. 1942 was an important year in Li Keran’s artistic career, and he began to paint more works using black ink. During his Chongqing years, he lived in a farmhouse in Laijiaqiao near the neighbor’s cowshed, and began to observe buffalo, developing a great interest in depicting them. The painter seemed to find his own natural instincts in the disposition of the ox, and even began to find more extensive qualities embodied by the ox: diligence, warmth, goodness, steadiness, reliability, honest and energy. The qualities of the ox spurred him on, and he changed his studio name to Stone Ox Hall (Shiniu Tang). His ink and wash painting The Herd Boy Points to Distant Xinghua Village was purchased by the socially influential artist Xu Beihong and this show of appreciation encouraged him. In fact, in 1943 after he was invited by Chen Zhifo to take up a lecturing position at the Chongqing National Art College, he devoted his main energy to restoring and researching the tradition.
In 1950, Li Keran taught Chinese-style painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1954, he went with the painters Zhang Ding and Luo Ming on a field trip to South China, Mount Huangshan and other places, and the realist works produced during their three-month trip were shown at a three-man show in Yuexin Hall in Beijing’s Beihai Park. In 1956, Li Keran travelled up the Yangtze River and the Three Gorges, completing 200 works during the eight-month journey. In these realist works, the artist retained the observational technique used by Western artists, and also used pencil to sketch in outlines and contours of the mountains, paying close attention to the effects of light. In 1957, Li Keran and Guan Liang together visited the German Democratic Republic and during his four months there, Li continued to retain his own painting methods in his realist treatment of the scenery and buildings, namely full composition, and the heaviest possible use of brush and ink. Two fine examples of this are his paintings Dusk in Dresden and Meissen Cathedral, which depict buildings with the sunlight directly in front. When the artist painted buildings with the light directly in front, the concrete structural detail of objects is necessarily apparent in the work, but while it was difficult to fully utilize the special qualities of the ink and water for presenting the twilight retreating behind the buildings, the gloomy dusk in fact provided the opportunity to deploy heavy ink over a large area. Up until his painting trip to Guilin in 1959, he was still conducting meticulous experiments in full composition, backlight and blackness, although the ink and wash realist (xiesheng) painting exhibition titled ‘This Land So Rich in Beauty’ that he staged in that year was very influential.
Li Keran began to attempt to create paintings using his own brush and ink style to express the poetic conceptions of Mao Zedong, and Liupan Shan which he painted for the Museum of the Chinese Revolution is considered to be the painter’s earliest attempt to create landscape paintings taking Mao Zedong’s poetry as the theme. The composition demonstrates mastery of sweeping layout and his lofty mountain ridges satisfy these criteria. With agility, Li Keran thoroughly dispensed with any hesitation in his use of brush and ink, and by 1962 he had not only succeeded in preserving his panoramic style but also in even more freely and fully depicting mountain ranges with his brush-work. His Ten Thousand Mountains in the Glow of the Setting Sun (1962) already fully demonstrated his totally individualized style and, through his understanding and application of Western painting, he totally dispensed with Huang Binhong’s tenacious defense of traditional artistic conceptions. In 1963, Li Keran painted Ten Thousand Mountains Are Covered with Forests of Red. Li Keran had initiated a number of experiments on this theme beginning in 1962, until he had boldly incorporated types of cinnabar ink directly into the accumulated wash, and no longer feared whether or not his own brush and ink style accorded with the demands of traditional artistic conception and, when possible, did not eschew creating effects similar to those of oil painting or gouache in his method of building up color. To a great extent, such works by Li Keran came very close to the ‘watercolors’ imbued with a revolutionary and healthy spirit called for by Jiang Feng and others. Yet, in the movement to transform Chinese-style painting, to what extent did Li Keran consciously hope to succeed in replacing the artistic conception of traditional landscape paintings with his scenic paintings conceptually replete with revolutionary symbolism? In fact, apart from not expressing similar themes, he showed an increasing interest in using rich black ink wash to execute landscape work he understood, and this led to the criticism that his landscapes should be titled ‘This land so rich in blackness’. The upshot was that his right to paint was rescinded during the Cultural Revolution period from 1966 onwards. In 1974, the bureaucrats in control of ideology criticized Li Keran’s ‘black paintings’ (heihua) which were held to vilify socialist society under the Party’s leadership. Like most well-known older painters, Li Keran spent several years in a ‘cowshed’ (niupeng) lock-up, was sent down to the countryside and was paraded for denunciation and attack.
Shi Lu
Shi Lu (1919-1982), whose original name was Feng Yaheng, was a native of Renshou in Sichuan. At the age of 15, Feng Yaheng was invited by his brother Feng Jianwu to go to Chengdu and study painting there at the Oriental Fine Arts Junior College set up together with friends. During this period, Feng Yaheng also read the works of Lu Xun and Ba Jin, and these two rebel writers made a deep impression on him. In January 1940, he reached Yan’an and entered the Northern Shaanxi Communist School where he studied courses in Marxism-Leninism, and soon became a stage designer for the Northwest Literature and Art Troupe. Regarded as the ‘holy land’ of the revolution, Yan’an seethed with passion and the fervent spirit of opposition to KMT rule, and this new political environment led to Feng Yaheng’s decision to abandon his original name and adopt the revolutionary alias ‘Shi Lu’, a reference to the ancient painter Shitao and the modern writer Lu Xun. The freedom and pungency of the creative work of these two men struck a chord with this young Sichuanese filled with passion for the revolution.
For his political earnestness and stance, Shi Lu won the trust of the Party organization, becoming a member of the CPC in 1946. From 1942 to 1949, Shi Lu totally accepted the dictum that art serve politics. In September 1950, Shi Lu chaired the North-western Literature and Art Workers Representative Congress, a mass organization that obviously had to accept the leadership of the Party, and, as a member of the standing committee of the Northwest Federation of Literary and Art Circles, he delivered a speech announcing how the north-western people’s fine arts movement was to be launched. He called on north-western artists to draw on the Yan’an experience and reminded them that ever since Mao delivered his speeches at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in 1942, ‘art work has the clear direction of serving the workers, peasants and soldiers’. He naturally concluded: ‘Political thought is the very soul of art works’.
In the years before Shi Lu attacked Jiang Feng in 1957 for ‘using realism to transform Chinese-style painting’ Shi Lu himself had used traditional Chinese tools and materials to paint realist works. Shi Lu had participated in the movement to use shading and perspective to transform old nianhua and traditional Chinese painting (Zhongguo-hua). His works Comrade Wang Is Here (1953) and Beyond the Ancient Great Wall (1954) featured images delineated using realist methods, at the same time as they revealed an obvious interest in narrative and plotting. In 1955 and 1956, Shi Lu visited India and Egypt, respectively, and when he saw the preservation of national cultures in foreign countries, he began to recall his own earlier call to restore traditional art. In Egypt, he gave a speech at the Art Exhibition of Afro-Asian Nations in which he stressed national forms and discussed the need for new national styles that reflected the period’s changes in life, but he said that the new forms could neither come from the sky nor come from the outside, and should ‘be sought along the course of the river of tradition, so that in using old forms we must first understand and grasp the laws and characteristics of those traditional forms, preserving their rich lively elements, deleting some and adding and absorbing others, so that what results will emerge as a new national style’.[33] Here Shi Lu was in obvious agreement with legitimizing pre-1949 art, and after being stimulated by foreign culture, he even felt great sympathy for traditional art. In any case, the traditional painting with which he had long been familiar held lasting appeal for him. On this point, he disagreed with Jiang Feng’s appraisal of traditional painting, and revised the simplistic view of feudal culture he had presented several years previously at a conference at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. On that occasion, Shi Lu had been already dissatisfied with the ‘flat line sketching’ which was only a ‘folk form’ of the Yan’an period and not something that warranted study as a ‘national form’. He was in disagreement with Jiang Feng’s concept of ‘national sketching’ because it was nothing more than ‘sketching within thin outlines’. Shi Lu quietly combined the art produced by feudal society with legitimized folk art, and used the concept of ‘classical form’ to replace the notion of ‘old forms’, when he stated that ‘folk forms and classical forms are the two inalienable components which form the national style’.[34] In this way, encouraged by Mao Zedong’s concepts of ‘Chinese work-style’ (Zhongguo zuofeng) and ‘Chinese style’ (Zhongguo qipai), Shi Lu argued that the quest for the national style should be one of the goals towards which Chinese artists diligently strive, and he seemed to find a legitimizing basis for his proposals in Mao Zedong’s statement that ‘we absolutely cannot refuse to inherit and draw lessons from the ancients and foreigners, nor even from things of the feudal classes and the capitalist classes’.
In winter 1959, Shi Lu was commissioned by the Chinese Revolutionary Museum to paint a work depicting Chairman Mao deploying his armies in northern Shaanxi province, which he titled Fighting in Northern Shaanxi. At this time the theories of Soviet socialist realism were continuing to exert influence, and it was inevitable that a painting on a historical theme would use the ‘realistic’ method. However, Shi Lu, having absorbed some of the filtered techniques of the ancients, could no longer dispense with the interesting techniques of brush and ink that he had succeeded in eliminating in works like Beyond the Ancient Great Wall. At the same time, there was no way either that the artist could draw on the available lexicon of earlier brush and ink artists to depict the loess plateau. He applied a free and unchecked brush and ink style to create the environment of northern Shaanxi, which suggested to some the method of dragging the brush to create furrowed chapping. Shi Lu used mineral pigments, obviously hoping these colors would enhance the effect of the new brush and ink technique in recreating the impression of the loess plateau. In this period, although people admiringly paid close attention to Shi Lu’s clever composition that suggested the presence of thousands upon thousands of horses and soldiers led by Mao Zedong, it was the new brush and ink method that made Shi Lu feel confident. Because Shi Lu was a leader of the Artists Association, he brought together the guohua painting members Zhao Wangyun, He Haixia, Fang Jizhong, Kang Shiyao, and Li Zisheng in the Traditional Chinese Painting Institute, where they studied tradition and undertook field trips. In 1961, artists from Xi’an organized ‘exhibitions of studies [lit., practice works]’ (xizuozhan), an acceptable term for experimental works, in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and other places, and as a result the corpus of work identified as that of the ‘Chang’an school’ was born.[35] Ye Qianyu ‘discovered that Shi Lu is fond of the crevices that cut the loess plateau of the northwest and these form the focus of the artistic realm (jingjie) in his painting Fighting in Northern Shaanxi’. He observed: ‘In earlier landscape paintings, artists used black ink and water to produce furrows, but now artists use color, brown and ochre furrows and hooks to recreate the loess plateau …’.
However, in the April 1963 issue of Fine Arts, the art historian Yan Lichuan analyzed audience’s views of Shi Lu’s works as ‘wild, weird, chaotic and black’ (ye, guai, luan, hei), and Shi Lu answered the charges with a poem he wrote:
People scold my wildness, so I get wilder; searching for a miracle in the limits of the mundane.
People charge me with weirdness, but where is the weirdness? I don’t think guys like you warrant me changing my ideas.
People say that I’m chaotic, but I am not; laws bounded by no laws are stricter laws.
People laugh at my blackness, but I am not so black; when blackness is alarming, it excites the soul.
These charges of ‘wild, weird, chaotic and black’ aren’t worth discussing; you have the tongue but I have the heart.
Life gives me new meaning; I in turn give life my spirit.
In 1964, Shi Lu continued the idea he had in painting Fighting in Northern Shaanxi and tackled Eastern Crossing, another history painting in which Mao Zedong was the central figure, which he was preparing to enter in the national fine arts exhibition, but he was soon informed that Fighting in Northern Shaanxi had serious political problems. In terms of composition, did the fact that Mao Zedong was standing on a cliff edge with no path leading to it suggest that Mao had no way out? The painting, which only a few years previously had been recognized as a masterpiece, was taken down from the wall of the Chinese Revolutionary Museum, and the political and artistic legitimacy of Shi Lu’s works was eliminated overnight.
Shi Lu aborted his brilliant career as a painter and took up qigong exercises, until one day his friends and family discovered that he was suffering from delusional schizophrenia. At the end of 1965, Shi Lu was sent to a mental hospital. Over a long period of time thereafter, Shi Lu spent his days being beaten until he was numb, crazed, comatose and groaning, fleeing occasionally to paint crazily, only to be dragged back crazed whenever he got away; his chaotic utterances led to him being charged with being a ‘historical counter-revolutionary’ and an ‘active counter-revolutionary’, but up until 1979 he still found the opportunity to declare that ‘art should be free’. However, by this time, nearing the end of his life, Shi Lu was almost totally destroyed in body and mind.
Pan Tianshou
Pan Tianshou (1897-1971) was born in a peasant village in Ninghai county, Zhejiang province, and as a child he studied painting by copying printed collections of rubbings by noted calligraphers and the illustrations in The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual. Later, he was influenced by Xia Mianzun, Li Shutong, and Wu Changshuo. In the spring of 1928, Pan Tianshou was invited by Lin Fengmian to serve as the professor of Chinese painting at the Hangzhou National Art Academy, and concurrently as head teacher at the Calligraphy and Painting Research Society, but Pan Tianshou had reservations about Lin Fengmian’s views on ‘integrating Chinese and Western art’. Pan believed that no integration of the systems of Western art and Chinese traditional art was possible, because the structure and background of their civilizations were completely different. Until 1949 he maintained his traditional interest in teaching poetry, calligraphy, painting and seal carving, and he undertook research on the traditional art establishment, compiling his Studies of Chinese Painting Academies in 1943, and research on seals, which he wrote up in 1944 in his Discussions of Seal Carving. He even undertook research on Buddhism, writing Buddhism and Chinese Painting in 1947. He was firmly convinced that painting different from that of his predecessors could be produced from within the path of tradition.
In 1949, the new society and life eventuated, but this did not mean that Pan Tianshou could go on painting as he had before in accordance with his own understanding and training. Jiang Feng, who had once been a student of Lu Xun and who later became a Yan’an artist, took over the running of the Hangzhou Art College in his new capacity as a ‘revolutionary cadre’ and the college was renamed the East China Branch of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Jiang Feng now again merged the Western and Chinese painting departments, which for Pan Tianshou recalled Lin Fengmian’s integration of Chinese and Western painting several years earlier. Jiang Feng would now politically transform Chinese painting on the basis of his understanding of art from the Yan’an period. In the eyes of many revolutionary artists, Chinese painting, especially the traditional painting referred to as ‘literati painting’, had already lost its raison d’être in the new social system. This left Pan Tianshou obviously unsettled. Seven years later, when Jiang Feng was dramatically defined as a ‘rightist’, Pan Tianshou was able to finally express his melancholy and unhappiness. At the outset of his article titled ‘Who Says Chinese Painting Must Be Eliminated?’ of 1957, Pan Tianshou described the depressed atmosphere that prevailed among guohua painters at that time.
Now discussions about questions of Chinese painting were different from those that had taken place before 1949, and artistic questions now had an ideological background. Changes and adjustments in the ideology of the Party formed the criteria for academic discussions during different periods, and the officials who grasped these criteria made decisions on academic questions. From the beginning, because art had been made into a tool of the Party, Jiang Feng obviously disagreed with the artistic interest in literati paintings, and believed that painting or the arts must directly reflect real life and massive paintings had greater significance in propaganda and agitation. Language had to advance with the times, thus artists would be able to paint ‘international paintings’. In 1950, Pan Tianshou, like the other teachers, studied Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, and he was required to ponder earnestly the problems raised by the exhortation that art serve the workers, peasants and soldiers. At the same time, his style based on that of the celebrated scholars of the Wei-Jin period was now considered to belong to the exploiting classes of feudal society and therefore needed to be abandoned. Pan Tianshou had been involved in the understanding of passionate life but his understanding of the present was not limited to realism. In fact, for him the main way of understanding life was direct participation in productive labor and even possibly to become a laborer to the extent that was possible, rather than be, as he was in the past, a self-proclaimed noble-minded literati painter. At the beginning of 1953, People’s Daily published works by Qi Baishi, by way of the central people’s government’s present to Qi Baishi on the occasion of his 90th birthday. These paintings of subjects that hardly qualified as socialist realism – shrimps, frogs, vegetables, melons and fruit – were thereby legitimized. In this year, Zhou Enlai in his report to the second national congress of literary and art circles reminded everyone to pay attention to the importance of ‘the culture of our ancestors’ and to not be ‘exceedingly conceited’; the propaganda minister Zhou Yang, who exerted power over ideology, warned that writers and artists must pay attention to national forms, national style and the national spirit. Those who dictated ideology were making adjustments in the criteria of art and, although the aim of those adjustments had some deep-seated political purpose, Pan Tianshou took great consolation in this. Whatever the purpose, such a political climate enabled the painter to flee from the realist works with which he felt awkward and return to painting eagles, rocks, pines and cypress trees and birds and flowers or research the topics in which he was interested.
In 1955, Pan Tianshou began to express his views on traditional art using new terminology. From the writings on literature and art of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, he found terms and expressions similar to the Party’s thinking on literature and art, and, as someone who had not immersed himself in the jargon of scholarly or academic discussion prior to 1949, Pan Tianshou mastered the words and concepts that officials found difficult to fault, and he realized which words had legitimacy and were difficult to attack. To find a defense as graceful as that of Chen Shizeng in the vocabulary of such writings was difficult. Before the concept of ‘realism’ Pan Tianshou added the concept of ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’, by way of legitimization. He asserted, wishfully, that ‘it is actually the communist who is best able to protect courageously the great national tradition’. However, regardless of whether or not he understood or accepted this new language, his writings provide clear evidence of the acceptance of ideological transformation by traditional Chinese painters in that period.
In 1957 the anti-rightist movement gave Pan Tianshou the opportunity to refute the use by Jiang Feng and others of ‘realist painting’ (xieshi huihua) as a replacement for traditional Chinese painting, as fully articulated by Pan Tianshou at the time:
The world’s painting can be divided into the two major systems of Eastern and Western painting, and traditional Chinese painting is representative of the Eastern system.
Each of the two systems of painting has its own supreme achievements. Like two lofty peaks at either end of the Eurasian land mass, they command the world’s admiration. Between them, the best of each can be drawn upon, which is essential, given the height and mass of each. Yet we cannot draw upon them randomly, not questioning the elements we are taking in, and we must determine which are needed and which harmonize with the national style created by different national histories. In the process of absorbing elements, we must subject them to study and examination. Otherwise, we will not only increase the height and mass of one of the two peaks, but detract from the height and mass of the other, and in leveling the peaks one might lose its own unique style. Chinese painting should have a unique Chinese national style and, if Chinese painting is executed in much the same way as Western painting, then this will, in fact, be tantamount to the self-abnegation of Chinese painting.[36]
Pan Tianshou also argued that within the Eastern painting system, ‘Chinese painting occupied the highest position’.[37] He readily placed Indian and Japanese art on a level below Chinese art. At this time, the critique of ‘national nihilism’ had become a tactical element in the Party’s ideology, and in the movement to eliminate dissident intellectuals who might harbor bourgeois ideas, it was now the turn of Jiang Feng, who had once despised traditional Chinese painting, to be subjected to attack, and so he was labeled a ‘national nihilist’ in the art world. As an intellectual with the character of a traditional scholar-painter, Pan Tianshou believed that the time for him to study art as he wanted had come. In 1959, Pan Tianshou, like many traditional Chinese style painters, completed his work interpreting the theme suggested by Mao Zedong’s line of poetry in Snow, ‘This land so rich in beauty’. Pan’s conception relied on black-line modeling with empty spaces and no cun shading strokes to create a vast expanse of green, lending the work a simple and ornamental flavor. Although we can see that he used a distinctive composition in arranging the distant mountains in this work, he faced the problem of reconciling the ‘eremitism’ of the politically frustrated literatus and the eulogistic mood occasioned by ‘auspicious omens’. The effects of the color and ornamentation impeded the intended impersonal and lofty emotional state, and the hooked brush strokes (goule) used to delineate the contours of the mountains and the trees failed to evoke the thousands of mountain gullies and the magical mists we see in the masterpiece on the same theme by Fu Baoshi and Guan Shanyue. This painting does not embody any original conception of Pan Tianshou. He had merely wanted to invest a grand landscape of the motherland with warmly passionate emotion, thereby providing himself with a landscape in which he could freely express himself. The problem did not lie in his unbounded imaginings or his emotional input; the key was grasping the images and symbols of the era. In an age when any words or symbols could be given particular political readings, the legitimacy of images was not determined by artists. So, when Pan Tianshou was attacked in the Cultural Revolution as a reactionary academic authority, his works were attacked for ‘loudly proclaiming the dissolute pleasures of the feudal official class who indulged themselves in order to escape reality and real life struggles’, and were said to vent the artist’s ‘world-weary hatred for the glorious socialist life we lead today’.[38]
In 1955, the painting departments which had been amalgamated by Jiang Feng were again separated, but after the division the school that used traditional materials and tools was renamed ‘the department of color ink painting’ (caimo-hua xi), a term which did not refer to any true genre but rather to a criterion only created in the process of transformation of traditional Chinese painting initiated by the Party. This criterion entailed sketched outlines, flatly applied color and realistic modeling. Pan Tianshou had an early taste of this, but once he gained a position where he could speak, he could furtively experiment in the space between the viewpoint of traditional ink and brush and what was politically required. When he had the opportunity he criticized a young teacher who was using realist brush and ink wash in a figural work, urging him to clean up the faces of the ‘workers, peasants and soldiers’ in his paintings by washing away the shading from their faces, at the same time as he intoned a line from Su Dongpo:
From beyond the sky the black winds whip up the seas,
But the flying rain from Eastern Zhe can wash across the Yangtze.
Sometimes, Pan Tianshou experimented with using firm and strong brush strokes to delineate mountain rocks and trees, even treating square mountain rocks as the main subject in some works. At other times an ancient mighty pine tree would occupy the dominant place in the composition, and he would dot grass, moss and flowers in the surrounding space. His colors were rich and his alternation between a meticulous gongbi style and a freer xieyi style succeeded in created an enthusiastic sense of the required innovation in his paintings. When there was no alternative, he would add elements to his paintings, such as a power pylon, a reconnaissance tower, a highway, or contemporary figures, to indicate that he cared about the socialist reality that the Party emphasized.
Beginning with his works of 1955, A Corner of Lingyan Ravine and Recording the Ancient Pine at Baizhangyan, an obvious personal style appeared in the composition and brushwork of Pan Tianshou’s paintings and in later works the painter only attempted to make subtle changes in this overall unchanging style. Unlike Jian Jiang (Hongren, 1610-1664) who always used square natural rocks of different sizes to form hills and mountains, Pan Tianshou would indicate with small dots the presence of figures on his enormous boulders and thereby naturally incorporate them into his interesting hillsides, as in his 1961 work Taking his Lute to Visit Friends. Up until the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, Pan Tianshou could feel that he had been successful. In 1957, Pan was appointed vice-president of the East China Campus of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. In 1958, he was selected to be a member of the first NPC and was nominated as an honorary academician at the 14th session of the Soviet Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1959, Pan took up the post of president of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. In 1960, he was selected as vice-president of Chinese Artists Association, and in October 1962, under Kang Sheng’s encouragement and function, Pan Tianshou held a solo exhibition of brand new works at the China Art Gallery. But in 1966, Pan Tianshou was branded a ‘reactionary academic authority’ and his career came to a violent end. During his later time in a ‘cowshed’ prison undergoing ‘violent struggle’, Pan Tianshou endured physical torture and merciless political persecution that only ended with his death.[39]
NOTES:
[1] Li Keran, ‘A discussion of the transformation of Chinese-style painting’ (Tan Zhongguohua de gaizao), in People’s Fine Arts (Renmin meishu), inaugural issue, February 1950, quoted in Li Keran Discusses Art (Li Keran lun yishu), Beijing: People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 2000, p.3.
[2] People’s Fine Arts (Renmin meishu), inaugural issue, February 1950.
[3] Idem.
[4] ‘The Huangshan Artists Forum on Realism organized by the Creative Committee of the Chinese Artists Association’ (Zhongguo Meishu Xiehui Chuangzuo Weiyuanhui zhaokai Huajia Huangshan Xiesheng Zuotanhui), Fine Arts (Meishu), July 1954.
[5] Fine Arts (Meishu), July 1954 issue.
[6] Fine Arts (Meishu), February 1957 issue.
[7] ‘Xu Yansun is the recruitment agent for the rightists among traditional Chinese painting circles’ (Xu Yansun shi guohua-jie de youpai batou), Fine Arts (Meishu), August 1957.
[8] Wang Xun, ‘Several views on guohua painting at present’ (Dui muqian guohua chuangzuo de jidian yijian), Fine Arts (Meishu), August 1954.
[9] Cai Ruohong, ‘On the question of the development of painting in the guohua style’ (Guanyu ‘guohua’ chuangzuo de fazhan wenti), Fine Arts (Meishu), June 1955.
[10] Zhou Yang, ‘Views on work in the fine arts’ (Guanyu meishu gongzuo de yixie yijian), Fine Arts (Meishu), July 1955.
[11] ‘A major victory for people’s art: The second national art exhibition opens in Beijing’ (Renmin meishu de zhongda shengli: Di’er jie quanguo meishu zhanlanhui zai jing kaimu), Fine Arts (Meishu), April 1955.
[12] ‘Struggle to win glorious achievements in fine arts creative work: Views of the exhibiting artists on the works in the second national art exhibition in Beijing’ (Wei zhengqu meishu chuangzuo huanghui de chengjiu er nuli: Lai jing canguan di’er jie quanguo meizhan de meishu gongzuozhe dui zhanchu zuopin de yijian), Fine Arts (Meishu), May 1955.
[13] Pan Jiezi, ‘Let flowers bloom more beautifully and abundantly’ (Rang hua’er kai de geng mei geng sheng), Fine Arts (Meishu), August 1956.
[14] Ya Ming commented at a work meeting of the Field Painting Art Team: ‘We set out for the revolution and for the liberation of the proletariat, and these are tasks entrusted to us by the revolution. The Party today has assigned us to paint, our task being to paint whether at the school or at the academy’. Huang Mingqian, Ink and Brush Landscapes: A Record of the Field Painting of the Art Team Led by Fu Baoshi (Bimo jiangshan: Fu Baoshi shuai tuan xiesheng lu), Beijing: People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1995, p.25.
[15] Ya Ming, ‘Art in the skies: In memory of Mr. Fu Baoshi’ (Yibao yuntian: Jinian Fu Baoshi xiansheng), in Huang Mingqian, Ink and Brush Landscapes: A Record of the Field Painting of the Art Team Led by Fu Baoshi (Bimo jiangshan: Fu Baoshi shuai tuan xiesheng lu), Beijing: People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1995, p.10.
[16] Huang Mingqian kept a record of many of the statistics gleaned during this trip, and many years later he acknowledged: ‘The above are what I recorded at that time. Looking back now, I can see how in that period of rampant exaggeration, many figures had been greatly inflated’. See: Huang Mingqian, Ink and Brush Landscapes: A Record of the Field Painting of the Art Team Led by Fu Baoshi (Bimo jiangshan: Fu Baoshi shuai tuan xiesheng lu), Beijing: People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1995, pp.44-46.
[17] Ibid., p.44.
[18] Ibid., pp.253-254.
[19] Qian Songyan, ‘Talking about painting on a ten thousand li journey’ (Zhuangyou wanli hua danqing) in Wen Hui Daily (Wenhui bao), Shanghai, 4 March, 1961.
[20] Lang Shaojun and Shui Tianzhong eds., Selected Documents on 20th Century Chinese Art (Ershi shiji Zhongguo meishu wenxuan), vol.1, Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House, 1999, p.67.
[21] Ibid., p.65.
[22] He said: ‘some comrades proposed that we should change the name of the watercolor painting department to the guohua painting department, and as I saw it this was a fine idea’. See: Ibid., p.67.
[23] Jin Weinuo, ‘The class nature of flower-and-bird painting’ (Huaniaohua de jiejixing), Fine Arts (Meishu), March 1961.
[24] Ye Qianyu, ‘Tearing the academic gowns off Jiang Feng’s anti-Party clique’ (Jiekai Jiang Feng fandang jituan de xueshu waiyi), Fine Arts (Meishu), September 1957.
[25] Fu Baoshi, ‘With politics in command, brush and ink change: Discussion occasioned by the Jiangsu Chinese-style painting exhibition’ (Zhengzhi gua le shuai, bimo jiu bu tong: Cong Jiangsu-sheng Zhongguohua zhanlanhui tan qi), Fine Arts (Meishu), January 1959.
[26] ‘Chinese-style paintings from Jiangsu exhibited in Beijing’ (Jiangsu Zhongguohua zai jing zhanchu), Fine Arts (Meishu), January 1959.
[27] Fu Baoshi, ‘With politics in command, ink and brush change: Discussing the exhibition of Chinese-style paintings from Jiangsu’ (Zhengzhi guale shuai, bimo jiu bu tong: Cong Jiangsu-sheng Zhongguohua zhanlanhui tanqi), Fine Arts (Meishu), January 1959.
[28] Five years later, the opening of the third art exhibition of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army signaled that the movement to ‘revolutionize the army’s art work’ that had been promoted throughout the country, made use of a similar ‘three-in-one combination’ creative method. See Chapter 14.
[29] Ye Zonggao, Anthology of Fu Baoshi’s Art and Writings (Fu Baoshi meishu wenji), Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 2003, p.361.
[30] Ibid., p. 365-367.
[31] Ibid., p. 467.
[32] Quoted from Chen Jun, Guan Shanyue, Shijiazhuang: Hebei Educational Publishing House, 2003, p.66.
[33] Shi Lu, ‘On the question of form in art’ (Guanyu yishi xingshi wenti) was first published in: Chinese Artists Association (Xi’an Branch), Fine Arts Newsletter (Meishu tongxun), no.5. See: Ye Jian and Shi Dan, Shi Lu’s Writings on Art (Shi Lu yishu wen ji), Xi’an: Shaanxi People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 2003, p. 34.
[34] Ye Jian and Shi Dan, Shi Lu’s Writings on Art (Shi Lu yishu wen ji), Xi’an: Shaanxi People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 2003, p. 17.
[35] In 1956, Shi Lu established the Chinese Painting Research Institute of the Xi’an Artists Association (Xi’an Meixie Zhongguohua Yanjiushi) under the Xi’an branch of the Chinese Artists Association and members included Zhao Wangyun, He Haixia, Fang Jizhong, Kang Shiyao and Li Zisheng. They were also described as the Chang’an school of painting. That year’s secretary of the artists association Chen Jiayong has recalled: ‘No-one at that time proposed setting up our own school of painting, and we were only concerned with implementing the literary and artistic principles and policies of the Party’s Central Committee in order to serve socialism better: going into the thick of life, inheriting the tradition, weeding out the old and bringing forth the new, making the past serve the present and making foreign things serve China, letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend’. See: Chen Jiayong, ‘A discussion of the Chang’an painters school’ (Tan Chang’an huapai) in Collection of Articles on the Chang’an School of Chinese Painting (Chang’an Zhongguohua luntan ji), Xi’an: Shaanxi People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1997. In any case, it is inappropriate to recognize the six painters of this Research Institute as having a consistent style or sharing aesthetic attitudes, and so the term ‘Chang’an painters school’ is only a reference to a collective enterprise in a particular historical period, and perhaps it was only because of the currency of other regional names such as the ‘Jinling painters school’ of Jiangsu that the term gained currency.
[36] Pan Gongkai ed., Pan Tianshou Discusses Art (Pan Tianshou tan yi lu), Hangzhou: Zhejiang People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 2002, pp.19-21.
[37] Ibid., p.20.
[38] Ref: Pan Tianshou Research (Pan Tianshou yanjiu), Hangzhou: Zhongguo Meishu Xueyuan Chubanshe, 1997, p.289. The original was published in: Big Critique Documents from Shanghai Art Circles (Shanghai meishujie dapipan cailiao), ‘Overthrow the reactionary academic authority – Pan Tianshou’ (Dadao fandong xueshu quanwei: Pan Tianshou).
[39] In June 1966, when the Cultural Revolution broke out, Pan Tianshou was sentenced to imprisonment in a ‘cow’ for three years. At the beginning of 1967, he was taken to Shengxian county to be subjected to a denunciation and beating in what was called a ‘big struggle session’. In 1968, the ‘Crusade against Pan’ [Tianshou] was waged at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts; at the beginning of 1969, he was taken to his hometown Ninghai county to be subjected to struggle and beating, and in April, while severely ill, was taken to a factory to labor, but fell into a coma and was taken to hospital. In May 1971, Pan Tianshou, after hearing the verdict read out that he was a ‘reactionary academic authority’ and an enemy of the people, was again taken to hospital in a serious condition, and on 5 September he passed away.