Songs of Praise for the New China:
Art in the Period of Social Recovery and Construction
Basic Forms - New Pictures for the New Year (New Nianhua) - Political Pollution - The Fine Arts Movement of the Worker-Peasant-Soldier Masses - Learning from the Soviet Union - Maksimov’s Classes - The Transition to the Two-in-One Combination - Paintings on CPC History - Sculpture
Basic Forms
At the end of 1949, all governmental and civil organizations were placed under the control of the PLA and the Party; after the KMT was forced to flee to Taiwan, the educational structure and the schools came under the leadership of the Communist Party and so the schools were transformed and rapidly amalgamated. Even private schools were incorporated into the new institutes or universities led by the Party.[1] In 1953, the state-funded Chinese Artists Association was proclaimed and established, and ‘the general principles’ in the association’s constitution stipulated that the association would ‘organize artists to study the artistic theories of Marxism-Leninism and socialist realism, study the policies of the Party and government, study social life, and adopt the methods of criticism and self-criticism in the constant transformation and improvement of artistic thought’. These rules demonstrated that, from the very beginning, art in New China was required to advance under the leadership of the Party.[2] Prior to 1949, if artists had so wished, they could have set up their own groups and organizations, including national associations. However, after the KMT was driven from the mainland to Taiwan, artists had no alternative but to submit to investigation by the ‘Artists Association’ and vie to enter its ranks or face exclusion from the only artists’ organization that now existed in the country. People saw, in the ensuing months and years, how the CPC was able to implement its own principles and policies through the artists’ association, and how, as a ‘mass organization’ under the leadership of the Party, the association was able to organize art workers (a specific term encompassing all those engaged in the fine arts, industrial arts, painting, sculpture and print making) to produce propaganda that proclaimed the political goals of the Party, as well as complete the political tasks assigned to them by the Party.
The outbreak of war in Korea on 25 June 1950 again compelled the Communist Party to opt for war. On 8 October, Mao Zedong issued a directive ordering the organization of the Chinese People’s Volunteers, and ten days later this Chinese army crossed the Yalu River, joining Kim Il Sung’s people’s army in the war against the troops of the United Nations and South Korean forces. [3]
A hastily set-up organization called the ‘Chinese People’s Committee for Safeguarding World Peace and Opposing the US Invasion’ issued its ‘Circular Calling for the General Launch of the Nationwide Movement in Support of the War to Resist America and Aid Korea’ on 14 March 1951, Article 5 of which stipulated that every cultural propaganda organization must make use of all public space at its disposal to meet the need to intensify the war effort. Most painters were mobilized to participate in this propaganda campaign, epitomized by Zhao Jianghe’s traditional Chinese painting titled Telling My Volunteer Army Uncle about My Achievements in Study (1953) which became a popular propaganda poster at the time. Reproductions of this work were ‘hung everywhere -in the frontline trenches, in the posts for treating the wounded, and in the hospitals at the front’. Yan Han’s woodblock Freshly Picked Apples was a tender work embodying a depth of emotional warmth in its composition and expression. The large number of works by He Kongde that drew on the battlefield for their subject matter became a source from which people drew their understanding of the Korean War situation at that time. His work Force 2 Combat Hero Yang Guoliang took real people and incidents from the Battle of Triangle Hill as his subject matter, and through them the artist depicted scenes of heroism.
New Pictures for the New Year (New Nianhua)
From the first day of 1950, the Communist Party worked to consolidate its position in all fields on the mainland –military, political, economic, and cultural, and most artists were excited to be enjoying a new era of peace; they depicted the events of this period through oil paintings, prints and traditional Chinese paintings, encompassing the genre of nianhua (‘New Year pictures’). With the formal date of the founding of the People’s Republic of China set for the 1st of October, 1949, and with the lunar New Year or Spring Festival of the following year fast approaching, it was clear to the artists who had come from Yan’an and to the cadres who now exerted control over the artists’ organizations that the most popular and effective art form for proclaiming the new regime was the nianhua. On 23 November, Mao Zedong inked his comments and approval on a document issued in the name of the Ministry of Culture by its minister Shen Yanbing (better known by his nom de plume Mao Dun), ‘Directive Launching the Work on New Nianhua’.
The ‘Directive Launching the Work on New Nianhua’ was equivalent to a military mobilization initiating the nation-wide creation, publication and exhibition of these works. Oil painters, guohua painters, woodblock print makers and cartoonists, regardless of whether they were originally from Yan’an or from KMT-controlled areas, were all required to participate in the creation of new nianhua. During the traditional New Year season of 1950, more than 200 painters from 26 regions created 412 new nianhua illustrations, of which more than 7 million copies were circulated. The main themes of the new nianhua in this period were the victory in the war led by the Communist Party, the establishment of the People’s Republic, industrial and agricultural production, the great unity of the people, the people’s love for Mao Zedong, and Sino-Soviet friendship and mutual assistance. As the Party’s propaganda tool in the art world, the newly founded magazine People’s Fine Arts promoted the new nianhua movement in its second issue, which was devoted to the topic.
In 1950, the Ministry of Culture organized awards assessing the new nianhua works. New nianhua by Wang Qi, Gu Yizhou, An Lin, Yin Shoushi, Zhang Ding, Feng Zhen, Gu Qun, Li Qun, and Deng Shu, and even by Wang Shuhui and Huang Zhou, won various awards. In subsequent Chinese New Year seasons, the nianhua became a mirror for the Communist Party, an art form in which important historical events and social life were reflected. The Korean War, economic construction, and safeguarding world peace and equality all provided subject matter for the following works: Lin Gang’s Zhao Guilan at the Gathering of Heroes, Hou Yimin and Deng Shu’s Celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the Establishment of the Communist Party of China, Li Keran’s Model Workers and Peasants Celebrate in Beihai Park, Ye Qianyu’s The Great Unity of the Nationalities throughout the Country, Li Qun’s Chairman Mao’s Representatives Visit the People in the Old Base Area in the Taihang Mountains, Shi Lu’s Happy Marriage, Ah Lao’s Sino-Korean Troops Sing Joyous Songs of Victory at the Front, and Zhang Longjin and Fang Zengxian’s The People’s West Lake all became important items of nianhua documentation.
As propaganda media publicizing the Party’s political feats, the new nianhua re-worked old forms as they created new images. The painters of monthly calendar pictures (yuefenpai), versed in depicting young ladies hailing from the gentry and the urban bourgeoisie, were now called upon to portray laborers and to produce images of the laboring women of the new society. The realist technique and the aesthetic form of the calendar pictures had won an extensive following, especially among urbanites and commoners. Painters versed in these skills and techniques simply relied on that with which they were familiar, and so their works were well received. By 1958, the calendar nianhua ‘virtually monopolized the entire market for nianhua pictures’. In an analysis of the reasons for the popularity of the calendar nianhua pictures, Fine Arts magazine in its April 1958 issue cited the depiction of ‘figures with appeal’ (renwu meili) as one of the contributing factors. However, the reporter for Fine Arts, who examined the comments made at a travelling exhibition of nianhua works jointly organized by the Arts Office of the Ministry of Culture, the Artists Association and People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, found that there was still criticism for the painters from the districts formerly ruled by the Kuomintang. The face of a child in Li Keran’s Yellow Ox was regarded as poorly executed, and the inscription on the same work that read ‘returning home after the land reform’ was thought to be ‘very passé’. Jiang Zhaohe’s Festival Gift was criticized because the child in the work seemed to have favus of the scalp and his facial hair seemed too pronounced, while the worker in the painting was accused of having beetling brows, like a thief, as well as a general slovenly appearance. The female character in Yu Feng and Jin Meisheng’s New Clothes for the Evening Gathering was criticized by PLA soldiers and workers, who insisted that she belonged to the past and that none of ‘the top ranks of today’s workers could contain such a woman’. The works by these painters from the old KMT areas were also deemed to be ‘insufficiently attractive and even unacceptable’, and the techniques used to produce them were held to not fulfill the needs of the new nianhua.[4]
Despite these expressed reservations, in line with the transformation of the politics and ideology of the nianhua, the elements of ‘feudal superstition’, thereby categorizing the artistic sensibilities of all pre-1949 art, in the old nianhua had been gradually replaced by personalities of the new society and their deeds.
Political Pollution
Mao Zedong remarked on 23 October, 1951 in his speech opening the third session of the first Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC): ‘With thought reform, it is the various types of intellectual who should first undergo thought reform. This is one of the preconditions for our country implementing a thorough-going democratic reform in all sectors and progressively implementing industrialization’.[5] Because intellectuals were concentrated in the field of education, on 30 November, the Central Committee issued its ‘Directive on the Work in Schools of Conducting Ideological Transformation and Organizing the Clean-up’. Clearly the Communists from Yan’an had set out to achieve absolute control in the intellectual and ideological spheres, in everything from ideas to organization. In this first political movement of the new regime the key document for study was Mao Zedong’s speech at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art because, though delivered almost one decade previously, it stipulated the political standpoint and social responsibility required of intellectuals. Now it was the turn of urban intellectuals, rather than those who had been up in Yan’an where the overwhelming majority of whom had in the 1940s been transformed into a cadre that the Party trusted, to submit to the pressure and impact of the political movement. City intellectuals were now subjected to the regimen of mass rallies, criticism and self-criticism sessions, ideological struggles and frank confessionals that were originally commonplace in Yan’an. On 20 May, People’s Daily had published an editorial, revised and authorized by Mao Zedong himself, which was titled ‘We Should Pay Attention to the Discussion of the Film The Life of Wu Xun’. On 23 July, People’s Daily announced that ‘Notes on the Investigation of the History of Wu Xun’ had been revised by Mao Zedong; intellectuals were told that ‘the bourgeoise with their reactionary thought had launched a penetrating attack on the Communist Party’, that Wu Xun had been ‘a powerful gangster, usurer and landlord’, and that to acknowledge or tolerate praise of The Life of Wu Xun ‘was tantamount to acknowledging or tolerating slander of the peasants’ revolutionary struggle’. No-one knew how to respond in this political situation and could only conclude that in line with the demands of the Communist Party leadership only the revolutionary and working classes were correct.
The conclusion of the Korean War on 27 July 1953 provided the new regime with the opportunity to devote its strength to construction. One month earlier, the ‘general line’ and overall tasks for the transitional period had been set out. The general line stipulated that socialist transformation be carried out as a nation-wide mass movement in agriculture, the handicraft industry and in capitalist industry and commerce. Moreover, the ‘state monopoly on purchases and marketing’, which had begun to be implemented in that year and entailed the expropriation of the farmer and the elimination of the market, had resulted in an increasingly serious gap between rich and poor and between the city and the countryside.
In September 1954, amid the jubilation when the 1st Session of the First National People’s Congress ratified the Constitution of the PRC, the CPC launched the wave of criticism of Hu Shi, the prominent intellectual of the May Fourth period who was then living in Taiwan. Two students of Shandong University, Li Xifan and Lan Ling published an article in the university journal Humanities and later in Guangming Daily criticizing Yu Pingbo’s study Research on Dream of the Red Chamber, pointing out that its ideological roots are the ‘subjective idealism’ manifest in Hu Shi’s Textual Study of Dream of the Red Chamber. Mao Zedong remarked: ‘Reading this, it seems possible that we can launch a struggle against the bourgeois idealism of Hu Shi that has been poisoning youth for more than thirty years in the field of classical literature studies’. He demanded that the entire Party undertake a total critique of Hu Shi’s thought. On 8 November 1954, Guangming Daily published a speech by Guo Moruo who reminded his readers that Hu Shi was a ‘Confucius’ in the intellectual world who must be overthrown. On 2 December, at a conference jointly chaired by the Chinese Academy of Science and the Writers’ Association, it was resolved to launch the critique of Hu Shi in the spheres of philosophy, politics, history and literature. In January 1955, the Central Committee issued its ‘Notice on the Work of Organizing Lectures, Propagating Materialist Thought and Criticizing Bourgeois Idealism among Cadres and Intellectuals’, which was followed in March by ‘Directive Calling for Propagating the Materialist Critique of Bourgeois Ideology’.
Art circles echoed this political movement. In the March 1954 issue of Fine Arts the painter Li Hua published an article introducing French art titled ‘Delacroix and his Scène des massacres de Scio’, yet in the December issue of the same year, an article by Wang Rong titled ‘We Must Eliminate Bourgeois Views from Art Criticism’ singled out Li Hua for his bourgeois idealism:
From the outset, Comrade Li Hua’s article affirms Delacroix’s status as a leader of the Romantics, an appraisal that reveals Li’s acceptance of the capitalist class, this being the bourgeois view (as revealed by the entry on romanticism in The Encyclopaedia Britannica). Everyone knows that romanticism has two diametrically opposed extremes -the revolutionary and the reactionary. By stating ambiguously that Delacroix was ‘a leader of the romantics’, was he referring ultimately to the romanticism of the revolution or to reactionary romanticism? If applying such equivocal appraisal to a classical painter is not bourgeois idealism, then what is it?
Such criticism was the response in art circles to the movement to liquidate bourgeois idealism, as represented by Yu Pingbo’s research on Dream of the Red Chamber. As the author Wang Rong pointed out at the beginning of his critical article: ‘The alarm bell has been struck summoning research workers in all fields of thought to liquidate the bourgeois idealist views that imbue Yu Pingbo’s research on Dream of the Red Chamber. Naturally that clarion call also extends to art criticism. Every art critic should ponder the question: Do bourgeois idealist views also exist in art criticism? The answer should be in the affirmative’.[6]
As the regime relentlessly consolidated and developed, the political struggles in ideology and culture became increasingly ferocious. During the first month of 1955, the Central Committee approved and disseminated the reports of the Propaganda Department on Hu Feng, who had been an active literary and artistic theoretician in KMT-administered areas, as well as on his associates who were collectively dubbed ‘the Hu Feng counter-revolutionary clique’,[7] which Mao Zedong described in a commentary in People’s Daily dated 13 May as ‘a clique in literature and art that is opposed to the Party and to the people’.
Regardless of differences in academic views and positions, all those in literary and art circles took part in the denunciation of the ‘the Hu Feng counter-revolutionary clique’. The Chinese Artists Association on 22 April held a forum attacking the reactionary literary and artistic theory of Hu Feng which was attended by more than 30 people. At this time, the traditional painter Yu Fei’an, and Xu Xingzhi, an early revolutionary artist who used an expressionist style to treat urban realities, were unanimous in their political views, arguing that, in attacking the Central Committee’s ‘Views on the Question of Literature and Art’, Hu Feng had launched an attack on the working class’ literary and artistic theory using bourgeois literature and art theory, with the aim of replacing the Party’s guiding principles and policies on literature and art with bourgeois idealist thought. On 23 May, leading members of the Chinese Artists Association, including Jiang Feng, Liu Kaiqu, Ye Qianyu, Wu Zuoren, Cai Ruohong, Wang Zhaowen, Hua Junwu, Shao Yu, Gu Yuan, Yan Han, and Hu Man, jointly signed a letter to the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, ‘proposing that Hu Feng be eliminated from the ranks of literature and art circles’.[8] A majority of artists participated in the ideological and political attack on Hu Feng. [9] In this period, the foremost problem for artists was maintaining agreement with the political stance and attitude of the Communist Party. The Artists Association soon began to organize branches and groups throughout the country to begin creating cartoons, picture-story books and propaganda posters that expose and attack the ‘Hu Feng counter-revolutionary clique’.
Painters were also called upon to depict the new socialist transformation movement. After the appearance of Mao Zedong’s report ‘On the Question of the Transformation of Agriculture into Cooperatives’ and of the document of the Sixth Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee titled ‘Resolutions on the Question of the Cooperative Transformation of Agriculture’, Shao Yu called upon artists in his article ‘Greeting the High Tide in the Movement for the Cooperative Transformation of Agriculture’ to arm themselves with socialist thought, in order to depict ‘the greatest topic of our times’.[10]
The political situation was constantly changing. In January 1956, at a conference on the question of intellectuals convened by the Central Committee, Zhou Enlai announced to the conferees in a gentle and amiable manner that the overwhelming majority of intellectuals today were now part of the working class. On 25 April, Mao Zedong explained to inner-Party comrades at the enlarged meeting of the Politburo his article ‘On the Ten Great Relationships’, which had previously not been regarded as important by the Party’s political elite. Because he was discussing economic questions in terms at a remove from the Russian development model, Mao gave the impression to Party members and outsiders that the main task in the future was developing the economy, not engaging in class struggle. However, at the Eighth Congress of the CPC in September, people were told: Economic construction has become the focus of our future work, the contradiction between the proletariat and the capitalist class has been basically resolved, and the class struggle has retreated to become a secondary contradiction.
Finding his power to formulate Party policy weakened and wanting to strike back at what he perceived to be an obstructive bureaucracy, Mao Zedong, still enormously popular, announced at the enlarged meeting of the Politburo on 28 April 1956: ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend; I think this should become our policy. Let a hundred flowers bloom on artistic questions, let a hundred schools contend on academic questions’. Mao Zedong thereby hoped to rely on the views of intellectuals from outside the Party to help him in inner-Party politics and ideological struggle. One month later, Lu Dingyi, Minister of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, gave a speech simply titled ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom and a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend’ to a group of intellectuals who included natural and social scientists, physicians, writers and artists. In February and March 1957, Mao Zedong further clarified his new position at top-level state meetings and at a national conference on propaganda work: ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend: this is a basic long-term policy, not a temporary measure’. At the time, artists began to feel that ‘this policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend was like the spring breeze blowing the tip of every branch’.[11] Lin Fengmian commented that it was ‘as though the long winter were over’.[12]
For artists, the ‘double hundred policy’ provided a sense of freedom. The February 1957 issue of Fine Arts was strikingly devoted to Impressionism, long regarded as ‘bourgeois formalism’, and included illustrations of works by Manet, Monet, Degas, Pissarro, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
In fact, this discussion of the Impressionists echoed the political situation in the Soviet Union. Into the night of 24 February 1956, Nikita Krushchev had delivered his famous report ‘On the Personality Cult and its Consequences’ to the 20th National Congress of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) which presented an unprecedented assessment of Stalin, pointing out the serious consequences of the personality cult surrounding him. Obviously, the political atmosphere in the Soviet Union quickly influenced China. From November 1956 to January 1957, teachers and students of the Central Academy of Fine Arts held four forums on Impressionist painting. At the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the local branch of the China Democratic League organized ‘evening salons’, at which one participant even ventured to say that ‘with the hundred flowers blooming today, Impressionism is one flower that can be allowed to exist’. Participating in the discussions at these gatherings were such prominent artists as Wang Shikuo, Wang Manshuo, Wang Linyi, Ai Zhongxin, Jiang Feng, Wu Zuoren, Li Zongjin, Li Hua, Xu Xingzhi, Hua Tianyou, Feng Fasi, and Jiang Zhaohe. Impressionists were even included by some artists in the category of realism, which belonged to the proletariat and to socialism; if this game of overlapping categories proved successful, they might secure freedom for their painting and deflect the political accusation of being ‘bourgeois formalists’. In a letter to the editor of Fine Arts, Lin Fengmian reminded people that although victory in the revolution had been achieved and material construction was advancing by leaps and bounds, the achievements in the fine arts were shameful. Lin mocked those artists who made much of their bold depiction of ‘the road of socialist realism’, and warned that too narrow a view of socialist realism should be not be taken. He called for ‘the careful study of the way in which classicism, romanticism, realism, naturalism, impressionism, academism or fauvism, cubism, futurism …took shape and reached maturity. We cannot begin by denying everything’.[13] In the brief period of the ‘double hundred’ policy, works of fiction that presented a critique of bureaucratism were popular and influential. Among the best known were Liu Binyan’s novellas At the Bridge Construction Site and An Inside Story from Our Newspaper and Wang Meng’s The New Young Man in the Organization Department. Art circles also felt dissatisfied with, and were critical of, the policy of upholding socialist realism in art and literature, but an overcautious psychology prevailed, unlike in literary circles, where writers ‘opposed the news blackout, the suppression of speech, the expansion of the classified document system and the regularization (jingchanghua) of democracy walls’.[14] This kind of libertarian speech was different; the liberalism sought by art circles was limited to simply obtaining more room for freer artistic expression.
Yet, on 15 May Mao Zedong quickly issued a political circular titled ‘The Situation Is About to Change’ to senior cadres within the Party. In it he said that rabid Rightists wanted to win total victory through factional political struggle and that in order to eliminate these ‘poisonous weeds’, ‘we need to keep them rabid, so that they go to extremes’.
Like most intellectuals, art circles found it very difficult to respond rapidly to this, but in the spirit of Mao Zedong’s ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People’ of February 1957, artists under the Ministry of Culture, the Artists Association, the editorial department of Fine Arts and the Central Academy of Fine Arts similarly joined their critical voices to the rectification movement’s opposition to bureaucratism, sectarianism and subjectivism. On 18 May and 4 June, the Ministry of Culture and the Chinese Artists Association jointly invited Chinese-style painters based in Beijing to two forums, each of which was attended by more than 70 painters and others from art circles. At the meetings artists responded at their own pace to the Party’s rectification movement. Yet, only a few days later, Fei Xiaotong’s reference to ‘an early spring for intellectuals’ [15] was attacked in Mao Zedong’s draft essay of 8 June titled ‘Organize our Forces and Plan Our Counter-attack on the Rightists’. In fact, this appeared just when the ‘Hungarian incident’ (October 1956) was exerting an influence among Chinese intellectuals, to the alarm of the CPC. It was only inner-Party conflict that delayed the crackdown on liberal speech by intellectuals. Nevertheless, when it came it was swift and the CPC decided to conceal its reaction to the ‘Hungarian incident’ within the rectification movement, and only later isolated a small ‘Hungarian’ faction for annihilation.[16] The swift upshot was that the members of every academic, literary and artistic organization were presented with long lists of the names of Rightists as required reading. On 22 June, the CPC organ People’s Daily provided the following response to intellectuals in its editorial maintaining that this was an ‘unusual spring’. From the summer until the latter half of 1958, 550,000 people were named as ‘reactionaries’ or ‘counter-revolutionary elements’, and the waves of the Anti-Rightist Movement reached into all walks of life inside and outside the Party. The movement led directly to the Third Plenary Session of the Eighth Party Congress’ alteration of the basic judgment on Chinese social contradictions made previously at the First Plenary Session. As a result the principal contradiction was no longer considered to be internal contradictions among the people. Because some people were trying to use the rectification to do away with the one-party system under which the CPC ruled, inner-Party conflicts were temporarily halted. On 9 October 1958 Mao Zedong reiterated: ‘The contradictions between the proletariat and the capitalist class, and between the socialist road and the capitalist road, are now without doubt the principal contradictions in Chinese society’.[17]
The urgency of events led the editors of the 7th issue of Fine Arts of 1957 to bring their planned series of reports on the rectification forums to a peremptory halt. Instead, a hastily prepared series of articles contributing to the anti-Rightist movement by Liu Kaiqu, Wu Zuoren, Jiang Feng, Gu Yuan, and Hua Junwu, in their capacity as officials and leaders in artistic work, obediently echoed the directives of the Party. Liu Kaiqu, in his article titled ‘Resolutely Overthrow the Attacks by Rightist Elements’, argued that they ‘never imagined that Rightist elements would make use of the rectification movement and negate the glorious victories and achievements of our socialist revolution and construction. They vainly hoped, with their monstrous lies, reactionary speech and reactionary actions, to attack the Party, usurp the leadership of the Party and lead the people away from the socialist road, in their attempt to fulfill their shameless and wild reactionary political ambitions’. In the campaign, Wu Zuoren wanted to rely on his historical understanding to explain that during the period of Kuomintang rule the economic crises created by inflation made it impossible for artists to engage in art, and only with the leadership of socialism and the Party could an artist become a ‘red expert’ (hongse zhuanjia) and an ‘artist of the soul’ (linghun de yishujia). The point of the contribution to the campaign made by Gu Yuan, an artist trained in Yan’an, was obvious from the title of his article, ‘If There Were No Communist Party, There Would Be No New China’. Jiang Feng in his article, ‘Do Not Allow Rightist Thought to Slip through Loopholes’, summarized his understanding of the characteristics of rightists in the fine arts. However, just as the rectification in Yan’an more than ten years previously had provided no defense for those young activists participating in the revolution, Jiang Feng’s political standpoint, which went back to the early Left-Wing movement and the Yan’an period, had inconceivably, and within only a few days, become described as that of a prominent Rightist in art circles, and his speech condemning the Rightists was regarded as a piece of evasion that failed to grasp the key points or main ideas. In the August 1957 issue of Fine Arts, people were told that Jiang Feng was ‘the incendiary leader in art circles’ who had attacked the Party. In this way, earlier differences between Jiang Feng and several guohua painters came to be described as Jiang’s refusal to implement both the Party’s policy on inheriting and developing national fine arts traditions and its policy of uniting with Chinese guohua painters. All political judgments began to transform, and Jiang Feng variously found himself described as an artist who had ‘appropriated the name of “the revolutionary school” in order to oppose the policies of the Party’, ‘appropriated the cause of “anti-factionalism” to spearhead his attack on the Party’, and ‘had instigated the masses to wildly attack the Party’. Later, Jiang Feng began to be criticized at great length by his former colleagues, and even those who had once supported him, including Wu Zuoren, Li Zongjin, and Dong Xiwen, were now also accused of being members of the ranks of the Rightists. Pang Xunqin, who had earlier raised many issues concerning industrial art or arts and crafts (gongyi meishu), was now regarded as a Rightist harboring plans for an ‘anti-Party conspiracy’; the ‘questions of leadership’ he had raised were construed to be his attempts to dissolve the Party leadership, while his ‘questions of direction’ (fangxiang wenti) were interpreted as an attempt to ‘move in the direction of capitalism’. Even more ironic were the unceasing efforts to portray Xu Yansun, who argued for the importance of the status of Chinese traditional painting, as a Rightist; he was regarded as being in an alliance (the Zhang-Luo League) closely connected with Zhang Bojun and Li Boqiu. At this time, articles portrayed Xu Yansun as a feudal labor contractor who had bullied others with his band of hired thugs. According to statistics on the liquidation of the Rightists, a large number of oil painters, woodblock printmakers, guohua painters and cartoonists were classified as ‘Rightists’; such luminaries as Yan Han, Wang Liuqiu, ZhengYefu, Wang Zimei, Wang Maigan, Liao Bingxiong, Liu Haisu, Zhang Huaijiang, and Mo Pu were all declared to be Rightists and savagely criticized. Soon, art circles throughout the country, like those in all other walks of life, had identified large numbers of ‘Rightists’.[18]
In May 1958, the anti-Rightist movement raged on, and the second session of the CPC’s Eighth Congress adopted the general line to ‘go all out and strive constantly to achieve greater, faster, better and more economical results in building socialism’. This directly initiated the radical movement in the economy called the ‘Great Leap Forward’, which ultimately led to the national economy’s collapse.[19] Yet the Party had issued the call and the Great Leap Forward would impact on all walks of life. During this period, most leaders of the CPC genuinely believed that China had already completed the transition to socialism and that the system of private ownership had been eliminated through the socialist transformation. They believed that now in China there was only the urban economy owned by the whole people as well as the rural economy that was collectively owned, and that the development of material wealth would usher in the socialism which Marx had outlined. Indeed, industry had already completed the First Five-Year Plan, which saw the successful testing of China’s first experimental nuclear reactor built with Soviet assistance, the first traffic roll across the Yangtze River Bridge in Wuhan on 15 October 1958, the construction of the petroleum base in Yumen, and even the elimination of the ‘Four Pests’ (rats, sparrows, flies and mosquitoes) in what was deemed to be a ‘people’s war’ (quanmin zhanzheng). All these socialist achievements provided artists with rich raw material for their work.
Most people believed that socialism was riding the crest of victory, and that present problems did not hinge on the general goals of consolidation and construction, but on taking the decision to ‘overtake Britain and catch up with the USA’. (1 January 1958, People’s Daily) On 17 August 1958, the enlarged meeting of the Politburo passed its ‘Resolution on the Question of Setting up Rural People’s Communes’, which announced that, through the establishment of people’s communes in the countryside, the rapid transition from socialism to communism would be effected. The Party and the government wanted the people to believe that, to bring about the imminent advent of communism, present work must focus on the Great Leap Forward. In 1958 the entire population took part in the large-scale effort to make iron and steel and set up communist units, and although the ‘general line’ did not make use of the term ‘communism’, the three red banners, namely ‘the general line’, ‘the great leap forward’ and the ‘people’s communes’, led people to hope that they would soon be entering the stage of communism. One of the ‘new folk songs’ of the day proclaimed that ‘communism is the paradise, to which the people’s communes form the bridge’, lyrics which captured the spiritual fervor of the period. Although ‘the great leap forward’ was at the outset a term limited to the fields of production and construction, such vocabulary was rapidly appropriated even by people in the social sciences, literature and the arts, and there were feverish scenes in which the completion of literary and artistic works was stipulated within a brief time. Some painters took the view that there was little difference between the quality of labor associated with the brush plied indoors at an artist’s table and the shovel wielded by a laborer at a blast furnace.
From 3 March onwards, each small group within the Chinese Artists Association frequently held ‘Great Leap Forward conferences’ (dayuejin huiyi). These meetings assigned concrete tasks to subordinate units in the ‘Great Leap Forward in the fine arts’, and the artists’ associations in all provinces and municipalities throughout the country formulated specific plans for the Great Leap Forward. This feverish atmosphere was a response to what was taking place in production and construction.
In any case, a vigorous communist movement was unfolding, and the changes in the cities and rural areas provided artists with first-hand material. The grassroots steel-making drive, the widespread construction of reservoirs and the campaign to build collective dining halls were all regarded as themes with communist content and they appeared over and again in the works of painters in this period. Like the great majority of workers eagerly ‘rushing to enter communism’, artists were buoyed up by promising and joyful slogans like ‘the bolder the people, the greater the production’. The leading article in the October 1958 issue of Fine Arts was titled ‘Launch Hundreds of Communist Art Sputniks’.[20]
The criticism of knowledge that characterized the anti-Rightist movement resulted in contempt for intelligence itself, because it was argued that the more important thing was a person’s political standpoint. Hence, the universal need for ‘redness’, the political ideology stipulated by the Party, rather than ‘expertise’ (zhuan), professional technical proficiency which might be bourgeois and hence dangerous unless that ‘expertise’ were balanced by the ‘redness’ (hong) that was the Party’s stipulated political goal. Up until 1976, artists would grapple constantly with problems related to the interpretation and fulfillment of the injunction to be ‘both red and expert’ (youhong youzhuan).
In this period, explicatory and narrative picture-story books (lianhuanhua) and prints that could be readily reproduced became important art forms. A number became part of the artistic memory of the period for people growing up in the 1850s and 1960s: Wang Xuyang and Ben Qingyu’s I Want to Learn to Read, Gu Bingxin’s Reconnoitering across the River (1956), He Youzhi’s Great Changes in a Mountain Village (1963), Railway Guerrilla Troop by Ding Binzeng and Han Heping, and The White-Haired Girl (1965) by Hua Sanchuan. Many picture-story books were the childhood companions of people born in this period, becoming their textbooks on ideas and emotions. Prints of the period that also made a deep impression included Dandelion (1959) by the Sichuanese print maker Wu Fan, and Tibetan Girls (1959) and Setting Out on the Golden Road (1963) by Li Huanmin.
The Fine Arts Movement of the Worker-Peasant-Soldier Masses
It was difficult for most artists, teachers and students from art schools to keep pace with the Great Leap Forward and its demands; the policy of sending teachers and students of the academies of fine arts to the factories and countryside could not satisfy the needs of the Great Leap Forward in art. For the Communist Party which had in the past resolved revolutionary and political issues by activating the masses, the solution to this problem was to rely again on the participation of the workers, peasants and soldiers, even though they had no professional artistic training. In April 1958, at the National Rural Masses’ Culture and Arts Working Conference, Qian Junrui, the vice-minister of culture, stressed that in the process of building culture there was a two-line struggle between ‘serving the socialist politics and economy’ and ‘serving the politics and economy of the bourgeoisie or of the representatives of the semi-colonial, semi-feudal classes’. However, by assuming political command and mobilizing the masses under the leadership of the Party, the conferees could see that:
…there had already been an unprecedented leap in the cultural and artistic activities of the rural masses, and in their involvement in spare time creative activities the masses were surging ahead with full force. Through their enthusiastic songs and splendid paintings, the masses were extolling the present glorious era of socialist construction. Gao Xueqian, the director of the Houqianzhuang Village Center Club in Changli, Hebei province, had this to say in introducing the situation in his county: ‘Slogans called on artists to engage in Great Leap Forward production, and to grasp culture and engage in it, as well as exhorting them to wage a battle through mural paintings and to serve as a vanguard; under their direction the masses, in the space of only three days, created 164 mural paintings. A ditty describes how the walls were all whitewashed and then covered with poems and pictures, and every house gleamed as each village was transformed. After the work shifts ended, the streets were filled with people congregating to view the murals. Describing a commune girl in a mural painting, one commune member wrote a poem describing how she was like a fairy maiden who had come to earth to distribute talismans that would ensure years of bumper harvests’. Huang Deyu, the head of propaganda of the Changli county Party committee pointed out that in twelve days in the middle of March the Great Leap Forward in mural painting in the county had resulted in all of the villages being beautified with a total of more than 65,000 mural paintings.[21]
These peasant pictures were obviously not the result of the research and promotion of traditions or folk art, but derived from the spontaneous delight taken by peasants in painting the works, most of which of which stressed obvious propaganda aims. They constituted a documentary record of the basic irrationality of this period, through their revolutionary fervor and their understanding of the expression of the communist ideal.
In an editorial piece in the September 1958 issue of Fine Arts titled ‘Promoting the Great Popularization and Prosperity of the Arts’, the authors informed their readers: ‘The broad masses of the working people are not only once again the people who appreciate art, but they have already leapt into the creation of art. This marks the conclusion of an era in which only a minority of people created art and the beginning of a new era in which art is owned by the people in their entirety. This is the age in which everyone can be an outstanding painter and in which the divisions between physical labor and mental labor will gradually fade, with labor acquiring a new integrated form, free of the old division of labor’. An art form cannot exist in isolation, and it was felt that bourgeois formalism must be criticized and repudiated; the ideology and spirit poured into peasant painting were held to demonstrate the power that creating art conferred on the peasants. In this way, even if peasants did not have knowledge and concepts of art theory, their paintings could still be seen as the organic unity of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism. Those peasants who painted murals were praised as ‘laboring people’ (laodong renmin) and were regarded as both connoisseurs and artists. If specialist artists were unable to totally discard their individualism, they would be unable to attain the goal of being politically ‘red’, and if they did not discard the ‘pretence’ (jiazi) of being expert, then they would become utterly superfluous. With tens of thousands of peasants becoming painters, art in the rural villages was seen as having attained the intensity of a ‘sputnik’ phenomenon, and the art movement had blended totally into the mighty torrent of the Great Leap Forward. The peasant paintings of Pixian county in Jiangsu province were singled out as the model of the art of the Great Leap Forward in this period, and in these paintings: sheaves of grain reached into the clouds; the fishing boats should have capsized under the weight of the catch they transported; ears of wheat could contain an entire railway train; pigs were larger than elephants; a soybean could serve as a ferry across a river; the paddy rice was so sturdy it had to be sawed down at harvest time …No one questioned this revolutionary romanticism; in the same way that nobody questioned the utopian Great Leap Forward. These peasant paintings were described by critics at the time as imbued with the ‘communist style’ (gongchan-zhuyi fengge).[22] Critics looked on as the peasants created innumerable ‘Dunhuang mural temples’ of the new era.[23] Indeed, the paintings of the peasants, who completely lacked a professional basis, did demonstrate a freedom and boldness that was similar to the claims of Great Leap Forward slogans (‘the bolder the people, the bigger the production’); ‘big’ became the goal and requirement of art. In a speech at the National Fine Arts Working Conference titled ‘The Art of the Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Is Excellent’, Wang Zhaowen said: ‘We must affirmatively investigate why the masses like big things. Regardless of the joy that peasants show for the fruits of their labors, in their expectations, ideals and confidence in future achievements their love of big results is understandable. Living today in an age which is realizing the general line of the Party and producing the Great Leap Forward, the people seek to conquer nature and build socialism and so they give full play to their creativity and their enthusiasm for work, in order to win even greater victories. Given the bumper harvests and the revolutionary demand to conquer nature, people’s demands cannot be satisfied if they do not paint big things’.[24]
Thousands of communist ‘art sputniks’ (yishu weixing) were being launched, and in this climate the art movement in the army was also being pushed towards a ‘new climax’ (xin de gaochao). Every barracks and platoon became an art school, soldiers became practicing painters, and military art activities were linked with those of the Yan’an and civil war periods—‘where you fight, you paint’.[25] Workers were unequivocally also important players in this flood of art. Art activities in factory workshops were said to promote enthusiasm for work and could even lead to the invention of massive new tools that ‘could raise production output 700 times!’[26]
The large number of worker-peasant-soldier painters in this period produced an incalculable quantity of works, and these were regarded as sufficient proof that art both served the workers, peasants and soldiers, and sprang from the workers, peasants and soldiers. Wang Zhaowen reminded people that the most important thing was the artist’s political standpoint and being able to see the superiority of the works of workers and peasants; ‘the works of the masses have great ideological strength, because they combine revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism’.[27]
Learning from the Soviet Union
After 1949, the USA and western countries continued to exert pressure on the CPC, forcing the new regime to obtain as much support as possible. Trends in international politics and ideology and the established socialist bloc led the CPC to ‘lean to the socialist side’, as Mao Zedong put it in ‘On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship’.
The signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance was one of the earliest political events to which the Chinese Artists’ Association rallied by calling on art workers throughout the country to create propaganda works extolling this major event in the socialist camp. Exhibitions, conferences and other activities publicizing Soviet art henceforth became increasingly frequent, and the most basic resources influencing Chinese artists’ ideas on art were derived from the theory of Soviet socialist realism. In the pages of the August 1950 issue of People’s Fine Arts, readers were introduced to the works of Soviet and Russian artists, dominated by Repin, and could read articles such as ‘Realism Is the Progressive Methodology in the Creative Arts’. Regardless of the complexity of the development of concepts, the similarities between the Soviet and Chinese political and ideological backgrounds ensured that Chinese artists could very readily understand ‘socialist realism’. The great majority of them began to acquire an understanding of the meaning of this concept through publications and documents in the years after 1949. [28]
It was also after 1949 that Zhou Yang directly drew on the terminology of Soviet literary and art theory and began to combine carefully concepts of Soviet socialist realism with Mao Zedong’s populist concepts, including ‘class struggle’ and ‘workers, peasants and soldiers’. In the second issue of Xinhua Monthly of 1953, he published ‘Socialist Realism: The Way Forward for Chinese Literature’, in which he re-cast many of the expressions from his translations in more populist language: ‘Socialist realism requires above all that the writer truthfully depict reality in the development of the real revolution. In life there are always contradictions and conflicts between progressive and new things, on the one hand, and retrograde and dying things, on the other, and writers should incisively reveal the contradictions in life, so that we can clearly discover where the development of reality is leading us and so resolutely uphold those things that are new and oppose those that are old’.[29] Zhou Yang called on people to learn from the socialist realist literature of the Soviet Union and with self-confidence and optimism he declared that socialist elements in national politics, economics and cultural life were increasing daily and that, as intellectuals and students had already begun to receive an education in the world outlook of Marxism, socialist realism has a real foundation. In fact, in September 1953 Chinese literary and art workers at their second representative assembly had made it very clear that socialist realism was the basic demand of literature and art.
In December 1953, Shao Yu, deputy director of the creative committee of the Chinese Artists Association, in outlining the tasks for publicity and propaganda of the general line for the transitional period, used the vocabulary proffered by Russian theoreticians and approved by the CPC’s Central Committee: The general line will be the grand theme for the creative work of writers and artists for a long time to come, and artists should respond warmly to the call of the Party, and use the creative methodology of socialist realism to create works which have educational significance and which point to the glorious future of the working people.
In 1954, the inaugural issue of Fine Arts included illustrations of a number of Soviet art works, including Salvo from the Cruiser Aurora (oil painting), Peasant Delegates Visit Lenin (oil painting), Lenin and Stalin at Lenin’s Dacha (sculpture), and Lenin at Work (drawing). Starting with this first issue, the magazine regularly serialized Soviet theoretical articles about art and these became classic documents studied by Chinese painters.
Many articles concerning the narrative quality of paintings exerted a lasting influence on Chinese painters, opening up their imagination and informing them how to depict real conflict and not limit themselves to intense class struggle in their portrayal of people and events in socialist society. To a degree this gave troubled Chinese artists space to display their intelligence. In addition to the early works by the Russian artists Repin (Unexpected Homecoming) and Surikov (Morning of Streltzi’s Execution), works with plot by contemporary Soviet artists, such as Boris V. Ioganson’s Communists under Investigation and In an Old Factory in the Urals and A.Livitin and Yuri Tulin’s A Fresh Issue of the Factory Newspaper, made a deep impression of Chinese artists in the 1950s, who imitated them to various degrees but using Chinese subject matter. Even Pang Xunqin, who in his early years had called for ‘the creation of a world in which our own colors, lines, and forms interweave’, provided a delectable description of the paintings with plot in the 1954 All-Soviet Art Exhibition:
Apart from emphasizing the description of the Soviet people travelling along the road to communism, the painters also reveal imperfections in behavior and incorrect thinking as a part and parcel of life, even though these are by no means universal phenomena. In order to sharpen his critique, Mikhail Likhachev issues a pointed rebuke of drunks through his depiction of a bleary eyed alcoholic returning home to a son who sternly looks up at him from the newspaper he is reading, a daughter who looks afraid and a wife serving a meal but who on seeing her husband drunk again endures great suffering. Everyone seeing this painting wonders when will such behavior come to an end?[30]
It was from the ideology of such paintings, which sought to expound a literary narrative ideology and which entailed related principles of composition, graphic characterization, logically composed narrative and healthy and lofty ideological themes, that Chinese painters in the 1950s generally emulated the principles, methods and approaches of Soviet art.
Maksimov’s Classes
On 29 February 1955, Konstantin Ivanovich Maksimov (1913-1993), professor of the Surikov Academy of Fine Arts, arrived in Beijing as the first Soviet government advisor in art teaching and took up his post as advisor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Maksimov was a major influence in China because of the advanced oil painting classes he ran at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Students from different art institutions attended these classes, including Hou Yimin, Jin Shangyi, Zhan Jianjun, Shang Husheng, Zhang Wenxin, Ren Mengzhang, Wang Liuqiu, Yu Yunjie, Qin Zheng, Wang Dewei, Gao Hong, He Kongde, Lu Guoying, Chen Beixin, Wei Chuanyi, Wu Dezu, Wang Chengyi, Yuan Hao, Wang Xuzhu, and Yu Changgong. The class monitor was Feng Fasi. These students had all previously undergone professional training at higher institutes and colleges of the fine arts, but their understanding of oil painting was flimsy. So, in a situation in which there was no contact with western oil painting, there was great excitement generated by this visit of a Soviet professor in the field. In the first year, Maksimov provided the training class with basic practical instruction in oil painting, and from 1956 onwards he switched the focal point of his teaching to the students’ graduate work. The teaching program shifted from plaster sculpting to anatomy, from sketching to oil painting, from studio work to outdoor training, and from compositional rough drafts to completed work. In teaching, Maksimov even based his course on the Soviet oil painting curriculum and methods, assisting the Central Academy of Fine Arts in its ‘standardization’ (zhengguihua) of teaching, and participating in drawing up the syllabus for the oil painting department. The Soviet system thus influenced the long-term foundations of the system in China.
Like most Soviet painters, Maksimov, when discussing art issues in speeches and forums, invariably touched on the question of the ideological tendency in socialist realism, but as the teacher of an oil painting training class, he could show his Chinese students, through teaching and practical demonstrations, the full extent of his understanding and knowledge of oil painting techniques, even if there was only one technique. His basic methodology called on painters to observe life and be sensitive to what the French called ‘en plein-air’ (Chinese: waiguang, lit., external light). But, given the background of socialist realistic ideology, the importance of ‘external light’ was shifted to its reflection through the peasants working in the sunshine, the workers building roads and bridges and the soldiers fighting far from their homes. In other words, the artist was called on to depict ideological man ‘en plein air’, and not to rely on exterior light to reflect inanimate objects or lifeless bodies. External light, moreover, must serve the literary narrative. Maksimov was, however, interested in explaining to Chinese painters the laws and effects of color.
In 1957, Maksimov’s advanced oil painting class came to an end and his legacy was the comprehensive body of work for the Chistyakov teaching system, even though Maksimov’s own drawing system had a different flavor from that of Chistyakov. From 19 May to 9 June an exhibition of the class work of Maksimov and his students was staged. In the January 1957 issue of Fine Arts, Maksimov published an article titled ‘Oil Painting and Teaching Oil Painting’ that was read repeatedly by young Chinese students of oil painting, so that many could recite it by heart. The works Maksimov singled out for praise were Wang Chengyi’s The Letter, Hou Yimin’s Young Underground Workers, and Zhan Jianjun’s The Undertaking. It must be pointed out that, although the painting methods Maksimov provided for these Chinese students were very traditional, he constantly urged them to emulate western painters. Many years later, in 2002, Chen Beixin recalled: ‘If we only studied him, then our artistic lives would have ended when he left China, but he insisted that we learn from all the great masters of the past and that we should study the masters throughout our lives. He introduced individual students to those great painters who addressed the talents of individuals’. Chen mentioned a number of impressionists and post-impressionists recommended by Maksimov and also noted: ‘He introduced Chagall, Monet and Sisley to us at the very time when Western bourgeois art was being attacked’.
The Transition to the Two-in-One Combination
Krushchev’s ‘secret report’ to the February 1956 meeting at the CPSU Congress was regarded in China as revisionist, and this political event served as a serious warning to leaders throughout the socialist camp. On 5 April, the People’s Daily editorial ‘On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ was a direct response to Krushchev’s stance. The leadership of the CPC attempted to express their views on the socialist historical experience and its lessons in a more objective way. The article pointed out the importance such critical issues as ideology, national doctrine, the democratic system and revolutionary leadership occupied in the revolutionary camp. At the same time as the CPC did not criticize excessively the serious mistakes made by Stalin in his later years, it also emphasized the rationality of the socialist system under Stalinism. The CPC’s position was diametrically opposed to that of the CPSU which, it maintained, had precipitated political events that created problems regarding the legitimacy of the socialist system throughout the socialist camp. Mao Zedong attempted to solve the problem of bureaucratism within the Party through the rectification movement and later, through the state apparatus, crushed intellectual speech deemed to have crossed the accepted boundaries. These actions demonstrated that in this period, following the elimination of private property, the one-Party socialist system could not be queried or shaken. However, Mao Zedong had already revised the Soviet experience as in his early years when he quietly flouted Stalin’s will and independently guided the Chinese revolution. For him Chinese issues always had paramount importance and after determining how to handle ‘the question of Stalin’, he resolved China’s inner-Party and domestic political and economic problems in accordance with what he outlined in ‘On the Ten Great Relationships’ and ‘On the Question of Correctly Handling Contradictions among the People’, in order to advance the socialist development model for China that he had designed. At the Chengdu conference in March 1958 Mao told inner-Party members that ‘the wholesale adoption of Soviet rules and regulations lacked the spirit of original creation’. Mao, in discussing the collection of folk songs, expressed the view that the classics and folk songs could be combined. The ‘classical’ he was referring to here had nothing to do with the European notion of classical art; he was merely referring to the application of a term frequently used in the literary and art worlds to traditional classical poetry. Careful scrutiny reveals that the classical and folk he referred to also had nothing to do either with the west or the Soviet Union, and that the form Mao Zedong hoped to see was ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’ (minzude), and that the content should be a ‘unity of the opposites’ of realism and romanticism. In May, Mao further developed his ideas at the Eighth Party Congress: The literature and art of the proletariat should adopt the creative method based on a combination of revolutionary romanticism and revolutionary realism.
As early as 1939, to commemorate the first anniversary of the founding of the Lu Xun Art Academy, Mao Zedong wrote this couplet: ‘The realism of resisting Japan; the romanticism of the revolution’.[31] In Lu Dingyi’s speech of 1956, authorized by Mao Zedong and titled ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom and a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend’, people could read what was tantamount to a denial of ‘socialist realism’: ‘Socialist realism, we regard as the best creative method, but it is by no means the only creative method. Given the premise of serving workers, peasants and soldiers, any writer can create and compete in whatever way he believes to be the best method for himself’.[32]
As a term introduced from abroad, ‘romantic’ (langman) came to be used in 20th century Chinese literature and art, and its main connotation was ‘irrational’, signifying concern for the complexity of human nature. When it was combined with the concept of ‘revolution’, its meaning was limited to ‘ideal’. In the explanation of socialist realism, this ideal was obviously a goal that could be realized. Therefore, the other characteristics of ‘romantic’, such as libertarian qualities, grey emotions and Bohemian consciousness, were regarded as aspects of a concept that belonged to the bourgeoisie and needed to be eradicated.
On 22 March 1958, Mao Zedong emphasized the nationalization of artistic forms at this meeting in Chengdu, and the ‘unity of the opposites of realism and romanticism’ in the content of a work of literature or art. In that year’s first issue of Red Flag, the Party’s theoretical journal, Zhou Yang had explained, in an article titled ‘New Folksongs Have Opened up a New Road for Poetry’, Mao Zedong’s new statement that the Soviet experience could not continue to be used. Zhou wanted people to believe that Mao Zedong’s ‘combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism’ was ‘a scientific summary of the entirety of literature’s historical experience’ and should become ‘the direction in which all writers and artists struggle together’.
In fact, it is very difficult to provide a simple timeline for the development of literary and artistic theory in the period from 1949 to 1966. In different periods there were different degrees of response to the May Fourth attitudes of ‘scientism’ (kexue-zhuyi) and ‘realism’ (xieshi) (European academism), the Yan’an arts (folk treatment, minjianhua) and Soviet socialist realism (Soviet academism). During this time, the concepts of ‘science’, ‘the masses’, ‘folk’, ‘tradition’, ‘realism’ and ‘romanticism’ were used with different and alternative meanings at different times and in different situations, and there was an excessive and abusive use of these terms, as they acquired tactical meanings in ideological struggles when political meanings were attached to them.
Paintings on CPC History
After 1949, most painters used the realist method to depict revolutionary history, revolutionary heroes and the great political achievements of the leaders of the CPC. In the eyes of the Party’s leaders in the literary and art fields, realist art with its capacity for full representation and its ability to reproduce was the ideal form for recording history, when compared with other art forms. For those leaders familiar with European art history, the use of realist techniques to serve the historical mission of European classical historical painting had once served a similar function – except that Napoleon had not been a member of the proletariat.
On 17 January 1950, the Revolutionary History Painting Creative Committee was established in Nanjing, and several months later, the tasks assigned by the Ministry of Culture for commissioning teachers of the Central Academy of Fine Arts to paint revolutionary history paintings had been drawn up. In 1951, the Revolutionary History Museum organized the first batch of history paintings. Apart from presenting material satisfying the new regime’s needs, these history paintings provided people with information on the CPC’s revolutionary history, even though many of the paintings did not technically live up to expectations. Luo Gongliu has discussed his memories of that event:
In 1951 the Museum of the Revolution laid out a proposal for organizing the creation of history paintings for the first time. Yan Han, who had been placed in charge of the program appointed me to paint Rectification Report, but specified that I produce an oil painting. I told him that I was a printmaker and couldn’t paint oils. He said: ‘That won’t do. Gu Yuan and you both must paint oils’. I imagined that Rectification Report was to depict a meeting, and I had no idea of how to paint it! Wanting to beat a retreat, I told him: ‘I have an outline for a painting called Tunnel Warfare and I see that there is nothing on that topic in the program. I’d like to paint that, rather than the Report’. As a result, he consulted the leadership and came back to tell me: ‘Tunnel Warfare will be fine because there are too few works treating the Anti-Japanese War, but we still want you to paint Rectification Report. Zhou Yang said that, since Luo Gongliu had taken part in the rectification movement, he was the person to paint it, not someone who had not participated’. So I ended up having to paint two works, rather than the one I was originally asked to paint. At that time Xu Beihong and Wu Zuoren each only had to do one painting. Time was short and it wasn’t easy to complete even one work.[33]
This was an age in which there was felt to be an urgent need to extol the revolutionary history of the Communist Party of China, and all forces were mobilized for the task. Thus, there was no restriction on the materials and genres from the CPC’s revolutionary history used in the art on historical themes, which served as a tool for recreating the moments of glory in the Party’s history. Oil paintings included Luo Gongliu’s Tunnel Warfare (1951), Dong Xiwen’s Birth of a Nation (1953), Zhan Jianjun’s Five Heroes of Langyashan (1959), Hou Yimin’s Comrade Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan Miners (1961), Ai Zhongxin’s Crossing the Yellow River at Night (1961), and He Kongde’s Before the Attack (1963). Sculptures included Wang Zhaowen’s Liu Hulan (1950) and Pan He’s Troubled Times (1957). Chinese-style paintings (guohua) included Wang Shenglie’s The Eight Girls Braving the Yangtze Waters (1957) and Shi Lu’s On the Road to Nanniwan (1961); there were also prints, including Gu Yuan’s Liu Zhidan and the Crimson Guard (1957).
In 1957, the Fine Arts Exhibition Commemorating the 30th Anniversary of the Founding of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army was held in the Working People’s Palace of Culture in Beijing, at which 420 works in different genres were shown. The production of the history paintings in the exhibition had been organized by the General Political Department of the PLA, and the more than 400 participating artists within eighteen months completed the historical paintings that treated the armed struggles of the Communist leaders. Among the works in the exhibition were: Wang Shikuo’s Joining the Forces in the Jinggang Mountains, Zong Qixiang’s Forced Crossing of the Dadu River, Gao Hong’s Chairman Mao in Northern Shaanxi, Lü Sibai’s The Battle of Wazijie, Ai Zhongxin’s The Red Army Crosses the Snowy Mountains, Dong Xiwen’s The Red Army Is Not Afraid of Distant Campaigning, Yun Qicang’s He Long in Honghu, Yang Jianhou’s Liberating Nanjing, Hou Yimin’s Crossing the Yalu River, and Feng Fasi’s Liu Hulan.
The Party stipulated the tasks for history painting, but their explicatory basis in theory was derived from Soviet socialist realism. When the yardstick of analysis was not in the hands of an artist, the concepts of ‘realistic authenticity’, ‘historical truth’, ‘the essence of reality’ and ‘ideological depth’ could become quite arbitrary. Take for example the dramatic explanation of the artistic truth and the historical truth of the painting Birth of a Nation (1953), which was completed initially by Dong Xiwen, and then later revised and altered by other artists. After the Central Committee, in December 1954, denounced the words and actions of the inner-Party senior cadres Gao Gang and Rao Shushi, the painters were required to revise ‘Birth of a nation’ and remove the image of Gao Gang from the work. Although the ‘historical truth’ was that this person, now regarded politically as having been a ‘splittist’ (fenliefenzi), had chaired the proceedings at the awesome ceremony at which the People’s Republic was proclaimed and this was the ‘realistic authenticity’, excising his image from the work expressed revolutionary purity and this could be understood as ‘the essence of reality’. After the outbreak of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, Liu Shaoqi was regarded as being a ‘traitor’ of the people, and so his image in the painting was then substituted with that of Dong Biwu, because the image of the man who had been second only to Mao Zedong did not accord with the new truth of the essence of history. Even later, because Lin Boqu, a Politburo member with very solid Party credentials, had objected to Mao Zedong marrying Jiang Qing, Lin’s image was also removed from the painting. However, by 1971 the original artist, Dong Xiwen had been diagnosed with cancer and was unable to continue with revisions to his painting, and so the task fell to Jin Shangyi. Jin had no recourse but to simply paint the entire work again. To fulfill the political requirements for the task, Jin Shangyi painted the reproduction of the work again and again, changing the heads on the figures, until ‘after the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, the image of Liu Shaoqi was dramatically restored to the work’.[34] In this period, historical truth was the truth in which the artist was instructed, and as soon as an artist had made the necessary ideological preparation he would find that this truth could be changed in line with the latest political struggles within the Party.
The theoretical foundation of history paintings was expounded upon ceaselessly, and after the Soviet concepts dimmed together with the image of the Soviet Union through their substitution with Mao Zedong’s concepts of literature and art, critics quickly adjusted to the new narrative: ‘When an artist reflects reality through art, he must express his position and attitude to reality, whether idealist, reactionary or progressive. The philosophical foundation of the creative methods of critical realism and positive romanticism lies in the combination of the philosophical foundations of the creative methods of materialism, revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism taken one step further, which is dialectical materialism’.[35] For example, the clothes worn by the characters in Pan He’s Troubled Times ‘should have been shabby’, but in the image building the sculptor hoped to express ‘the spirit of revolutionary optimism’. This spirit was thought to embody the affirmation of the future and ideals, and it was diametrically different from the negative spirit of romanticism replete with pessimism and gray moods. The sculptor even hoped to reflect, through the figures he sculpted, the sense of yearning for the imminent high tide of the revolution that he felt from reading Mao’s essay ‘A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire’. He hoped ‘to intensify the yearning for future happiness and also hoped that he would be able to induce in audiences a shared sense of an ideal future’.[36] This form of expression came to be regarded as the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism.[37]
From 1957, when the exhibition commemorating the 30th anniversary of the founding of the PLA was held, through to 1961, which saw the show of history paintings commissioned by the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, until 1962’s Third National Art Exhibition, paintings reflecting revolutionary history subject matter continued to appear. Many of these works depicted CPC leaders, as well as heroic deeds from the revolutionary historical period. The major historical paintings documenting this period were: Li Binghong’s The Nanchang Uprising (1958), Luo Gongliu’s Comrade Mao Zedong at Jinggangshan (1959), Wang Zhenghua’s Wuchang Uprising (1959), Cai Liang’s Torches of Yan’an (1959), Zhan Jianjun’s The Five Heroes of Langya Mountain (1959), Hou Yimin’s Comrade Liu Shaoqi and Miners at Anyuan (1960), Quan Shanshi’s Unyielding Heroism (1961), Jin Shangyi’s Chairman Mao at the December Conference (1961), Lin Gang’s Prison Struggle (1961), Ai Zhongxin’s Crossing the Yellow River at Night (1961), The Great Huai-Hai Victory (1961) by Bao Jia and Zhang Fagen, and Wang Xuzhu’s The Jintian Uprising (1961).
Following the promotion of realist oil painting techniques, Chinese painters gradually mastered oil painting materials, and a consummate delight in the brush-work and color of realist oil painting emerged. In 1963 at an exhibition of the oil painting graduate class organized by the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the works on display demonstrated that painters had achieved breakthroughs in imbuing history paintings with literariness and compositional form. Following a phase when expression had been marred by crude and strained images, painters began to pay close attention to composition and color; this was reflected in changes in their works. Zhong Han, for example, in his work titled On the Banks of the Yan River, placed Mao Zedong and peasants in as equal a position as possible and behind them the viewer could look towards the golden colored Pagoda Mountain that overlooks the skyline of Yan’an; the painting was a literary expression of warm emotions and human emotions, while retaining rich political significance. Three Thousand Miles of Lovely Land by Liu Qing poeticized the image of Korean women, and the painter paid great attention to the form of the composition. The Internationale Will Definitely Come to Pass by Wen Lipeng expressed through its rich symbolic composition the solemnity and passion of the painter.
The painting Comrade Liu Shaoqi and Miners at Anyuan by Hou Yimin was another example of a work that touched on historical truth, at the same time as it presented real problems. When Hou completed this history painting, Liu Shaoqi was one of the nation’s revolutionary leaders. The work was painted ‘to extol heroes and reproduce the strong hope evinced through this glorious historical scene’. The painter set out to depict the actual historical personage, but so that people could clearly distinguish Comrade Liu, he painted his image half-way between his original appearance at the time of the event in the painting and his present appearance. In accordance with realist painting’s general conception of truth, the painter also wanted to show the suffering of the miners and their slave-like existence, but the painter was very cautious: ‘If I treated aspects of life naturalistically, then contrary to my aims I would have to embellish the emaciated musculature of the miners, and this would be detrimental to my purpose. If I gave the figures suffering faces then the work would be murky and if, for example, I painted the miners with naked torsos, black faces and gleaming white teeth and bruised and bloodied bodies …I might have depicted my subjects with compelling realism but this would have submerged the revolutionary fighting spirit of the work, and distorted the heroic stature of the central figure’.[38] Yet however meticulous the artist was, even for one as experienced as Hou Yimin, censure of his work could come ultimately from any direction. When Liu Shaoqi fell from power, Hou’s painting was declared to be a reactionary work.
Sculpture
The consolidation of the new regime and the construction of the New China demanded a public art more invested with the function of propaganda, and sculpture, having permanence, was obviously an important art form. Large-scale commemorative buildings were erected in each city, and, naturally, sculptures depended on them to form new social environments. We can also imagine how the universalized urban commemorative sculpture was learned from the Soviet Union. War heroes, model workers and revolutionary leaders should, and in fact had already, become the main figures in sculptures, at the same time that themes drew content from the agendas of national construction, land reform, world peace, the great unity of the people and revolutionary history.
The construction of the Monument to the People’s Heroes formally began on 1 August 1952. Taking part in the committee overseeing the building of the monument were representatives of 17 bodies, including the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the PLA General Political Department, and the Beijing Municipal Government. The persons in the Party and government directly responsible for the project were the Mayor of Beijing Peng Zhen and two scholars, Zheng Zhenduo and Liang Sicheng. The historical explanation for the sculptures was provided by a historical research committee headed by Fan Wenlan, who had been put in charge of Yan’an revolutionary history by the CPC. The sculptural team itself was led by Liu Kaiqu, who in addition to being a sculptor, was also deputy-mayor of Hangzhou and deputy-director of the East China branch of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The design work was carried out by a team comprising Liu Kaiqu, Hua Tianyou, Wang Linyi, Xiao Chuanjiu, Zhang Songhe, Zeng Zhushao and Fu Tianchou. Over a four year period they completed the bas-reliefs for the sculpture: the burning of the opium that led to the Opium War, the Jintian uprising, the Wuchang uprising, the May Fourth patriotic movement, the May 30th Movement (1925), the August 1st Nanchang Uprising, the victorious crossing of the Yangtze River and the liberation of the entire country. On May Day, 1958 the completed Monument to the People’s Heroes was unveiled. The reliefs, which surrounded the monument on four sides to a height of 1.8m and measuring 39.6m in overall length, had taken seven years to complete and were a pure and symbolic record of the history of the revolution. ‘The people’s heroes are immortal’, read the inscription by Mao Zedong carved on the stele of the monument; Zhou Enlai wrote the calligraphy for the monument’s tablet. The sculptural works on the monument were so similar in form and treatment that it was hard to detect the work of any individual, regardless of whether the sculptors had studied in France or were more interested in Soviet sculpture, and there is no record in the documentation of the sculptors’ own views regarding the requirement that they all use a single style. In the 1950s, among the artists who relied on sculpture to commemorate revolutionary history were Xiao Chuanjiu, who completed bas-reliefs of Chairman Mao and Marshal Zhu De, and Wang Zhaowen (who sculpted Liu Hulan).
With aims similar to those behind the invitation of Maksimov to China, at the beginning of 1956, the Soviet sculptor Nikolai Nikolaevich Kelindurov was invited by the Central Academy of Fine Arts to set up a sculpting course, to which nineteen lecturers and assistants from art colleges throughout China were invited as students. After two years, China had trained a handful of students in Soviet sculpting ideology: Yu Jinyuan (The Eight Girls Braving the Yangtze Waters), Guan Weixian (The Call), Xu Shuyang (The Unyielding Wang Xiaohe) and Ma Gaihu (Old Shepherd). In the criticism of sculptural art, the analysis of works relied on the inflexible concepts of socialist realism, as revealed in an article by Chen Tian published in the December 1956 issue of Fine Arts: ‘Because they have no penetration of real life, our works universally lack movement, expression and individuality, and the sculptures rely for their themes on just one or only a few figures. This requires us to be much more rigorous in our molding of human images. At the same time we must continue to fulfill our politically stipulated work’. [39] Amid the clamor of the Great Leap Forward, a conference examining ten major architectural art projects for the capital was convened in Beijing in November 1958, and this led to outdoor sculptures and friezes being commissioned for the ten priority building projects. In September of the following year, two large-scale sculptures collectively titled Long Live the People’s Communes and flanking the new Beijing Agricultural Exhibition Hall were completed by the Lu Xun Art Academy. Separately titled Long Live the People’s Communes Combining Workers, Peasants, Merchants, Students and Soldiers and Long Live the People’s Communes Representing the All-round Development of Farming, Forestry, Animal Husbandry, Sideline Production and Fisheries, the sculptures readily suggested Soviet socialist realist sculpture, although the powerful images of laborers and ‘the bountiful harvests of the new society’ completed by the Chinese sculptors were somewhat more squat and rounded than Soviet sculpture.
NOTES:
[1] In 1949, after the PLA entered Beiping, the Communist Party of China took over the Beiping Art College (Beiping Yizhuan). Xu Beihong remained head of the school, but Hu Yichuan, Yan Han and Mo Pu from Yan’an became his main assistants. In September, the Literary and Art College of the North China United Revolutionary University (Huabei Lianhe Geming Daxue Wenyi Xueyuan), founded in 1946, and the Beiping Art College amalgamated. In January 1950 the new school changed its name to the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). Xu Beihong remained as nominal director, but five new art officials from Yan’an, namely Hu Yichuan, Wang Zhaowen, Luo Gongliu, Jiang Feng and Zhang Ding, formed the actual leadership of CAFA. In 1952, the Shanghai Art College (Shanghai Meizhuan) run by Liu Haisu and Yan Wenliang amalgamated in Wuxi with Shandong University’s Art Department. Then, in 1958, this new school moved to Nanjing and was renamed the Nanjing Art Academy (Nanjing Yishu Xueyuan).
[2] See: Fine Arts (Meishu), 1954:2, February 1954. The new system for the management of art was established as follows: On 19 July 1949, the All-China Federation of Literature and Art, known in Chinese abbreviation as Wenlian, was established, and on 21 July, the All-China Association of Art was established. In 1953, this organization was renamed the Chinese Artists Association. From 1950 onwards, artists’ associations were established in succession in China’s provinces and cities. In the total system, the regional Artists Associations accepted the leadership of the all-encompassing Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the Federation of Literary and Art Circles accepted the leadership of the Propaganda Department of the Party, and the Federations of Literary and Art Circles set up Party Committees or Party organizations. In their work the Federation of Literary and Art Circles accepted the leadership of the Party, and the leading cadres of the Federation of Literary and Art Circles were appointed by the CPC’s Propaganda and Organization Departments. In the same way, the salaries and welfare payments of the professors and administrative staff of all universities and colleges, and of all members of the Federation of Literary and Art Circles and each association were allocated from state finances.
[3] On the third day after hostilities in the Korean War broke out on 25 June 1950, the US Seventh Fleet entered the Taiwan Straits. On the following day, Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai issued a declaration opposing US President Truman’s declaration of 27 June and announcing that the US had committed aggression against China. On 15 September, the United Nations forces headed by the USA attacked North Korea, and Andong (today’s Dandong) and other places in China were bombed. Subsequently, the various democratic parties in China issued a ‘joint declaration regarding the War of Resistance to US Aggression and to Aid Korea to protect our homes and defend the motherland’. On 25 October, the Chinese People’s Volunteers crossed the Yalu River, and initiated their War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea that would last for three years.
[4] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1958:4.
[5] People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao), 24 October 1951.
[6] After the beginning of the 1956 movement to ‘let a hundred schools contend’, there was some relaxation of the intellectual climate. The magazine Fine Arts published articles by Wu Jiafeng and Tang Dejian that were critical of Wang Rong. Tang Dejian maintained that Wang Rong had made categorical errors of ‘anti-historicism’ and ‘formalism’.
[7] As a literature and art theoretician in the KMT-controlled area, Hu Feng in July 1954 presented a 300,000-character report to the Politburo titled ‘Report on the real situation in literature and art over the last few years’ (Guanyu jinian lai wenyi shijian qingkuang de baogao). Hu Feng’s ideology was regarded as an attempt to ‘discard the weapon of Marxism’ Ref: Zhou Yang, ‘We must struggle’ (Women bixu zhandou), December 1954.
Hu Feng’s ideology was also linked to the critique of Yu Pingbo and Hu Shi then being carried out. The Central Committee of the CPC demanded that the critique also be extended at that time to Hu Feng’s ideology. On 21 January 1955, the critique of Hu Feng’s thought was defined by the Central Committee as ‘an important struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie’. On 18 May, the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress authorized the arrest of Hu Feng. On the 25th, an enlarged joint meeting of the presidium of the Federation of Literary and Art Circles and the Writers Association issued a joint resolution expelling Hu Feng from the Writers Association and liquidating the ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ of Hu Feng. The incident of the ‘Hu Feng counter-revolutionary clique’ implicated more than 2100 persons, of whom 92 were arrested, 62 were exiled and 73 lost their jobs and were subject to self-criticism.
[8] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1955:6, June 1955.
[9] The June 1955 issue of Fine Arts contained articles attacking the Hu Feng ‘anti-Party clique’ by Liu Kaiqu (Expose Hu Feng and thoroughly smash his anti-Party anti-people plot; Jielu Hu Feng, chedi fencui qi fandang fan-renmin de yinmou), Zhu Dan (Tearing the sheep’s clothing off the wolf; Pizhe yangpi de lang), Hu Yichuan (Thoroughly liquidate the Hu Feng counter-revolutionary clique; Chedi qingsuan Hu Feng de fangeming jituan), Yu Fei’an (Never allow the counter-revolutionary Hu Feng to ‘feign death’ again; Juebu rongxu fangeming de Hu Feng zai ‘zhuangsi’), Wang Xun (Hu Feng is the most evil counter-revolutionary; Hu Feng shi zui edu de fangeming-fenzi), Pang Xunqin (The Hu Feng incident has sounded the warning bell for us; Hu Feng shijian wei women qiaoxiang le jingzhong), Mi Gu (Peng Boshan views with hatred the new achievements in color-and-ink painting; Peng Boshan choushi caimohua de xin chengjiu), Wang Shikuo (We must honestly and thoroughly explain ourselves to the people; Bixu laolaoshishi xiang renmin zuo chedi jiaodai), Ni Yide (Thoroughly expose the plots of Hu Feng and his counter-revolutionary clique; Chedi jielu Hu Feng ji qi fangeming jituan de yinmou) and Ai Zhongxin (Continue to expose the plots of Hu Feng; Jixu jielu Hu Feng de yinmou).
The July issue of Fine Arts also contained articles attacking Hu Feng, on this occasion by Jiang Feng (Suppressing liberalism can raise our political vigilance; Kefu ziyouzhuyi cai neng tigao zhengzhi jingti), Feng Zikai (Severely punish the unpardonably evil counter-revolutionary element Hu Feng; Yancheng shi’ebushe de Hu Feng fangeming-fenzi), Wang Manshuo (Resolutely dig out all hidden counter-revolutionary elements; Jianjue wajin yiqie anzang de fangeming-fenzi), Hu Man (Eliminate the Hu Feng counter-revolutionary clique and all concealed enemies; Suqing Hu Feng fangeming jituan he yiqie ancang diren), Wang Zhaowen (The snowy ground cannot conceal the corpses; Xuedi li cangbuzhu sishi), Lei Guiyuan (Make persistent efforts to eliminate enemies; Zaijie-zaili suqing diren), Ding Cong (Wake up to the ‘naïve’ ‘scholar’; Xingxing ba ‘tianzhen’ de ‘shusheng’), Li Qun (Raise our vigilance and eradicate enemies; Tigao jingti xiaomie diren) and Qin Zheng (Be vigilant and alert!; Yao jingjue, yao jimin!).
In July 1955, the Ministry of Culture held the National Artistic Education Forum in the Central Academy of Fine Arts. It was attended by 55 professors from 22 art colleges. Hu Qiaomu, Head of the Propaganda Department of the CPC Central Committee continued to mobilize the professors to criticize Hu Feng.
[10] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1955:11, November 1955.
[11] Fine Arts (Meishu), May 1957.
[12] Lin Fengmian, ‘Conscientiously undertake good research work’ (Yao renzhen zuo hao yanjiu gongzuo), Fine Arts (Meishu), June 1957.
[13] Fine Arts (Meishu), June 1956.
[14] Niu Han, Deng Jiuping ed., Grass on the Plains: Reminiscences of the Anti-Rightist Movement (Yuanshang cao: Jiyi zhong de fanyoupai yundong), Beijing: Economic Daily Publishing House, 1998, p.210.
[15] Fei Xiaotong noted the concern of a number of people in his essay titled ‘The early spring of the intellectuals’ (Zhishifenzi de zao chuntian qi): ‘What was there to worry about? There were still people who did not realize that the hundred flowers policy was probably designed to gather a group together and ascertain their ideology, then wait for the next political movement to come along and clean them up’. See: Fei Xiaotong, The Writings of Fei Xiaotong (Fei Xiaotong ji), Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House, 2005, p.106.
[16] In November 1956 Nagy’s uprising to end the system of one-party rule in Hungary and to initiate withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact was suppressed by Krushchev using Soviet military force.
[17] Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. 5, Beijing Renmin Chubanshe, 1977, p. 467.
[18] From the 1st of August onwards, the Ministry of Culture, Chinese Artists Association, and Beijing Municipal Federation of Literary and Art Circles jointly convened a number of anti-Rightist struggle meetings, and on 28 September, at the Eighteenth Anti-rightist Struggle Session in Art Circles, Xia Yan, Lao She and Cai Ruohong delivered long anti-Rightist speeches.
[19] The ‘great leap forward’ was a readily understood term that enabled readers to comprehend its meaning of the expression when it first appeared in the 13 November 1957 editorial of People’s Daily titled ‘Mobilize the entire people, discuss the forty policy points, and raise a new climax in agricultural production’ (Fadong quanmin, taolun sishitiao gangyao, xianqi nongye shengchan de xin gaochao). In the directive of the Central Committee of the CPC dated 3 March 1958 and titled ‘Directive on launching the movement opposing waste and conservatism’ (Guanyu kaizhan fan-langfei fan-baoshou yundong de zhishi), the phrase ‘a great leap forward in production and a great leap forward in culture’ was used to express the elevated enthusiasm of the builders engaged in construction. In the period 11-22 January, the CPC at its Nanning Conference further criticized the ideology of ‘opposing adventurous advances’, effectively a call for the rapid unfolding of the Great Leap Forward. Several years later, the CPC would clearly negate the main features of this movement for ‘setting high targets, providing blind direction, encouraging exaggeration and whipping up a communist storm, and summing it up as an outpouring of leftist mistakes’. See: ‘Resolution on certain questions in the history of the Party since the founding of the People’s Republic of China’ (Guanyu jianguo yilai de ruogan lishi wenti de jueyi). However, nothing could make up for the national economic difficulties and disasters during the period 1959-1961 ushered in by the Great Leap Forward.
[20] In 1958, ‘launching satellites’ (fang weixing) was a vogue term that came in the wake of the successful launch of the first Sputnik by the Soviet Union. It was used to mean ‘to develop, increase, improve or exaggerate’. On 11 August People’s Daily used the term to describe the record grain output claimed to be more than 10,000 jin per mu.
[21] ‘Culture and arts closely follow the Great Leap Forward in production: Notes on the national conference of peasant masses culture and arts’ (Shengchan dayuejin, wenhua yishu jinjin gen: Ji quanguo nongcun qunzhong wenhua yishu gong huiyi), Fine Arts (Meishu), May 1958.
[22] Ge Lu, ‘Essay on the appreciation of Pixian county murals’ (Pixian bihua xinshang duanpian), Fine Arts (Meishu), September 1958.
[23] See: Bo Songnian, Feng Xiangyi, ‘How many Dunhuangs will we create?’ (Jiang hui chuangzao duoshao ge Dunhuang?), Fine Arts (Meishu), September 1958. Documents record that in Hebei province there were 52125 murals paintings in Runxian county, 9990 mural paintings in Huai’an county, and 49154 mural paintings in Shulu county. See: Fine Arts (Meishu), June 1958. Along each side of a 720 li-long highway running from Sanguankou to Dongzhiyuan in Pingliang prefecture, Gansu province, a wall for murals was constructed and at intervals of one li along the wall there were one or two murals. This was described as ‘the largest mural gallery in the world’.
[24] Fine Arts (Meishu), December 1958.
[25] Fine Arts (Meishu), November 1958.
[26] See: Cheng Qichang [a worker in the Liuzhou Machine Factory in the Guangxi Dong (Zhuang) autonomous region], ‘How our factory took part in the arts movement’ (Wo chang shi zenyang gao meishu huodong de), Fine Arts (Meishu), December 1958.
[27] Wang Zhaowen, ‘The art of the workers, peasants and soldiers is excellent’ (Gongnongbing meishu, hao), Fine Arts (Meishu), December 1958.
[28] For the definition of socialist realism”, see: Beijing Normal University Literature and Art Theory Group ed., Reference Materials for Literature Theory Study (Wenxue lilun xuexi cankao ziliao), (classified materials), Beijing: Higher Education Publishing House, 1956 edition, p.648. In 1954, the second Soviet Writers Congress amended this definition, omitting the phrase ‘using the socialist spirit to educate the people’.
[29] Beijing Normal University Literature and Art Theory Group ed., Reference Materials for Literature Theory Study (Wenxue lilun xuexi cankao ziliao), (classified materials), Higher Education Publishing House, 1956 edition, p.655.
[30] Fine Arts (Meishu), April 1955.
[31] At this time intellectuals, especially writers, in Yan’an already knew of the concept of ‘socialist realism’ outlined in the 1934 constitution of the Soviet Writers’ Association.
[32] People’s Daily, 13 June 1956.
[33] Liu Xiaochun ed., Dialogues about Luo Gongliu’s Art (Luo Gongliu yishu duihua lu), Taiyuan: Shanxi Educational Publishing House, 1999, pp.32-33.
[34] ‘In 1972, Jin Shangyi was recalled to Beijing from the countryside, and urged to fulfill the political task of copying Dong Xiwen’s ‘Birth of a nation’: ‘Why copy Birth of a nation? Because shortly after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi was overthrown, and the Revolutionary Museum wanted Dong Xiwen to remove Liu Shaoqi from Birth of a nation and paint Dong Biwu in Liu Shaoqi’s place. Now we didn’t know whether they wanted us to alter other figures in the painting, and if so whom? It turned out Lin Boqu was to be erased. But by then Dong Xiwen was already in hospital with cancer, and he didn’t have the strength to alter the painting. But no one else dared tamper with his original work, and so the alterations could not be done on the original. So Zhao Yu and I were brought back to make a copy of the original identical to Dong’s. Gao Gang had already been removed from the work and Liu Shaoqi had been replaced by Dong Biwu. Because only the head of Lin Boqu appeared in the painting, his portrait was simply replaced by that of an anonymous individual, and I did that. … After the Cultural Revolution, Birth of a nation had to be restored to its original state, and the restoration again could not be done on Dong Xiwen’s original, and so we began to copy the painting in order to restore the appearance of the original. However, because I was otherwise engaged at that time, Yan Zhenduo was asked to replace the original personages on our copy. Thus the Birth of a nation now displayed in the Revolutionary Museum is the copy we made’. See: My Oil Painting Journey: The Reminiscences of Jin Shangyi (Wode youhua zhi lu: Jin Shangyi huiyi lu), Changchun: Jilin Fine Arts Publishing House, 2000, pp.63-64.
[35] See: Ge Lu, ‘My understanding of the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism’ (Wo dui geming xianshizhuyi he geming langmanzhuyi jiehe de lijie), Fine Arts (Meishu), February 1959.
[36] See: Pan He, ‘What I gained from painting Troubled times’ (Jianku suiyue chuangzuo yu de), Fine Arts (Meishu), February 1961.
[37] See: Ge Lu, ‘My understanding of the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism’ (Wo dui geming xianshizhuyi he geming langmanzhuyi jiehe de lijie), Fine Arts (Meishu), February 1959.
[38] Hou Yimin, ‘The treatment in Comrade Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan miners’ (Liu Shaoqi tongzhi he Anyuan kuanggong de gousi), Fine Arts (Meishu), April 1961.
[39] In May 1956, the Ministry of Culture proposed that a conference be held in Beijing to discuss the establishment of Chinese sculptural foundries and workshops. At the conclusion of the second Five-Year Plan, more than 360 sculptures in 10 major cities throughout China were completed. At the conclusion of the third Five-Year Plan, the completion of more than 100% more than the number of sculptures produced in the second Five-Year Plan period was announced, thereby realizing the goal of making sculpture a popular mass art form.