Forward

It might be asked: What has the Museum of Art Ein Harod to do with an exhibition of Chinese prints? Since its founding more than sixty years ago in the heart of a kibbutz, the Museum of Art Ein Harod has concerned itself with contemporary art and, particularly, with the charged and complex questions that surround the relationship between society, art and the shaping of history.

Half a Century of Chinese Woodblock Prints is a fascinating exhibition, not only because of the exhilarating quality of the works on show but, also and principally, because of the challenge it poses to the Western eye. We are asked to confront a different conception of art, one that reflects society but also takes part in shaping it: art as communication. The exhibition contains work that is quite remote from the intimate and autonomous modes of expression of so much Western art and presents, instead, a charged and complex dimension of artist-society relationships, a mobilized,engaged art.

The curator of the exhibition Chang Tsong-Zung and the associate curator Iris Wachs have selected specific material that reflects precisely the immense upheavals undergone by Chinese art and society in the present century. Their selection is not exotic, nor does it present Chinese art as static or unchanged over the years. On the contrary, works in the exhibition are documents of the amazing way in which the winds of change have fanned the dynamics of creativity in the woodcut&emdash;an ancient Chinese medium of art&emdash; according it a distinctive status and an old-new role in society. The rare material that has been collected by the curators makes perceptible the way in which Western&emdash;European and Soviet&emdash;aesthetic modes have swept over the region and influenced the reshaping of Chinese aesthetic patterns, at the same time as the old, local art idioms survive and accord Chinese aesthetics their own distinctive vitality.

The exhibition draws its strength from its specificity, and it is relevant to any contemporary public that attends to the immense emotional and intellectual wealth to be found in the prints.It is my privilege to thank Chang Tsong-Zung, who collected with devotion this rare high quality selection of prints, and Iris Wachs, who researched the collection and spared no effort to bring to the Western public information that enriches our understanding and enhances our appreciation of the works.

My thanks also to the distinguished museums in the U.S.A. that have responded to our proposal to present the exhibition in their galleries, enabling viewers outside of Israel to enjoy it. Last&emdash;though really first&emdash;our blessings and our appreciation to the Chinese woodcut artists in whose art the tragedies, crisis and hopes of this tumultuous century&emdash;so soon to end&emdash;are communicated and resonate beyond the boundaries of space and time.

Galia Bar Or

Director, The Museum of Art Ein Harod Translated from the Hebrew by Richard Flantz

INTRODUCTION

The prints m this exhibition have been assembled to enable visitors to appreciate the beauty of a movement little known outside of China. In China, however, woodblock printmaking is an honored medium with an honored past. Since the 1930s talented young artists have had special encouragment to become woodblock printmakers. The artists whose works are represented in the exhibition are famous in their own country, where their originality and creative powers have long been recognized. Viewers outside of China can now discover the rich, variegated styles, both regional and personal, that they have created.Chang Tsong-zung's decision to include modern nianhua (New Year's prints), produced in traditional woodblock-printing studios, adds an important dimension to the exhibition. When shown in the past, nianhua have been presented solely in the context of folk, or popular, art, without reference to their role in the general development of the Chinese woodblock print. They are, however, an integral part of that development influenced and influencing it and their inclusion in the exhibition illuminates this inter-relationship.

Because works in the exhibition created before 1980 were intended to function as propaganda as well as art, the catalogue has endeavored to explain them against the sociological/historical background from which they emerged. Chinese viewers are accustomed to "reading" a picture for its meanings: the symbolism of the pictorial elements in the prints was apparent and of interest to the public for which it was created because they were aware of current national concerns. The essays are intended to recreate that milieu for the reader.

Style as well as content was affected by historical events. When the Creative Print Movement began in 1931 (the date assigned by Chinese art historians), it adopted print styles and techniques from Europe; particularly those associated with expressionist social protest art and Soviet that had no precedents in China (although the Chinese had invented and developed woodblock printing long before it was known in the West). Over time, however, Chinese art antecedents were reintroduced as an affirmation of national identity. The different effects achieved by combining Chinese and Western art elements quite fascinating as an art-historical subject in itself ;are evident in the prints and discussed in the catalogue. It is hoped that the background information provided by the catalogue will give the exhibition visitor a broad understanding and appreciation of the works, but above all, it is hoped that the viewer will enjoy them as works of art.

Iris Wachs and Chang Tsong-zung

New Subjects and Styles

By 1953 the government had managed to rebuild much of the war-devastated infrastructure, bring hyperinflation under control, and orient the population to a degree of mutual cooperation not previously known. Intent on building a socialist state, it now entered the period of the First Five-Year Plan. The emphasis was to be on industrialization, and the Soviet Union was to provide the relevant technical advice and equipment. At the same time, most agricutural units were amalgamated into cooperatives. Increased Influence of Soviet socialist realism The new government had consolidated its authority, and the cultural authorities now felt that they could reduce the dominance of the nianhua style on Chinese art and encourage artistic variety and specialization. Simultaneously, a new wave of the Soviet socialist realist style, which had influenced Chinese art since the 1930s, swept into the country along with the influx of Soviet technology. It was considered a more "scientific" method of descriptive art than native techniques, more capable of realistic depiction of the work of socialism.

In his report delivered to the Second Congress of Literary and Art Workers in September 1953, *Zhou Yang links the style to "raising standards." (Such reports were invaluable to artists, indicating as they did the policy lines to be followed.) Zhou cites the new nation's accomplishments in cultural fields since 1949 and adds: "The people have rapidly become more mature both politically and culturally....They demand that ... [art] works be of a high level."9 He endorses "the method of socialist realism as the highest criterion for all our literary and artistic work and criticism" (p.8) and urges artists to "study and assimilate the advanced experience of the literature and art of foreign countries in order to enrich our own tradition and make good our deficiencies" (p.10). The phrase "in order to enrich our own tradition" indicates the ultimate purpose of studying Soviet art&emdash;Zhou does not want to exclude Chinese art traditions. He finds them relevant to socialist realism by discovering "a fundamentally realistic tendency in Chinese ... art" (p.6), although he criticizes Chinese artists for still lacking the close contact with the masses that would enable their art "to depict the new people and their new ideology while fighting against the enemies of the people" (p.9). Having seemingly advocated Soviet art over other modes, Zhou nevertheless concludes his report with the declaration that now, in fact, there is to be "free competition of various artistic forms" (i.e., both Soviet and Chinese) and states that "'let all flowers bloom' ... is Comrade Mao Tse-tung's guiding principle" (p.8). (Mao had first used the phrase "let all flowers bloom" in the Yan'an Talks, and later commentators often referred to the well-known statement.) Zhou's report is short on the particulars of realizing the socialist realist style using the "realistic tendency in Chinese ...art," but publications reproducing Soviet examples were already available in quantity and Chinese artists presumably were aware of their own traditions.Many professional artists were now able to abandon the nianhua style, and some turned to creating art inspired by Soviet models. Rise Up, Slaves! Suffering Hunger and Cold!, 1954 (cat. 62), and Protest, 1956 (cat.63), by Zhao Yannian, recall the popular black-and-white Soviet poster style in both theme and dramatic composition; the prints reflect the policy called "leaning to one side," in which China identifies with the aims of the international socialist movement, in this case, as protector of oppressed peoples. Fraternal feelings and admiration for the workers of other socialist countries are implicit in Hungarian Ceramic Worker, 1955 (cat. 57), by Zhang Yangxi. The source of the print's style, however, is quite a different school of Soviet graphics from that which inspired Zhao: fullness of background detail and considerable negative carving of the block, popular devices in Soviet prints of the 1930s and 1940s, are used to achieve drama and tell the story. Zhang's prints from the 1940s had been modelled on central European social protest styles, and this work from the early 1950s follows Soviet print styles closely. In the very same year that Zhang created this print, however, he also was developing a new, "strongly national style" (see the discussion, below, of Bringing Lunch to the Field, 1955 [cat. 561), his own innovative synthesis of Chinese with Western styles. When creating Hungarian Ceramic Worker, he chose a style consistent with subject matter; that is, a worker from a European socialist country is depicted in the European socialist realist art form.

Synthesis of Western and Chinese Styles

The influx of so much foreign style troubled many in the art establishment. What kind and how much foreign art should be absorbed into Chinese style? What kind and how much of Chinese traditional art should be retained? These were and remain issues in Chinese art criticism. In an essay written early in 1954, a few months after Zhou Yang's speech, the influential art cadre Cai Ruohong argues for the legitimacy of different styles and techniques that had been endangered by the dominance of the nianhua style and/or were now in danger of being displaced by the new fashion for Soviet art. Apparently Cai still felt a need to contend with those art cadres who wished to see the folk style retain supremacy and laments that "many subjects and forms of presentation have gradually vanished from our art"10 (i.e., because of the nianhua dominance). "Stress is laid on using certain folk forms based on outline drawings and completely disregarding depictions utilizing light and shade" (p. 164). The latter, a Western technique much used in China in woodblock prints since the 1930s, had been avoided by professional artists&emdash;as instructed by the art authorities in their nianhua creations of the early 1950s. Cai then also argues for a Sinified form of socialist realism that preserves and incorporates traditional Chinese lyricism, in spite of the fact that some say, "the 'public' considers that lyricism is befitting only to a leisured class, and is of no interest to the labouring people;" but this, Cai says, is throwing away "lyricism ... together with certain 'unwholesome sentiments associated with lyricism" (p.164). Cai's article is by no means easy to follow and seems to voice various grievances, not necessarily compatible, made known to him by artists seeking greater freedom in creation. He asks, for example, "Why are woodcuts ... out of fashion? Two woodcut artists have told me that since the large-scale use of offset-printing and photogravure there is no longer any need for the old method of woodblock printing" (p. 164). (It should be noted that when Cai refers to "woodcut artists" he, and other Chinese art critics, are referring to professional printmakers in the Creative Print tradition. Nianhua workshops are always discussed as a separate and different type of creation.)

Many printmakers were still expected to make prototype paintings or prints for mechanical reproduction rather than to use the woodblock medium itself to produce a number of images. For veterans of Yan'an, like Cai Ruohong, where the woodblock print had been the supreme reproducing method, this must have seemed scornful treatment indeed. The dates on some prints in our exhibition, however, and those reproduced in Chinese publications at the time make it clear that after Zhou Yang's September 1953 speech, many woodblock artists returned to working in their own medium and to developing personal styles. The woodblock artist and art historian Li Hua also gives 1953 as the date when woodblock artists "again picked up their chisels," referring no doubt to the new wave of art started by Zhou Yang and also to the establishment that year of a separate printmaking department at the *Central Academy of Fine Arts. The fortunes of woodblock printmakers (and artists generally) were determined by the predilections of the art cadres who oversaw the places where they worked. In Beijing, Hangzhou and Chongqing influential art cadres were themselves woodblock printmakers and encouraged printmaking.11

In any case, a year after Zhou Yang's report, works in the National Exhibition of Graphic Art held in Beijing, in September 1954, as well as examples in our exhibition, are as if made in response to Cai's reproaches and Zhou's admonitions. In his review of the exhibition published in March 1955, the art critic Liu Yi-fang allocates praise, noting that "The synthesis of Chinese traditional line with western techniques, is giving rise to a strongly national style remarkable for its simplicity and clarity."12 He continues: "Altogether new to the Chinese woodcut were portrayals of the country's lovely scenery, the colorful life of the national minorities, working people at recreation" (p. 15). Most prints from this period merge elements from Chinese art with those of the West, although the variations in the mixture could produce a wide range of eftects. Typically, the faces have minimum chiaroscuro, which is reserved to indicate volume on clothing and on objects surrounding the people; there is much use of short lines to give texture and density; description, as in Soviet prints, includes considerable background detail, Western perspective is used to organize space, with triangular areas the focus of the compositions; and the prints are mostly in the black-and-white common to both classic Chinese book illustration and classic Western woodblock printmaking, foregoing the appeal of the bright colors of nianhua. Wang Qi's Selling Surplus Grain Crops, 1953 (cat. 30), is representative of this type of the hybrid style. With poignant simplicity, the artist exploits empty white paper in the traditional Chinese way to create a luminous ground for the fine outlining used to depict the peasants and their bulging sacks of grain; he places them, however, in a descriptive (Russian print style) background organized by Western perspective. Most of the prints from this period portray subjects "new to the Chinese woodcut" with quiet understatement, often bordering on lyricism. Li Shaoyan and Niu Wen's Finished With Medical Studies, She Returns, 1954 (cat. 79), Niu Wen's New Students For Beijing University, 1954 (cat. 80), and Li Huanmin's Winnowing Barley, 1957 (cat. 86), depict the "colorful life of the national minorities," with emphasis on the new opportunities being granted to them by the new state. Lin Jun's At the Foot of the Miao Mountains, 1954 (cat. 84) portrays lovely scenery in lyrical fashion but with the detail and rich texture of Soviet prints in the wood engraving style. Another print by Wang Qi, View of the Capital's Front Door, 1956 (cat. 31), shows a bustling cityscape, a "new theme in Chinese art," that has "depictions utilizing light and shade," (as called for by Cai). It has more affinity with Soviet than Chinese tradition and, like Li Huanmin's Winnowing Barley, uses the light brown colors favored by Soviet artists in both oil paintings and prints. (Both subject and style of Wang Qi's print were in fashion; in a 1955 review of the same 1954 Exhibition of Graphic Art, the printmaker and critic Li Qun praises a work by Gu Yuan, called Boulevard in a Peking Suburb, in words that could be applied to Wang Qi's print: a "delicately coloured print of a suburban landscape [that] conveys; the atmosphere of ... [the] prosperity of Peking."13) The type and degree of synthesis of Western and Chinese techniques thus varied according to the artist's predilection, the requirements of the subject matter, and current political-cultural policies. (The Suzhou nianhua called Eternal Life (cat. 14), created around the same time to convey the same basic message as Wang's Selling Surplus Grain Crops, uses exuberant color, in contrast to this group of subdued prints; nianhua continued to be produced in large numbers by popular workshops.)

Zhang Yangxi's Bringing Lunch to the Field, 1955 (cat.56), achieves quite different effects from any of the foregoing because the synthesis of Chinese and Western elements derives from a different Chinese antecedent. Zhang was inspired by the art of Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) carved bricks and funeral shrines. In Han pictorial art, a shallow depth of field is suggested by overlapping figures shown in profile or threequarter view, and compositions are virtually devoid of landscape elements. These conventions are used in Zhang's print, which has no indication of ground. The influence of Chinese style is apparent also in the use of black outlines for the figures and minimum use of Western chiaroscuro. The articulation of the body forms, however, utilizes the methods of Western anatomical drawing. The synthesis of the two styles is seamless, and the print is a model of a "strongly national style remarkable for its simplicity and clarity," the qualities commended by Liu. The short-lived Hundred Flowers Policy. Another important speech was delivered by Zhou Yang in September 1956, during the period of the Hundred Flowers Movement, which had been initiated by Mao Zedong on May 2, 1956. (Named after the phrase used by Mao in the Yan'an Talks, the movement introduced a brief period of liberal cultural policies but was followed a year later by the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which was characterized by severe chastisement of artists.) Zhou was understood to be a close interpreter of Mao Zedong's thoughts on culture, and his speech effectively explains the Hundred Flowers policy: "The Party's Central Committee has put forward the policy of 'letting flowers of many kinds bloom, diverse schools of thought contend.'"14 "In the struggles of the past when the situation was tense, it was required that artistic and literary activity be coordinated with urgent tasks at a definite time and place, so as to produce an immediate political agitational effect among the masses" (p. 181). But "the broad masses of artists and writers have now become more closely united on the basis of a common idea of serving the people" (p.180). Unfortunately, however, "doctrinairism ... in literature and art ... [has] seriously restricted the creative freedom of artists and writers" (p.180-181). "Doctrinairism ... manifests itself in vulgarizing and over-simplifying the Marxist view of aesthetics, and putting fetters and constraints on artists" (p.181). "In the choice of subject-matter and form, [artists] should be given an ample measure of freedom" (p. 182). Revolutionary fervor and revolutionary romanticism, Zhou's speech continues his earlier advocacy of multiple art styles for Chinese culture. He repeats many of his earlier criticisms and instructions, including his directive that Chinese artists use Chinese national art forms as well as those of the Soviet union. Speaking of literature, but in a context that makes his remarks applicable to art, he says: "Soviet literature has exerted a profound revolutionary influence....Socialist realism is the most advanced creative method, and it is the method we advocate" (p.182). Further, "socialist art must be rich in ideals and must to a high degree combine truthfulness and revolutionary fervour. Revolutionary romanticism is what we need" (p. 183). (Revolutionary romanticism is defined in this speech and elsewhere by Chinese art theorists as a particularly intense and ideal form of socialist realism.) Zhou asserts, however, that "it is incorrect to regard the new art ... as ... not indigenous to Chinese soil" because "foreign forms, once they have struck root in our soil, gradually become our own. Our people have always been good at learning from foreign countries" (p. 186). The speech contains other important statements of policy, but its insistence on "revolutionary fervour" and the

Chinese nature of socialist realism is germinal. Reactions to the Hundred Flowers Movement. The Hundred Flowers Movement, meant to encourage greater freedom for artists, resulted in cultural workers criticizing official cultural policies to a degree that the art authorities had not anticipated. In May 1957 Mao Zedong initiated the Anti-Rightist Campaign to restrain this burst of criticism: "In the last few months, everyone has been trying to criticize dogmatism, but they have let revisionism escape. Obviously dogmatism should be criticized, but now we should begin to criticize revisionism. Some of the dogmatism being criticized ... is actually Marxism."15 In June 1957 the Central Committee issued a 'directive on organizing forces to prepare for a counter-attack on the attack made by the Rightists" (p. 50). Domestication of socialist realism in the Chinese art academies Neither the criticism that came forth during the Hundred Flowers Movement nor the countercriticism of the Anti-Rightist Campaign restrained the powerful influence of Soviet socialist realism on Chinese arts. Between 1955 and 1957 the Soviet oil painter Konstantin M. Maksimov taught a two-year postgraduate course at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, attended by Chinese art professionals from all over the country. Maksimov's legacy to Chinese art was to be enormous. Because the Soviet academic system stressed mastery of drawing, particularly the depiction of volume, as the basis for creation in all media, Chinese students in departments other than oil painting also had to learn it, including those studying printmaking, traditional Chinese painting and sculpture. Some of Maksimov's personal preferences also became influential. A portrait painter, he had a predilection for the Soviet device whereby a monumental quality in single-figure paintings is gained by depicting only the upper portion of the body, rendered as a more or less triangular section fairly close to the picture plane.

The image in Yan Han's Old Shepherd, 1957 (cat.37), an adumbrated torso seen from a low point of view, exemplifies the powerful dramatic effect of these combined techniques. Yan had visited the Soviet Union in 1950, was familiar with these artistic strategems, and had already used this angle of view in his print Peace, from 1952.16 Yan also would have known Maksimov's work because both were on the faculty of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The Old Shepherd is a perfect realization of socialist realism in the mode of revolutionary romanticism, as advocated by Zhou Yang in his September 1956 speech. Its model qualities have made it one of the most reproduced prints from the period.

A single heroic figure rendered in this dramatic way was to remain for decades a staple of Chinese printmaking, as in Jiang Zhi's Fighting Drum, 1961 (cat. 76); Wu Qiangnian's Our Group's Party Secretary, 1961 (cat. 88); Li Yitai's Marxism Is the Most Lucid and Lively Philosophy, 1974, (cat. 72); Li Huasheng's Ten Thousand Mile Voyage, 1975 (cat. 99); and Zhang Huaijiang's Pillar, 1981 (cat. 59), among others. Some of these artists adopt another trait found in many Soviet prints: the person's character is conveyed by the objects surrounding him, including, in the case of Jiang Zhi, tiny vignettes. Yan Han and Zhang Huaijiang, however, eliminate almost all background, in a more typically Chinese fashion.

Created to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary, in 1957, of the Peoples' Liberation Army, Li Shaoyan's Breaking the Road, 1957 (cat. 78), adopts another compositional type popular in Soviet art and well-known in China through publications and exhibitions since the 1940s. (Maksimov also taught how to arrange figures in a convoy in his course at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.)17 A strong horizontal line, crossed by both large vertical elements and numerous small lines slanted in the direction of movement, crosses a long, horizontal format whose proportions resemble a classical Chinese handscroll; but, whereas the handscroll is viewed a section at a time, this print is meant to be seen in its entirety at a glance, in the Western convention. The print gains further dramatic impact by Li's use of the Soviet speciality of extensive negative carving of the block to produce large areas of black surrounded by, and articulated with, vibrating white.

Art During The Great Leap Forward

With the onset of the *Great Leap Forward, artists were presented with a host of new circumstances. Begun by Mao Zedong in March 1958, the Great Leap Forward consisted of a series of nationwide mass campaigns mounted to speed up the country's development. It was expected that steel production, especially, would be greatly increased and lead to the development of heavy industry; at the same time, the communization of agriculture was expected to bring increased crop yields. Cultural workers were also expected to increase their efforts. Artists were sent to aid workers and peasants, with the objects of assisting them to increase production, learning about their lives and teaching them how to create art. A period of rapid change, the Great Leap Forward disrupted the lives of many artists but also presented them with new themes and circumstances that led to considerable stylistic innovation. The Soviet Union considered the Great Leap Forward a divergence from the "correct path of socialist construction," and tensions between the two countries led, in 1960, to the withdrawal of Soviet technicians and the cessation of material aid to China. The dissensions evoked a heightened sense of nationalism, expressed in art as in other areas of national life. Although many artists continued to produce works in the socialist realist style (by this time thoroughly domesticated), the use of native art forms as sources for creation was seen as an expression of patriotism. Using native forms realized Mao's instructions, enunciated in the Yan'an Talks (and regularly quoted by art authorities afterwards), to "make the past serve the present." Nianhua workshops come under criticism The traditional workshops producing nianhua (which in the early 1950s had been the leading national art form to carry political content) came under criticism for lapsing from their political tasks. According to Maria Galikowski, a survey done by a Chinese art journalist in 1958 found that the workshops had reverted to the original pre-Liberation subject matter, and only 2.6% of the prints depicted "the lives of workers, peasants and soldiers and other political themes."18 A concerted effort was made by art authorities to see that the pictures again carried the correct political content. Water Reservoir, 1959 (cat.6), from Yangjiabu (in Shandong Province), is an example of a print to which political content has been added to traditional themes: a water reservoir and electric pylons have been introduced into a design with time-honored symbols of happiness and good fortune fat boys frolicking on carps to illustrate the rewards of the Great Leap Forward. By the mid-1960s the Shandong provincial workshops were being held up as models of reform, to be emulated by workshops elsewhere.19 The good life that comes when collectives are converted into communes became a central theme for reformed nianhua everywhere. The vigorous motion depicted in The People's Commune Is Good, from Yangliuqing (in Tianjin Municipality), undated but from about this time (cat. 11), conveys the quality of intense, all-out effort in which the peasants were engaged. Troupes performing the lion and dragon dances (both traditional at New Year's time as rituals to encourage successful crops) lead a triumphant group of celebrants across an elegant bridge, part of a new water conservancy project, the building of which was a main objective of Great Leap Forward mass peasant mobilization. The print is an exact pictorial realization of events as described in an editorial in Renmin ribao (People's Daily), dated September 1958: "Where the people's communes have already come into existence, the peasants, beating drums and gongs, celebrated the occasion with great joy, and their enthusiasm for production has reached new heights."20 The dances and the giant lotus flowers present the modern theme in the context of traditional peasant culture.

Mass culture comes to the communes

In The Commune's Club, undated but from the late 1950s (cat. 10), also from Yangliuqing, we see an outer wall adorned with the kinds of murals and posters that peasants were then producing with the help of professignal artists assigned to the communes. Such decoration realized the period slogan, "Every home a poem, Every household a painting." The choice of the club as the subject over other commune buildings underlines the emphasis on bringing culture to the rural population that followed a National Working Conference on Rural Culture, held in April 1958, in Beijing. During the conference, it was decided that the peasants were to participate in all kinds of cultural activities hitherto unknown to them, and that the commune culture club was to be the locus for this popularization.21 The print shows the peasants, who exude the same animation and exuberance as those in The People's Commune is Good, converging at the site. In the distance, industrial installations demonstrate rural development and self-sufficiency, another goal of the Great Leap Forward.

Development of socialist landscape art

In The Commune's Club, the artist combines Chinese with Western techniques, as so often recommended by the art authorities. However, the particular combination in this print is new. In places, it resembles a guohua landscape painting, that is, one executed with traditional Chinese painting media. Since 1949, guohua painting, whose typical subjects were birds and flowers, trees, scholars at their favorite pastimes, and landscapes, had been tainted as a reactionary form of art that catered to the tastes of the literati and landlord classes. Moreover, the Yan'an Talks had stressed that the masses were the only correct subject of art, whereas people were always subordinate elements in guohua landscape paintings. Guohua artists had been experimenting with ways to make the traditional form yield the required new political content and by this time had learned how to incorporate the works of man, evidence of the masses' contribution to socialist construction, into their landscapes in a way that corrected the defect. The landscapes in a guohua painting exhibition in Jiangsu in 1958 were praised in art journals, indicating not only that guohua artists had solved the problem, but that the incorporation of this national art form into the acceptable category was part of the general nationalist trend to "make the past serve the present" and develop "a truly national form."22 Having won approved status, the stylistic traits of landscape paintings were soon emulated in prints. The Commune's Club, for example, resembles in many particulars a painting in the Jiangsu exhibition called People's Commune Dining Hall.23 Trees, depicted as in traditional Chinese painting, decorate the environment; the viewer looks down into the courtyard from the traditional Chinese elevated point of view, while Western perspective and careful description lay out the commune before our eyes, as it had in the Jiangsu painting, although the point of view in the painting is from the side rather than down the middle. (The point of view, elevated and with convergence of the lines of perspective dead-center through the building complex, had been used by print workshops at the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911); it is the Chinese landscape elements and the subject matter that link this print to the new type of guohua landscape.)

Reemergence of traditional Chinese techniques and style

The Commune's Club was printed by shuiyin, the traditional Chinese workshop's method of woodblock printing. Shuiyin lends itself to emulating guohua painting because both use water-based ink and colors. The medium was brought into fashion in the late 1950s by professional printmakers seeking a nationalist alternative to the oilbased inks introduced with, and associated with, European printmaking. Huang Peimo, a woodblock artist from Jiangsu (a province in which the art authorities now were encouraging traditional landscape painters and where the landscape exhibition mentioned above had taken place), set out to develop new ways of using shuiyin to achieve effects similiar to the line and wash of guohua landscapes. Returning from Fishing on the Yellow Sea, 1962 (cat. 22), created after the crest of the Great Leap Forward had passed, is a model of how the expressive qualities of line and gradation of ink intensities of traditional painting can be emulated in a print. The work is politically correct as well, because the dominance of human activity in the foreground of the seascape suggests that man's mastery of the sea is being achieved through socialist effort.

Shuiyin is also used to suggest the colored wash of traditional guohua painting in Giving Milk in the Field, 1959 (cat. 71), by Zhao Zongzao. To further the resemblance, the artist also prints lines that approximate the texture strokes and outlining of objects common in traditional painting and uses the vertical painting format. The theme, however, was taken from Soviet art: a mother who interrupts her work in the fields to nurse her infant, brought to her by elderly peasants. The theme of mother-nursing-in-the-field was taken up by artists during the Great Leap Forward, because the commune took over many household activities, including childcare, to free mothers for work outside the home. In All Four Seasons Are Spring, 1960 (cat. 70), Zhao again uses shuiyin, but this

time appropriates the decorative aspects of peasant art to produce a different but new, original, nationalist style: from popular prints, he adopts their solid, bright colors and tilted-up ground, where near and far objects are almost the same size. Western elements are not obtrusive, but there is some convergence of the lines of perspective as in Western art, and the black ground that heightens contrast with the bright colors would never have been used in a traditional peasant creation. The message of the print is that the new commune system benefits the peasants raising silkworms. Traditionally, this had been a peasant family enterprise demanding extraordinary effort to feed and protect the growing worms but undertaken for the extra income it brought in; here it is portrayed as a commune activity that allows time even for relaxed study. Applied to the period theme, Zhao's stylistic innovation was also precisely what the art authorities sought. In a review of the National Exhibition of Chinese Art held in 1960, Deng Wen states that "the outstanding achievement of our woodcut artists lies in the fact that many of them have ... taken over the decorative feature of traditional art to establish an original style, thus acting as a vanguard to carry forward the national traditions and improve artistic technique."24 Emergence of amateur worker and peasant artists During the Great Leap Forward, much of the artistic productivity of professional artists went to aiding workers and peasants in the creation of ephemeral forms of art such as wall murals and the kind of posters glimpsed in The Commune's Club (cat. 10). Amateur art produced by the masses was featured and praised in art journals and in national exhibitions throughout 1958 and 1959, and many amateur artists became famous. At this time Song Enhou (a welder) and Chao Mei (an army agricultural worker) came to public attention. Both subsequently became professionals.

Song Enhou's Again Good Quality Steel, 1959 (cat. 103), is a model print not only because it takes as its subject the Great Leap Forward campaign to raise steel production ("Everybody Is Making Steel" was the theme of an exhibition in 1958), but because it depicts a worker-hero in the style of revolutionary romanticism; that is, socialist realism with heightened intensity, idealized and more heroic.25 Such qualities had become the touchstone for portrayal of model workers since Zhou Yang's report of 1956 (quoted above). The striking use of red increases the dramatic impact of the print, but red also symbolizes the Communist ideology that motivates the worker's activity. The print is an early example of the emblematic use of the color that was to become so prominent in the *Cultural Revolution. For the Chinese viewer, the welder-artist Song Enhou was himself also a subject of the print, because the class origins of artistically talented manual laborers were made known and emphasized when their work was displayed at exhibitions, or when it was published. Worker-artists were proof that socialism could achieve its objective and erase the boundaries between classes, because workers could perform the same tasks as intellectuals. Another great project of the Great Leap Forward, the mass resettlement of demobilized soldiers in distant Heilongjiang Province in 1958, created the conditions for a new school of printmaking. Chao Mei and his colleagues developed an innovative pictorial language to represent its topography and, in the process, created a landscape style that was not only new to Chinese art but also gave a symbolic significance to landscape depiction that it had not enjoyed in traditional guohua landscapes. September in the North, 1964 (cat. 18), and Natural Defense of the Northern Border, 1978 (cat. l9), though created after the Great Leap Forward, exemplify the style Chao developed at that time. In September in the North we sense the vastness of the plains reclaimed for agriculture: fields stretch across the high line of the horizon and continue beyond the picture's edge. In Natural Defense of the Northern Border, compositional emphasis is reversed: the horizon line is low, and the vertical elements of the trees continue past the picture's upper boundary, asserting the awesome height of a type of forest specific to the region. The dramatically low or high viewpoints and horizontal division of these designs were devices borrowed from Soviet art depicting the vastness of Siberia, whose topography is similiar to that of Heilongjiang on the other side of the border.26 The color effects of Chao's prints, however, differ from the Soviet models known to him. Rather than the typically dull earth tones and dark greens preferred by Soviet artists, he uses rich colors. The opacity of his inks emulates the effects of oil-painting in prints and was a technical innovation pioneered by Chao for Chinese art. Chao's prints demonstrate how socialism has tamed nature and/or uses it for man's benefit, content that, as we have seen, made Chinese guohua landscape paintings and landscape prints politically correct. The expanse of red sorghum in September in the North fills the print with the color symbolic of Communism, thus reinforcing the political statement. In addition, the vast expanses and awesome forests in Chao's landscape prints are an expression of the use of landscape art to depict the noble land as an embodiment of national pride. This symbolic usage was new to Chinese landscape prints and, like the use of landscape to demonstrate socialist construction, it was preceded by its use and acceptance as a theme in guohua landscape painting. We shall take up the subject of landscape as a vehicle for nationalism at greater length when discussing landscape prints created in the 1970s, here noting only that the monumental qualities depicted in Chao Mei's prints are among the first expressions of revolutionary romanticism in prints that take landscape as their subject.

History Prints

Nineteen fifty-nine was the tenth anniversary of the People's Republic of China and occurred during the Great Leap Forward. To celebrate the event, construction began in 1958, on or near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, of the Ten Great Buildings, one of which was the Great Hall of the People. Several of the buildings were museums of history; all required numerous commissions to fill their walls. Altogether, it was a period of intense art production focused on a review of the history of the Communist Party, which had brought about the revolution. Printmakers, of course, took part in this history art movement that continued for several years.

Revival of the Creative Print Movement style

One of the central themes of history art was the martyrdom of revolutionaries before Liberation. Important in the history of the revolutionary struggle in Sichuan, the Dung Heap was a notorious fortress-prison. A search was made for individuals who had been imprisoned there by the Guomindang and who could write a record of their experiences. The two authors who wrote the novel Red Rock, Luo Gongbin and Yang Yiyan, actually had been political prisoners; Luo had been incarcerated in the fortress as a child, like the young hero of the novel, and had escaped. Prominent Sichuan printmakers were commissioned to illustrate the book, including Niu Wen, Li Shaoyan, Li Huanmin, Wu Qiangnian, and Xu Kuang, who are represented in this exhibition. The novel's action takes place in the 1940s, before the founding of the People's Republic of China, and to illustrate it the artists revived the black and white expressionist styles derived from central European printmaking and favored by artists in the Creative Print Movement who worked in Sichuan at the time the events took place. As noted above, the use of chiaroscuro, large areas of black, and portrayal of the masses as debased and oppressed&emdash;characteristic of this art in the 1930s and 1940s&emdash;had been deemed in the Yan'an Talks to be unsuitable for art intended for the masses, and these characteristics had been removed from the category of acceptable styles. Apparently, however, the art establishment validated the expressionist social protest styles for prints depicting pre-1949 history, and most of the prints created to illustrate the novel have some of these characteristics (fig. 5). Niu Wen's Dream of 'Small Radish Head', 1961 (cat. 82), created as an illustration for Red Rock, conveys the disturbed nature of the child's dream in an expressionist style. Elements of a black and ominous cityscape are arranged according to principles from both European and Chinese perspective: we look almost straight out at the locked gate and at the same time down into the street with the multiple-viewpoints of Chinese perspective; but, with a technique taken from European expressionism, buildings, skewed and distorted, traverse the design along the diagonal created by Western perspective. The black ink that fills up almost all of the prints surface is patterned with white lines that are unconnected, uneven, and orientated in all different directions&emdash; effects that echo those of traditional Chinese North China paper cuts. Such patterning of discontinuous and irregular lines occurs in scissor-cut paper cuts because the scissor does not connect its snips one with the other in paper cuts&emdash;if it did, the paper would fall away; furthermore, the scissors, cutting rapidly, also leaves signs of its abrupt changes of directions in "bent" and irregular lines. The disturbing quality of Niu's print arises from combining distorted perspective, borrowed from Western expressionism, with the expressionist agitation of the many-directioned patterning of lines (created by negative carving of the block) native to the paper cut. Niu Wen, who had spent years in Yan'an and was familiar with paper cut effects, uses them to create a striking and original mixture, an "expressionist" print whose compelling nature owes as much to Chinese antecedents as to the West. A comparison of Niu Wen's style in Dream of 'Small Radish Head', 1961 (cat.82), with the same artistis print The East Is Red, The Sun Is Rising, 1959 (cat.81) also created with Yan'an paper cut effects in mind (discussed below) reveals what different aesthetic ends this gifted artist could achieve starting with the same artistic prototype.

Xu Kuang, at the time a young artist, also revived aspects of the Creative Print Movement's themes and expressionist styles (though somewhat toned down) for The Hatred of the Boat Towers, 1964 (cat. 91), a series within a larger, group history series called The Crimes of the Capitalist Class Recorded. Created as part of the ongoing history campaign, Xu's contribution also recalls, stylistically, prints from the 1930s and 1940s in order to depict events from that period. The artist uses large areas of black and chiaroscuro, and the prints take oppressed people as their subjects. The designs have a static quality, however, and lack the sense of tension and conflict found in works of the earlier period, such as Li Hua's four prints from the series, Raging Tide, 1947 (cat. 26).

The print styles of the 1930s and 1940s were natural to the older generation of printmakers, who had begun their careers working in these modes. Yan Han, who had studied Western art in Hangzhou before going to Yan'an, uses some techniques learned in his youth, along with others culled from both classical Western and socialist realist painting, for his series of illustrations for the narrative poem Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang, 1961 (cat.38, A,B,C), a tale set in the 1940s.

Some prints from this series are remarkable for realizing the same epic quality in very small formats that was finding expression at the time in huge canvasses commissioned for the Ten Great Buildings; the scenes of charging horses (no. 9 in the series) and the depiction of peasants beating an evil landlord (no. 13) could serve as designs for monumental works. Yan also uses flaming red (as in no. 9) that adds aesthetic drama, while simultaneously alluding to the Party, in the practice popular during the Great Leap Forward. Huang Xinbo, one of the founders in Shanghai of Lu Xun's Creative Print Movement in the 1930s, also returned to his own earlier style (influenced, among others, by the works of the American printmaker Rockwell Kent [1882-1971] who, in turn,

had influenced Soviet printmakers) for his history print recalling the struggles of early revolutionaries. In Keep Standing Up&emdash;Uprising of the Guangdong Red Army, 1961 (cat. 111), the volume on the faces is rendered with solid areas of black, while figures are constructed by blocks of black ink articulated by the white lines of negative carving. The two representatives of the masses, however, are portrayed as determined and capable rather than as the tortured and exploited victims who people Huang's early works. Using vivid red, Huang joins other artists during the period who use red for both its dramatic effects and symbolic allusion. Zhao Yannian, also a veteran of 1930s Shanghai, chose the image of the print movement's founder-patron to recall early revolutionary history. In Mr. Lu Xun, 1961 (cat. 64), Zhao's choice of subject and use of a modified expressionist style, so popular in the print movement Lu encouraged, is a double allusion to revolutionary beginnings: Lu was a leader in promulgating revolutionary ideas through his writings and also advocated using art to promote revolution; furthermore, he urged both writers and artists to use revolutionary styles to convey revolutionary messages. Lu was thus the quintessential revolutionary man. In the Yan'an Talks, Mao Zedong frequently cites Lu's arguments that art should serve revolution and indicates their parallelism with his own beliefs. In the closing lines of the Yan'an Talks Mao also quotes a famous couplet by the writer to imply that Lu shared his insistence that the artist be the servant of the masses "Stern browed I coolly face the fingers of a thousand men. Head bowed I'm glad to be an ox for little children"&emdash;and urges that it become the motto for all cadres.27 Mao does take exception to what he calls the obscurity and deviousness of Lu's essay style, and warns his readers (writers and artists) to avoid such qualities. Zhao Yannian was certainly familiar with both the praise and the criticism allotted to Lu in the Yan'an Talks, and his print avoids the heavy chiaroscuro of his own early works in the expressionist style (long deemed obscure to the masses) for a more Sinified mode of modelling Lu's face. Soviet socialist realist painting influences printmaking Jiang Bibo turned to Soviet socialist realist painting for stylistic inspiration and translated its effects into her woodblock history print Taking Luding Bridge by Force, 1961 (cat. 98). Figures in dramatic postures struggle along the bridge, which is depicted with strong diagonal elements intersecting a line that rises slightly from the horizontal, a composition often found in Soviet epic painting. Symbolic red&emdash;made even more dramatic by being coupled with yellow stands out, as if in relief, to the light, greyish-brown and black tones of the cliffs and river below, thus accentuating the deep distance of the latter. The greyed tones of the background recall classic woodblock printing inks and create the impression of a "painting" superimposed upon a print. Like Chao Mei, Jiang Bibo experiments with ink and colors to create a style totally new to Chinese woodblock printing. Style as historical allusion Artistic allusions to *Yan'an, the base area from which the revolution had expanded to the whole of China, were especially appropriate and could be stylistic as well as thematic. Niu Wen, who could work in a wide range of styles, used figures like those in peasant paper cuts made in Yan'an, the former Communist capital, to create The East Is Red, The Sun Is Rising, 1959 (cat. 81).

In the print, black outlined figures of Tibetan children dance around a piano (a new instrument in their society) while singing a Communist song popular since Yan'an days. They are silhouetted on a blank ground and appear very like window flowers, paper cuts pasted on windows, so popular in North China. The continuous circle of the children's linked hands parallels the continuous ligatures between components of a paper cut design that prevent the elements from falling apart. The title of the print is also the title of a song&emdash;whose lyrics are a poem&emdash;and amplifies the picture's meaning; the use of poetry in this way is another example of elitist aesthetics being co-opted for popular art. The idea that poetry-is-painting-is-poetry is a literati concept dating from at least the Song Dynasty (960-1278). The critic Bo Songnian, commenting on the addition of poetry to the peasant wall murals then being created in many villages, commented, "Peasants say there is poetry in painting and painting in poetry. When you can unite painting and poetry, then you are a real expert."28 In this print, Niu Wen uses antecedents from both popular and elite art to "make the past serve the present" and allude to the history of the Communist Party. (In the present less politically-oriented period, the picture has been posted on the Internet with the title Happy Tibetan Children; the impact of the print is lessened by the new title, which does not evoke the original allusions.)

Art in the Early 1960s

Great Leap Forward policies were reviewed and reevaluated throughout 1960, 1961 and 1962 and, in effect many were cancelled. Cultural institutions now reduced the excessive extra-mural work activities of artists and students and encouraged professionalism rather than amateurism. It was a period of renewed creativity for China's professional artists.

Soviet art continues to influence Chinese artists

The break with the Soviet Union that occurred in 1960 was reflected as a subject in Chinese art, although Chinese printmakers continued to create in Soviet print styles. In Fighting Drum, l961 (cat.76), Jiang Zhi, a veteran of both Shanghai and Yan'an, uses a Soviet print modality&emdash;tiny vignettes accompany the main theme as a gloss on the main action&emdash;to emphasize China's support of revolution in the Third World. Because the Soviet Union claimed for itself the role of tutor to oppressed peoples, and China now saw herself as the natural leader, there is irony in Jiang's use of a technique popular among Soviet printmakers in the l930s to dramatize this subject for the 1960s. The print was made into a stamp, so its message would be delivered, literally, to the nations to which Chinese assistance was being offered. (fig.6)

Emergence of ethnic minority artists in Sichuan The first half of the decade of the 1960s marked the emergence of the first generation of professionally trained artists from among the minority nationalities living in China's southwestern provinces. The Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts had established special classes for them, and the print artists Ah Ge (of the Yizu people) and Qijia Dawa (of the Zangzu [Tibetan] people) graduated in 1964. They specialized in depicting the customs of their own peoples, and both received exceptional attention because of their origins. Ah Ge's print A Mother Is Learning, 1964 (cat. 96), conveys empathy and affection with great technical skill. But in a review of her prints written in 1977, when her art was already recognized for its excellence, only a few words were granted to the aesthetic aspects of her work. It is the artist's feelings about the Party on which the reviewer dwells: "Her first work after her graduation was 'My Mother,' a series of woodcuts depicting the sufferings her mother had endured in the old

society. If it had not been for Chairman Mao and the Communist Party, her family would have been wiped out, and her people would have never become free."29 The tractor as a theme for art

The peaceful atmosphere of Ah Ge's print, which focuses on a quiet moment in the mother's day, is paralleled in other prints of the time. For artists, the first few years of the 1960s were relatively tranquil, with few intense political campaigns. The untitled Tianjin nianhua, undated but probably from the early 1960s, (cat. 12), shows peasants gathered around a tractor to rest and eat; relaxation rather than intense activity is emphasized. With the tractor as a centerpiece, the print is a model of the reformed nianhua, which has neither theme nor design from pre-Liberation antecedents. The marvelous aid of the tractor to peasants doing strenuous field work was a period theme. The industrial sector recovered from the dislocations of the Great Leap Forward more quickly than agriculture and, by 1965, the level of output of heavy equipment was more than double that of 1957.30 The tractor symbolizes this achievement. It appears also in some Suzhou nianhua of slightly later date but, unlike the Tianjin print discussed above, the Suzhou prints retain strong links to traditional nianhua in both theme and style, while incorporating the latest appropriate political content. In the pair of prints for Bumper Harvest, 1963 (cat. 15, A, B), a performance of the lion dance (to bring on rain and a good harvest), accompanied by other traditional images, dominates the scene. The tractor peeks out from behind the pennant-carrying lad on the left but can scarcely be seen because it is surrounded by cotton and grain, the field crops featured in nianhua since 1949 instead of the traditional fruits and flowers that had been emblems of luck. One banner, however, praises commune life, reflecting a new campaign already underway to recommunize cultivation.31 Private plots, forbidden in 1957, had again been permitted since 1961, but now a reversal of the reversal had begun. The print has been updated accordingly and bears the latest slogans. The color red dominates the design. As the *Cultural Revolution grew nearer, the content of nianhua became increasingly more political. Another nianhua from Suzhou, Meeting the "Spring Ox", 1965 (cat. 17), has strong links to traditional nianhua in design and in some of its motifs, but a tractor, surrounded by grain and cotton, is now the central character, underlining the contribution of socialism to the peasants' welfare. The print contains symbols especially associated with Mao Zedong, the initiator and driving force of the Cultural Revolution, such as the sunflower

that always turns to face the sun, as the Chinese people turn to face their leader; and, on the left, held up by a soldier, the little red book of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, already, in l964, being distributed to members of the *People's Liberation Army. The driver of the tractor in Meeting the "Spring Ox", is a woman. Women, this time armed, also are featured in the pair of Suzhou prints Chinese Sons and Daughters Have High Aspirations and They'd Rather Wear Weapons Than Pretty Clothes, 1964 (cat. 16). These prints reflect not only the feminism of *Jiang

Qing, Mao Zedong's wife, who was already playing an increasingly more active role in cultural matters, but also the fact that, in 1962, Mao had ordered that a civilian militia be formed and placed under the control of the People's Liberation Army.32 Because he believed in the power of the masses to accomplish almost any goal set for them, Mao envisioned a peasant militia as a potent force against China's enemies, even against the mechanized army of the United States. The mottos on the kites reflect Chinese concern about America's increasing involvement in Vietnam (which is on China's southern border), and American support for Taiwan; their militant tone is a harbinger of the atmosphere of struggle that accompanied the Cultural Revolution, about to descend on the nation.

Art During The Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, or, as it is usually called, the *Cultural Revolution, began in May 1966 when China entered a period known as "the ten lost years." As the name implies, the Cultural Revolution was aimed at the cultural establishment, and artists and art organizations were among the first to feel its impact. By June 1966 all art academies had ceased to function and, by January 1967, the *Chinese Artists' Association had been taken over by Red Guards. Almost all artists were sent to work on communes, where they performed manual labor, taught art creation to peasants and workers, and assisted them in the production of art. They had been assigned similiar tasks during the Great Leap Forward, but this time they were generally prohibited from creating art of their own.33. From 1966 to the early 1970s, most of the art, including works exhibited and/or popularized through reproduction in publications, was created by students and amateur artists from among the masses. The subjects were the revolution and their participation in it, as well as their esteem for their leader. The quantity of art they generated was considerable, most of it the product of collective anonymous creation. Much of such mass art, however, was transient, on billboard and blackboard, and has not survived. In addition, many works of art from the Cultural Revolution were destroyed, damaged, altered or removed from public view in the backlash that followed the fall of the Gang of Four. (34) For example, to be included in this exhibition, Song Enhou's Socialism Is Good, 1975 (cat. 105), had to undergo major restoration to repair the tears resulting from its having been folded and torn. Cultural Revolution slogans have been made illegible by the artists on Wang Qi's Launching Celebration, 1976 (cat. 32), and Fighting the Ba Mountain, 1976 (cat. 101), by Li Yingjin et al. Furthermore, a number of prints from the period were renamed afterwards.

Peasants as Creators of Art

A main objective of the Cultural Revolution, elimination of class differences, required that all sectors of society converge in interest and abilities. Therefore it was as important that the masses participate in cultural activity as that artists do manual labor. Mass cultural activities included participation in Chinese opera, drama, singing, and musical and poetic composition as well as creation of visual art. Peasants and workers were encouraged to record the process of their cultural awakenings, as in this statement, published in 1967, in which a young Moslem woman demonstrates a model attitude toward her membership in an amateur theatrical troupe: At first, I had no idea how to perform, because I hadn't much education and had never been to any school. I found the solution in Chairman Mao's works ... [which] ... showed me the way and gave me great inspiration and encouragement....Last year ... we composed and performed many shows based on real life and exposed the class enemy's attempt at a capitalist restoration....We performed in neighbouring villages as well as our own and out in the fields. Of course this took up a lot of our spare time and was quite strenuous. Sometimes we had to miss a meal or two. but when we thought of Chairman Mao's teaching that literature and art are a part of the revolutionary cause, we didn't mind going hungry."35 One Slab of Stone, 1973 (cat.90), by Jiang Xianliu et al, is an example of a work created during the Cultural Revolution by a farmers' art creation group. It is far more sophisticated than peasant art produced during the Great Leap Forward and stylistically quite different. During the Great Leap Forward, peasants had taken the characteristics of popular prints&emdash;black outline, flat color, tipped-up ground, and exaggerated size to indicate an object's importance and translated them into their wall murals and paintings. Water Reservoir, 1959 (cat. 6), well represents this style. Most Cultural Revolution art, however, was determined by the tastes of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, who favored Western perspective, shading and proportion. Collaboration with rusticated professional artists helped the amateurs create works with these characteristics. In One Slab of Stone, the artists have preserved the stylized decorative quality of popular prints in the rendering of trees and flowers, giving the print a "folksy" character; but objects become smaller as they recede into the distance and are arranged to lie on lines of (Western) perspective converging somewhere on the invisible horizon. There is also some shading on clothing, particularly around the waistlines, to indicate volume. The themes of peasant art, however their ordinary daily preoccupations and the socialist contribution to their lives&emdash;remain the same as during the Great Leap Forward. Amateur artists were also assisted by great numbers of printed how-to-do-it pamphlets and booklets prepared by professional artists, which showed the steps in drawing the human figure, the central subject of most socialist art. Such guides were, in fact, a continuation of an old Chinese tradition of printed art instruction manuals, but now the interest was in how to portray people at work rather than how to render traditional subjects such as bamboo and plum blossoms (fig. 7).

Anonymous Art and Collective Creation

Throughout the decade of the Cultural Revolution, because individualism was considered rightist and reactionary, much art was created by several individuals working together anonymously. Many prints in the exhibition, such as One Slab of Stone and Fighting the Ba Mountain, 1976 (cat. 101), are unsigned, and the names of the artists who created them were located for this catalogue in post-Cultural Revolution publications of reproductions, where they are listed, or because their names are written somewhere on the print by an anonymous hand. Furthermore, it is quite probable that many signatures that do appear on exhibition works created during the Cultural Revolution were added by their creators only afterwards, as this was a common practice. Much art was the collective product of amateurs assisted by professionals. Of the four artists credited with producing Fighting Ba Mountain only one name can be located in Chinese dictionaries of artists&emdash;the others presumably were amateurs or students. Furthermore, if there was professional assistance, the expert often remains unidentified for instance, from among the six artists credited (in publications) with creating One Slab of Stone, all are farmers; the sophistication of the print suggests considerable professional assistance, but no professional is named.

In addition, no prints identified as the work of professional woodblock printmakers, individually or collectively, and dating from between 1965 and l972, the early phase of the Cultural Revolution, appear at all among the reproductions (seen by this writer) of major retrospective collections published by fine art publishing houses in China after 1980.36 Yet by this date, art publishing houses again were able to publish collections chosen by the art establishment for their excellence and historical importance rather than for reasons relating only to the artists' origins. That they did not include prints made between 1965 and 1972 suggests that such prints do not exist, because professional artists were not permitted to create art during these years. Our exhibition also has no prints from this period, signed or unsigned, with the possible exception of Fu Lin's Mao Zedong's Thought Is Our Life Blood (cat. 102.), which may have been produced in the late 1960s. The names of professional artists again appear as printmakers around 1972, most frequently on collective creations, because joining one's identity with that of others was politically correct. Senior artists worked with relative unknowns in group creation, as Huang Peimo did when he produced In Praise of the Red Flag, 1972 (cat. 23), as part of the series Lauding the Long Rainbow; Lai Shaoqi, a veteran artist, collaborated with artists in Anhui Province&emdash;where he had been sent&emdash;on the picture The New Image of Huaibei, 1975 (cat. 112); and some renowned professional artists collaborated with each other, as Xu Kuang and Ah Ge did for The Master, 1978 (cat. 95). Collective creation continued to be common until 1979, when new cultural policies were introduced.

Art Creation in the Early 1970s

The year 1972 was preceded and followed by events that were to have great significance for the country and its artists. A more stable national environment followed the Ninth Party Congress (1969). The death of Lin Biao, the radical defense minister (who had given much impetus to the Cultural Revolution and the cult of Mao Zedong), in 1971, removed his influence, and a somewhat more relaxed atmosphere for artists ensued. Important exhibitions were planned to celehrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Yan'an Talks, in 1972, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the new Republic, in 1974. Furthermore,1971 and 1972 were also pivotal years in the development of China's international relationships: in 1971 China finally was admitted to the United Nations, and in 1972 President Richard Nixon visited the country. An influx of foreign diplomats was expected, and accommodations for them, suitably decorated, had to be prepared.

The foreign ministry decided that traditional guohua paintings, including landscapes, should be among the works commissioned for the hotels and restaurants that would serve foreigners; *Zhou Enlai, who had often shown a more liberal understanding of artists'problems than Jiang Qing, took an active part in advising the committee in charge of decoration. He did not consider it necessary for paintings intended for foreign viewers to have socialist content. On his advice, some professional painters and woodblock artists were called back from labor in the communes to produce the required work.37

Landscape Art

During this period, guohua landscape painting, including art intended for the Chinese public, enjoyed a general revival among the art authorities because the status and style of landscape prints was related to the status of, and developments in, guohua landscape painting, we shall follow the critical reception of the latter. As noted above, in 1949 guohua landscape painting had been found wanting because it was created for an elite by an elite, neither the style nor the subject matter was deemed at that time to be of interest to the masses. In the late 1950s the movement to use Chinese art forms and the introduction of socialist content into landscapes (by portraying socialist construction) had led to the acceptance of some landscape art as having the correct political qualities.

An anonymous reviewer explains, in 1972, how the depiction in landscape art of socialist achievements had come about: "Painters in the traditional style have gone to the countryside or factories to be re-educated. The excellent progress they have made both in their political thinking and in their experience of life has laid a certain ideological foundation for renovating our traditional art, and they are eager to reflect .... works with a new content the mighty construction projects in industry and agriculture."38 It was also discovered that traditional Chinese landscape had the ability to symbolize the spiritual qualities of the masses. Critics had found this quality in the guohua landscape painting This Land So Rich In Beauty, created in 1959 by the venerable guohua landscape painters (Guan Shanyue and Fu Baoshi.) The words of the painting's title and the subject were taken from a famous poem called Snow, by Mao Zedong. Hung in a prominent position in the Great Hall of the People, the painting had been greatly acclaimed, no doubt as much because the author of the poem was the esteemed leader of the nation as for the excellence of the art.39 Commenting on it in 1960, the art critic Deng Wen remarked, "when people admire the sublimity of mountains, the breadth of the ocean, the enduring quality of the pine ... they are admiring the spiritual qualities of man which coincide with these characteristics of nature....This is even more apparent in our new landscapes, many of which embody the ideas and feelings of the labouring people....[A picture of mountains and forests] ... not only presents the grandeur of China's countryside, but expresses our people's aspiring spirit and boundless confidence."40

Thus a landscape, whether a guohua painting or a print, was now acceptable because it depicted noble mountains and forests&emdash;metaphors for the masses&emdash;and not only because it depicted the masses' conquest of nature in a socialist state. Western viewers tend to be disconcerted by these works, as they violate the Western notion of how a Chinese landscape should look. But analysis of them reveals the artists' amazing inventive powers in solving the problems posed by the type. In Huang Peimo's print A Distant Source and a Long Stream, 1973 (cat. 24), for example, industrial installations follow an S-shaped line that leads the eye into deep space, a device taken from Soviet socialist realism; at the same time, the multiple viewpoints of traditional Chinese painting permits us to look down on the ship while we look straight out to the farthest chimneys.

Colors fade on far-off objects, in the classic Chinese landscape technique for indicating distance, and the use of overlapping mountains and texture strokes also give the print a "traditional" air. The industrial installations are of impressive size compared with the trees and sailboats nearby, but they are dwarfed by the grandeur of the mountains surrounding them. The red glow that tinges the most distant towers and hills complements the greenish-blue that is the landscape's dominant color, an allusion to the green-blue style of landscape popular in the Tang Dynasty (618906); the glowing empty spaces of blank white paper that surround the installations are a classic Chinese landscape technique harking back to the Song Dynasty (960-1278). The print has the quality of a dream materializing before our eyes. Its dramatic monumentality makes it an example of a landscape with the qualities of revolutionary romanticism, the style particularly recommended in Chinese aesthetic criticism since 1956. Revolutionary romanticism, an intensification of the basic socialist realist style, usually took idealized and heroic depictions of workers or peasants as its subjects. Here it is realized in a landscape that depicts both "the sublimity of mountains" and socialist construction. Furthermore, by using long-established landscape conventions, the picture fulfills Mao's dictum to make "the past serve the present." An even more sublime mountain setting envelops the hydroelectric dam in Feng Zhongtie's High Canyons Above, Smooth Lake Below, 1973 (cat.77). Feng uses the converging lines of Western perspective in the area depicting the dam, but overlapping silhouettes of mountains, valleys filled with luminous white, and ink tones which fade in the distance, are all devices for indicating spatial relationships taken from classical Chinese ink painting. The printmaking technique that Feng uses to achieve variation in ink tone, however, is quite different from the standard printmaker's technique for creating areas of more and less concentrated black. Lin Jun, for example, in his print At the Foot of the Miao Mountains, 1954 (cat. 84), varies the density of printed lines to achieve lighter or darker areas, using the European wood-engraving technique. Feng achieves nuance by using paler ink on parts of the block, and also by reinking and reprinting other areas where he wishes to achieve a rich black. The process may well have been invented by Feng, who had already, in 1962, begun to create nuanced ink tones.41(Differences of tone achieved by varying the intensity of the ink's blackness and the number of times a section of the block is reprinted can be found in other prints from Sichuan in the exhibition, including Fighting the Ba Mountain, l976 [cat.101] by Hu Dingyu, et al and Ah Ge's Yizu People Happily Welcome New Commune Members to Their Village, 1976 [cat. 97]; the technique became popular in the province in the 1970s when its aesthetic potential was recognized).

Other technical innovations used in High Canyons Above, Smooth Lake Below raise interesting guestions. In this print white highlights generated by blank paper outline the crests of rich, black-ink mountains. The traditional means to delineate the form of mountains in Chinese landscapes, however, had been to outline them with black lines&emdash;brush strokes in paintings or, in the case of prints, lines that resembled brush strokes. Feng Zhongtie had employed the traditional technique in his earlier works but, in 1963, began to shape mountains and ridges to resemble the ripples and curves of waves and to use white at the edges of the shapes in a way that recalls the reflection of sun on water; his mountains appear as if they are waves in an ocean, features without antecedent in Chinese landscape depiction.42 The stylistic innovation is so striking, so without precedent, and so resemble a description in a poem (known to every literate Chinese), by Mao Zedong and called "Lou Mountain Pass" (1935), that to this writer there is no other explanation but that lines from the poem inspired Feng's style. In his poem Mao describes a mountain range just climbed by the army (and located across the border from Sichuan in Guizhou Province), as "green mountains like oceans."43 Feng's mountains, modelled like waves in an ocean, are a visual realization of the simile, paying homage to the poem and its author. We have noted that printmakers were aware of, and influenced by, developments in contemporary guohua landscape painting. Stylistic innovations might flow in the other direction as well, and techniques developed by printmakers could be adopted by painters. In his guohua painting, dating from 1971 or 1972 and actually called Lou Mountain Pass, the artist Li Keran uses white to outline the mountain crests, shaping them like rippled and crested waves almost exactly as Feng Zhongtie does.44 There are no white outlines in Li's work from the 1960s, he late 1960s (although not in Loushan Pass). The high incidence of such shadows in both landscape prints and paintings by other artists that begins in the early l970s is probably largely due to awareness of Li's use of them. In China an artist's prestige is a powerful reason for other artists to adopt his artistic methods. Shadows on water are evident in Feng's High Canyons Above, Smooth Lake Below and Huang's A Distant Source and a Long Stream, as well as other landscape prints that we will discuss below all dating from the 1970s or later&emdash;and have been thoroughly domesticated, although they do not appear in landscapes by Feng Zhongtie and, scarcely, in other printmakers, before the early 1970s. (Curiously, shadows on people and cast by people had been much used by printmakers already in the 1930s, but shadows cast by mountains on water became common in Chinese art only much later.) Shadows appear also in the collaborative work by Li Yingtai et al Fighting the Ba Mountain, 1976 (cat.101), whose monumental size echoes its monumental theme, and which is another example of revolutionary romanticism in a landscape print. (Monumentality, itself a form of romanticism, is a feature of much Cultural Revolution art, figurative as well as landscape.) Fighting the Ba Mountain utilizes much the same synthesis of Chinese and Western techniques for depicting landscapes as High Canyoas Above, Smooth Lake Below. Completed construction, which occupies the medium and far distance in the print, is bathed in light, as are the constructions in A Distant Source and a Long Stream and High Canyons Above, Smooth Lake Below; the Chinese viewer would understand that, in all these prints, the rising sun, symbol of socialism and of Mao Zedong, is the source of the illumination. Human beings, scarcely visible in High Canyons Above, Smooth Lake Below and A Distant Source and a Long Stream, which date from the early 1970s are, however, very much in evidence in Fighting the Ba Mountain, created several years later, when there was renewed emphasis on the masses as the moving force in the construction of their new world. The notion of struggle, implicit in the title and abounding in the printed word during the Cultural Revolution, is dramatized by the figures: silhouetted on the ridge above, busy in the valley below and prominent in the foreground, the masses are everywhere at work. Shadows also play an interesting role, as we shall see, in The New Image of Huaibei, 1975 (cat. 112), by Lai Shaoqi et al. The print alludes to traditional landscape painting by emulating the narrow, vertical format of the Chinese hanging scroll. The mix of Chinese and Western techniques, however, is quite different from that in the prints discussed above. The ground plane, tilted up so that we look down steeply to the foreground but also straight ahead to a spur of hills in the distance, is a Chinese convention. The topography of this landscape, however a continuous plain is Western. The word for landscape in Chinese, shanshui, literally means mountains and water; in a classical Chinese landscape, our view ends at the mountains or, on occasion, at a forest, but in this print the plane continues beyond the hills. Furthermore, the composition is organized by Western linear perspective, deliberately emphasized by the march of the tree lines toward a distant convergence point. "Reading" the print, we realize that the shadows cast by the trees lining the fields clearly indicate that the sun is rising in the east, and it is a socialist sun that radiates brightness on everything. The signs of human activity&emdash;commune members harvesting yellow grain and white cotton, and smoke rising from industrial structures&emdash;instruct us that the effort of the masses in the commune system brings self-sufficiency. Bright greens, together with strong red accents, dominate the print. Green in China traditionally has symbolized life, just as red has symbolized happiness, warmth, vitality, and male virility. The fact that red is also the color symbolic of Communism was a felicitous synthesis for the Party of symbolic associations. Furthermore, green and red together are a Chinese metaphor for the universe, and this is one of the meanings the Chinese viewer would find in The New Image of Huaibei: the commune has everything. Green, green-blues and blue-greens abound in both guohua landscape paintings and landscape prints made during the l970s. Ellen Laing quotes a review that appeared in 1972, in which the painting Canal of Happiness, by Hou Dechang, is praised because "beyond the [canal] is a vast expanse of verdant fields spreading far beyond the horizon....The luxuriant verdure has swept away the gloomy and desolate atmosphere ... in the old landscape paintings.'"45 The review could just as well have been of The New Image of Huaibei, which partakes of the period themes both in subject and coloration (though not in composition).

A guohua painting called A Great Wall of Green Forests, done in 1972 by Guan Shanyue (one of the painters of This Land So Rich in Beauty, made for the Great Hall of the People, discussed above), may have amplified the popularity of greenish colors in landscapes. The painting received numerous laudatory reviews.46 The artist's narration of how he came to choose his subject and how he arrived at technical solutions for the effects he wanted to convey was also published: "After Liberation, Chairman Mao called on us to carry out afforestation throughout the country....I raised my political consciousness and made up my mind to take this afforestation as the theme of a traditional-style painting....To convey the idea that this forest belt is by no means tranquil and the class struggle is still acute, I painted in some mi]itiamen."47 Guan then adds some observations on his technique: "To suggest the luxuriant green of these trees, I used malachite. Since this traditional pigment is opaque and refractory, I applied it in layers as in oil-painting to create an effect of depth" (p. 120).

It is not surprising to find that both the theme and coloration of A Great Wall of Green Forests abound in period prints. The art authorities indicated to artists what themes, style, and even color, were currently desirable, and if a painting was created by a great artist whose work enjoyed political approval, and who cited the Party's Chairman as the inspiration for his subject, it surely would become a model work. The mountains in Huang Peimo's A Distant Source and a Long Stream, discussed above, are colored malachite blue-green; and Chao Mei's Defense of the Northern Border, 1978 (cat. 19), uses shades of malachite to give atmospheric color to the forest and also takes as its subject the theme of militia on patrol among trees, still topical in 1978. Even Song Enhou was influenced by the period fashion for malachite blue-green in landscapes. A welder and worker-artist, Song's characteristic work deals with industrial subjects; for example, The Eagle Attracts the Big Sky, 1981 (cat. 106), with its huge, soaring crane. It seems, however, that everyone was doing landscapes. In Untitled, dating from around 1972 (cat. 104), Song depicts a group of People's Liberation Army soldiers. who have arrived to view mountains and water in a landscape overlayed with malachite blue. Again we realize that they&emdash;and we&emdash;are looking toward the east, from where the sun is rising, the latter as much identified with Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution as the "little red book" (Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong) that the soldiers are holding. The direction from which the light comes is made clear by the shadows. Symbolically, sun and book tinge the water red. Mao's thoughts inspire the soldiers as they contemplate a landscape because, as in the quotation cited above, "when people admire the sublimity of mountains ... they are admiring the spiritual qualities of man....[A picture of mountains] ... not only presents the grandeur of China's countryside, but expresses our people's aspiring spirit and boundless confidence."48 The scholar sitting on an outcrop of rock contemplating mountains, with a winding path descending to a valley below, was a recurring subject of traditional landscape painting; our soldiers, however, have arrived by sturdy mechanized vehicles and are a new class of nature lovers.

Our essay has devoted proportionally more attention to landscape prints than they, or the paintings to which they were related, received during the decade of the Cultural Revolution. Reviews praising guohua landscapes, a measure in China of official approval of an art form, were published only between 1972 and 1974. Jiang Qing is said to have had a strong dislike for guohua painting, especially landscape painting, considering it elitist and bourgeoise. She is also said to have disliked Zhou Enlai, whose authority had led to the commissioning of guoLua painting as decoration for facilities to be used by foreigners. (Numerous stories were related after the fall of the Gang of Four about her attitudes on these matters.49) By 1974 Zhou Enlai was already seriously ill and scarcely active in the cultural world. Jiang Qing, now the preeminent arbiter of national taste, therefore ordered removed most of the guohua paintings that had been commissioned by the foreign ministry, disparaging them, it is said, as the "Hotel School" of painting. They were collected and some seven-hundred displayed in a special exhibition of "Black Painting" held in February 1974; regional Black Painting exhibitions were held around the country, and reviews of guohua painting soon disappeared from the press.50 Landscape prints with socialist content, however, seem to have escaped the general censure now meted out to guohua landscape paintings and continued to appear throughout the Cultural Revolution, probably because no one considered prints an elite art, and also because they carried the correct political messages to the masses. Some bear evidence that they won this public's approval. Exhibited in China unframed and without cover, as was the custom of the time with prints, Huang Peimo's A Distant Source and a Long Stream, 1973 (cat. 24), was evidently touched many times. This may shock us at first, with our notions of art as something precious, whose elevated status requires careful protection to keep the viewer at bay. But these prints were made for the people and displayed in towns and villages in locations little resembling museums or galleries. If one imagines peasants approaching the picture, amazed at the dream-like reality it portrays, and then touching the paper to see if such an image could really lie upon its surface, one realizes that it fascinated and pleased the audience for which it was intended.

Industrial Construction as the Subject of Prints

Industrial landscapes could be created without the "landscape," that is, without natural scenery. Huang Peimo turned to the building of the Great Yangzi Bridge for inspiration for his industrial landscape In Praise of the Red Flag, 1972 (cat. 23). Chinese engineers finished the bridge by 1974, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China. The massive achievement was celebrated in all media, including a considerable number of paintings and prints. Huang's work is one from a group creation called Lauding the Long Rainbow (1972-1974) produced by artists from Nanjing, the site of the bridge. The subject of Huang's picture is an early stage of the bridge's construction: a truncated pyramid of scaffolding (seen from a low viewpoint, in the Soviet manner), already capped by three red flags, rises up from the base. The source of illumination is indicated by light and shadow: in the east a red sun is rising and has illuminated the flags and the side facing east. But the part of the structure, not facing east and not yet completed, is still in shadow, like the workers hurrying to their jobs, who are darkened silhouettes. Only hastening the work of socialist construction the bridge's Completion will bring on full daylight. (The same contrast between completed work bathed in light, while work in progress is performed by active, darkened and silhouetted figures can be seen in Fighting the Ba Mountain, [cat. 101].) The picture abounds with accurate realistic detail, testimony to the artist's careful study of his subject and probably also to the critical participation of workers from the project. Artists were required to submit their industrial "likenesses" to the workers for examination to assure technical

accuracy. Industrial projects were a favorite of worker-artists who, not unnaturally, portrayed what they knew best, their own work environments. The "Shanghai, Yangquan, Luda Workers' Exhibition," a collection of art created in various media by workers from the three cities, was held in Beijing in 1974 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the People's Republic of China. Luda, in Liaoning Province, is a city with refineries and shipbuilding installation; of the twenty-four pictures by Luda workers illustrated in a published selection from the exhibition, thirteen contain images of ships and, of these thirteen, six are of the ship called Daqing.51 Daqing was the first great oil field discovered in China, and construction of the ship named in its honor was a major accomplishment for the Luda shipyard. The ship's launching was thus a double celebration and publicized in all media. Joining worker-artists in spirit, the veteran printmaker Wang Qi created an image of the ship that communicates not only its massive size and the worker activity that brought it to completion, but also the celebratory nature of the launching. It is, however, the composition of Launching Celebration, 1976 (cat. 32), that is particularly interesting. The sense of the ship's majesty is generated by use of a formula found in some Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) and Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) landscape paintings.52 In such compositions, which use the Chinese multiple point of view, the spectator stands slightly above and looks down on a low spit of land while at the same time looking across a level body of water and then up to a looming mountain on the other side, precisely the view we are given in Launching Celebration. In classical landscapes, foreground trees often frame the mountain just as, in this print, cranes frame the vessel. The term "industrial landscape" here becomes singularly appropriate.

Depictions of the Masses and Their Leaders in Prints

By far the most numerous subjects of art works from the Cultural Revolution are the masses&emdash;peasants, workers, soldiers&emdash;and their leaders. Some of the techniques used for their depiction are found in much socialist realist art and were not new to the Cultural Revolution; but in works of this period, the basic style is exaggerated and reduced to a few simplified formulas. Revolutionary romanticism, the intensification of the basic socialist realist

style, was the approved mode and, although it had been popular since 1956, the degree of intensification that now appeared had no precedent in earlier works. Applied to figure depiction, the term "revolutionary romanticism" implied images of the masses and their heroes brought to the highest level of idealism and also created according to new formulas developed by Jiang Qing in the 1960s. Most Cultural Revolution figurative art is recognizable as a product of the period, and we shall point out its characteristics as we discuss individual prints.Mass movements portrayedThe most idealistic and romantic aspect of the Cultural Revolution, the ideological basis promoted by Mao Zedong and his allies, was the belief that mass mobilization could sweep all obstacles before it and bring about total revolution. We have noted that, when mass mobilization was tried during the Great Leap Forward, art from that period often depicted groups of people bursting with energy and joy as they welcomed the changes taking place. (For instance, in prints such as The People's Commune Is Good, [cat. 11] and The Commune's Club [cat. 10], both from the late 1950s or early 1960s). During the Cultural Revolution, however, crowd scenes (those in which figures are far more numerous than group scenes) became a popular subject of prints. In such crowd scenes the emphasis is on the mass character of the movement, on the participation of the multitudes of the Chinese nation united in a like-minded effort to promote revolutionary aims. In prints such as Cai Dian's The Revolutionary Generation Is Like a Swelling Tide (cat. 108), undated but from the early 1970s; Fu Lin's Mao Zedong's Thought Is Our Life Blood (cat. 102), also undated but probably from the late 1960s or early 1970s; Song Enho's Socialism Is Good, 1975 (cat. 105); and Wang Qi's Launching Celebration, 1976 (cat. 32), the crowd's uniformity of mission and the vastness of its numbers are suggested by filling up large areas with scarcely differentiated, overlapping faces, reduplicated like symbolic ciphers. In many crowd scenes, however, the artist also takes care to make large images of a particular peasant, worker, and soldier stand out, as in Cai Dian's The Revolutionary Generation is Like a Swelling Tide and Fu Lin's Mao Zedong's Thought Is Our Life Blood. Peasants, workers, and soldiers are the constituents of the masses, and the particularization of their representatives in a trio not only clarifies who the masses are but also reinforces the symbolism by reduplicating it.

The Influence of Jiang Qing's "Model Operas"

Between 1961 and 1965 Jiang Qing had developed a group of "model operas" (afterwards augmented to "eight performance pieces," which included a piano concerto), with the objective of eliminating any lingering feudal and bourgeoise elements from this art form that was so very popular with the masses. The principles that were codified for the reform of the operas were than applied to all the visual arts, including prints, and the necessity of observing the principles was repeatedly emphasized in newspapers and journals.53 Clarity of message was one of the criteria for evaluating excellence in an opera. Language, which clarified a character's attitudes in a performance, could perform the same function in the title of a print; writing anywhere on the picture acted as a kind of gloss on the content, further obviating ambiguity, as in Cai Dian's undated The Revolutionary Generation Is Like a Swelling Tide (cat. 108) and numerous other prints from the period. A formula developed for the operas, called the "three prominences," was intended to clarify meaning still further by allocating a specific location for every character on the stage or in a design. According to the formula, when several characters are depicted together, subsidiary characters yield prominence to positive characters (that is, those without political orientation yield to those with commitment to the revolution), positive characters yield to heroes and heroines, and the latter yield to the leading hero or heroine, who is usually found at the meeting point of two diagonals, typically the apex of a triangle.54 In group scenes the most important character often appears close to the center, while less important characters stand close to him or her, forming a block to one side in a kind of optical wedge that thrusts the eye back to the central character. The heroes, brought forward to the picture plane, appear monumental because of the large area they occupy in relation to the total area of the picture. As noted in the discussion on landscape art, emphasis on monumentality was a characteristic of the Cultural Revolution variety of revolutionary romanticism. Furthermore, the figures not only appear monumental, but the size of the prints in which they appear are also monumental for the medium.

The source of light in figure depiction

The principles of stage lighting developed by Jiang Qing for the model operas (adopted from Western theater presentation&emdash;such lighting had no precedent in Chinese opera) also were translated into the other visual arts. Figures in Cultural Revolution prints are bathed in light that appears to come from above, like a spotlight, a phenomenon particularly noticeable in prints created with color, such as some of those discussed above&emdash;Song Enho's Socialism Is Good (cat. 105); Cai Dian's The Revolutionary Generation Is Like a Swelling Tide (cat. 108); and Fu lin's Mao Zedong's Thought Is Our Life Blood (cat. 102)&emdash;as well as Cha Shiming's Full of Youthful Spirit, 1976 (cat. 109). For the Chinese viewer, the flood of light that illuminates everything is understood to have its source in socialism and in the thought of Mao Zedong.The way the faces and bodies are shaded makes the spotlight quality of the lighting also recognizable in most black and white prints of the period. The figures in Xu Kuang's Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored, 1974 (cat. 92) and Cordial Love, 1976 (cat. 94); and Li Huanmin's The People Are Changed, 1979 (cat. 87) (the last done after the Cultural Revolution had ended but still in the period style), all stand under light coming from above. Even when they are outside and in daylight, the central characters are picked out by a spotlight in prints such as Xu Kuang's Epic of the Grasslands, 1975 (cat.93), and Lin Jun's Rely on Our Hands for the Hard Struggle, 1976 (cat. 85).

Model figures In addition to those discussed above, certain characteristics are repeated in virtually all figure depictions. Faces (and usually clothes and bodies) are outlined, rounded and fleshed out; everyone smiles except when they have a determined look, in which case thick eyebrows are drawn together to emphasize resolution. One can see the latter in Xu Kuang's Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored (cat. 92), and Cha Shiming's Full of Youthful Spirit (cat. 109), among others. The knitted eyebrows recall the exaggerated facial expressions typical of Peking opera and are another example of how the model operas influenced other arts.

Stage conventions also determined that a single figure always faces outward

toward the viewer; in a group depiction the main characters look outward (or occasionally face each other in profile), while the subsidiary characters watch them attentively. In Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored, Xu Kuang demonstrates how an outstanding artist succeeded in preserving plausibility, while still observing the requirement of an outward-facing posture for his main character. The artist gives the narrator an expression that conveys intense recollection of moments long-past in order to explain why she looks away from her audience. In Ah Ge's Yizu People Happily Welcome New Commune Members to Their Village, 1976 (cat. 97), a child's pointing finger explains why a young female soldier looks toward the picture plane. Whether male or female, workers and peasants have well-developed musculature and are never depicted as dirty or in tattered clothing. The process that led him to idealize his portraits of workers is described by the artist Zhao Zhitian. He relates how he first painted the workers in the Daqing oil fields with naturalistic detail. When the workers saw how he handled their images, however, they said, "Don't make us look like scarecrows. Make our clothes and faces cleaner."55 Zhao then recalls how the hero of one of the model operas, The Red Lantern, is presented to the audience with only a few bloodstains, although he has been brutally tortured: "[The play's designers] emphasized his lofty spirit and his courage." Accordingly, grime on the workers' faces and clothes is scarcely visible in Zhao's finished painting (p. 106). When it was published, Zhao's explanation enlightened other artists about the correct way to proceed. A similiar logic lay behind the creation of Socialism Is Good, 1975 (cat. lOS), in which only two of Song Enhou's oil-refinery workers show some smudging on their faces, a fact hardly noticeable because of their radiant smiles. The ultimate origin of idealized portraits of the masses was, of course, the Yan'an Talks, in which Mao insisted that only the "bright" side of the masses' lives should be portrayed. Reprints of the Yan'an Talks were frequent, and references to them appeared constantly in art reviews throughout the Cultural Revolution. In particular, the quotation which states that the masses should be portrayed "on a higher plane, more intense, more concentrated, ... nearer the ideal" is printed typically in bold type."56Color

The color red, emblematic of the Communist Party and already much used in the Great Leap Forward, now either dominates colored pictures&emdash;with hot yellow and orange as auxiliaries&emdash;or provides the dominating accent, frequently against a foil of blue. During the Cultural Revolution, however, Jiang Qing and her allies constantly asserted that "Mao Zedong Thought" (as Mao's writings were called), was the only correct interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. For the Chinese viewer, red thus represented Mao himself as the embodiment of Communist ideology and accomplishments. The slogan "Chairman Mao is the reddest reddest sun in our hearts" was repeated constantly and was the title of editorials as well as pictures in all media.Even in black and white prints, the color red plays a role. Many objects&emdash;such as the flags and banners that carry Cultural Revolution slogans in Wang Qi's Launching Celebration, 1976 (cat. 32); the Red Guard arm bands in Xu Kuang's Cordial Love, 1976 (cat. 94); the edition of Mao Zedong's works held by the soldier in Zhang Huaijinag's Pillar, 1981 (cat. 59), and the little red book held by many hands in Xu Kuang's Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored and his Cordial Love&emdash;are specifically associated with Mao and were immediately "felt" to be "red" by Chinese viewers.

Faces in art of the period, particularly those of heroes and Party leaders, are often colored a ruddy hue. This is another feature adapted from opera, in which convention signifies that an actor's face painted red denotes a character who is just, loyal, vital and has a warrior's courage. Less common in our prints than in paintings&emdash;because many woodblock artists work only in black and white&emdash;the ruddy hue does appear on faces in Song Enhou's Socialism Is Good, 1975 (cat. 105), and Cha Shiming's A Hard Mission, 1977 (cat. 110). A ruddy glow sometimes is implied even in black and white prints by the way the cheeks are highlighted and shaded, a technique used in Xu Kuang's Cordial Love (cat. 94) and Epic of the Grasslands (cat. 93); and Lin Jun's Rely on Our Hands for the Hard Struggle, 1976 (cat.85), among others.

After the Cultural Revolution had ended, in 1976, artists named the style, retroactively, hong, guang, liang (red, bright, and glowing). Professionals apply color like amateur artists do When color is used, it is applied to figures in patches with ragged outlines or in rough strokes, both crudely reminiscent of the brushwork of traditional painting; furthermore, it has little modulation or nuance, recalling its flat character in traditional nianhua. Such ragged and rough qualities abounded in the art of the "Shanghai, Yangquan, Luda Workers' Exhibition," where it has been explained as the result of untrained artists trying to utilize techniques that were beyond their abilities.57 Colored prints from the period created by experienced artists, however, have the same characteristics. The patchy way in which coloring is applied in the work of (by now) mature and practiced artists&emdash;such as in the worker-artist Song Enhou's Socialism Is Good, 1975 (cat. 105), and in the soldier-artist Fu lin's Mao Zedong's Thought Is Our Life Blood (cat.102), undated but probably from the early 1970s&emdash;as well as in the work of academically trained artists&emdash;such as in Cai Dian's The Revolutionary Generation Is Like a Swelling Tide (cat. 108) and in Cha Shiming's Full of Youthful Spirit, 1976 (cat. 109)&emdash;is probably meant to demonstrate that these artists identify with the masses, even in matters of artistic style. Just as artists from the masses sought to refine their art and emulate professional styles, so experts reciprocated by reproducing the manner of amateurs; thus, even artistic style achieved political correctness by demonstrating the convergence of classes.

Portraits of Leaders

The handling of the image of a great leader was a delicate matter. The artist Liu Junhua recorded how, in 1968, he went about painting his famous icon of Mao Zedong called Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan. He recalls that when he began the large work, he had already painted many poster images of his leader, whose image was dear to him. "Never once have I become tired of looking at Chairman Mao's picture....Since childhood I have liked to draw pictures of him. I collected many photographs of him, looked at these every day and learned how to do a good picture of him. The more I paint, the more I feel Chairman Mao is dear to me."58 His preparation for the painting included studying historical materials and Mao's writings and poems, as well as visiting Anyuan and talking to the workers there. After beginning the painting, Hua sought opinions from workers, soldiers, peasants, and his comrades, and frequently made changes according to their criticisms (pp. 5 and 6). Reworking a picture to comply with criticisms by members of the masses was a standard element of creation during this period. We may safely assume that the three artists who made prints in our exhibition depicting Mao Zedong and dating from the Cultural Revolution went through a process of creation much the same as Liu Junhua's. All would have known Mao's writing as well as the history of the Communist struggle for revolution. They would have studied many photographs of Mao and observed the way other artists had depicted him, noting the qualities that had been commended by reviewers. (As noted above, in both Song Enhou's Socialism ls Good (cat. 105) and Cha Shiming's A Hard Mission (cat. 110), the artists have adopted the period style and given Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai the requisite ruddy skin hue.)Artists chose different aspects of the Chairman's public personality to dramatize different messages. In Socialism Is Good, 1975 (cat. 105), Song Enhou, an artist of worker origins, places Mao among workers at a refinery and depicts him wearing a hardhat, as they do, to signify his identification with them. Mao is at the forefront of the revolution and is portrayed, literally, to the fore, up close to the picture plane. The solidity of the delineation of the foreground group is in sharp contrast to the masses, the banners, and the faint, grey industrial installations that rise, like visions, out of the mist in the background. Bathed in white light, the Chairman raises his arm and, although it is not clear whom he is addressing, the message is clear: the Party, led by its chairman, has mobilized the masses to bring industry to the nation. The new society is materializing before their&emdash;and our eyes. Xu Kuang's Cordial Love, 1976 (cat. 94), portrays the Chairman as mentor to the nation's youth, an idea basic to the Cultural Revolution. The title, Cordial Love which in Chinese implies instruction from a loving parent, occurred frequently on period art. To give the message of the print universality, Xu Kuang eliminates all background detail: Mao's meeting with student Red Guards could be taking place anywhere in China, with any of China's youth. The idea of Mao's personal concern for his listeners' well-being is conveyed by the sense of intimacy that results from the students sitting in such close proximity to him (although the white area surrounding Mao accents his uniqueness). We, the viewers, share in the group's intimacy because the figures are so close to the picture plane that we feel almost as if we are coparticipants. The centrality of Mao Zedong Thought to revolutionary purpose is conveyed by the little red book prominently displayed, and by the act of recording Mao's cordial instructions with pen and paper. We may note, also, that Xu Kuang is a consummate technician and in this print, with so important a subject at its center, the faces are all executed smoothly, and folds in the garments have little of the jagged quality found in the art of worker-artists or professionals copying the worker-artist style.The theme of Cha Shiming's A Hard Mission, 1977 (cat. 110), is quite different from either of the foregoing works. Here Mao is the commander who supports his officers in the field. By taking its location as Yan'an, a popular setting in Cultural Revolution art, the print points up how veteran was Zhou Enlai's participation in the long struggle that led to the revolution's triumph. The

incident depicted (Zhou's departure for Chongqing, where he will be envoy of the Eighth Route Army to the Guomindang headquarters) took place in the l930s, when the base area was first being consolidated. The design focuses on Zhou Enlai by placing him at the center of a group and near the center of the picture area, slightly forward from Mao Zedong who, we understand, wishes him well in his venture. Because only Zhou is without a hat, we see and identify his well-known face immediately. The print was executed after the fall of Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four, when such emphasis on Zhou Enlai's importance to the revolution ~sas possible. Stylistically also, Cha Shiming steps back from the Jiang Qing era in art: the main figures are farther from the picture plane than the group of onlookers and take up a smaller part of the picture area. But remnants of the ~'model opera style" remain. although it is clearly nighttime, the figures are as if spotlighted, and their skin has a ruddy hue.

Symbolic representations of Mao Zedong

Even when his likeness is not portrayed, Mao Zedong is represented symbolically in the majority of prints from the Cultural Revolution period and its immediate aftermath. For example, the little red book, or some other compilation of Mao's writings, appears in Cai Dian's undated The Revolutionary Generation Is Like a Swelling Tide (cat.108); Fu lin's Mao Zedong's Thought Is Our Life Blood, no date but probably early 1970s (cat. 102); Cha Shiming's Full of Youthful Spirit, 1976 (cat. 109); Li Huanmin's The People Are Changed, 1979 (cat. 87); Xu Kuang's Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored, 1974 (cat. 92), and Cordial Love, 1976 (cat. 94); Song Enhou's Untitled, circa 1972 (cat.104); and Zhang Huaijiang's Pillar, 1981 (cat.59). Banners with slogans particularly associated with Mao Zedong appear in crowd scenes such as those in Wang Qi's Launching Celebration. 1976 (cat.32), and Li Yingjin et al's Fighting the Ba Mountain, 1976 (cat.101), among others. Brilliant light and the rising sun, as we have noted, symbolize the Chairman, as did Yan'an, the city that was headquarters for the struggle that brought about the revolution.

Yan'an as a setting for figurative art

Because Yan'an had been the location for so many historical developments, the wide range of associations that accrued to the city could be used to convey a variety of political messages. Yan'an, used as a backdrop to Cha Shiming's A Hard Mission, 1977 (cat. 110), recalls the long-standing and loyal nature of Zhou Enlai's cooperation with Mao Zedong. In Lin Jun's Rely on Our Hands for the Hard Struggle, 1976 (cat.85), the soldier-cobblers and soldier-builders are located in Yan'an to remind us that the struggle for self-sufficiency began there and provided a model for the country's current needs. This theme became increasingly important during the Cultural Revolution because, during this period, China was taking her place on the world stage, and self-sufficiency is a measure of a nation's strength. Lu Xun as the Marxist who rejects bureaucratic deviation from the true path*Lu Xun continues to be a favorite subject for printmakers even today.59 A complex man, Lu's life and opinions leant themselves to different interpretations in different times and circumstances. As part of his efforts to introduce Western ideas and aesthetics into China, he had translated important Soviet aesthetic treatises as well as a considerable amount of Soviet literature. He had also organized an exhibition of Soviet prints, so that Chinese printmakers could use them as inspiration for their own creations. Of special importance, Lu had founded, in l930, the League of Left-Wing Writers, whose membership included many Communists. He could thus be held up as a model of the pure Marxist. But Lu had had a bitter conflict with the Party bureaucrat *Zhou Yang, with whom he had been working, because the latter dissolved the League without consulting Lu and created an alternative organization. When Zhou later became one of the first high level bureaucratic targets of the Cultural Revolution to lose his position, Lu Xun became, posthumously, a symbol of the brave hero, the true Marxist who resists bureaucratic deviationists. In Li Yitai's print Marxism is the Most Lucid and Lively Philosphy, 1974 (cat. 72), the portrait of Marx on the book facing the writer emphasizes the pure Marxist origins of Lu Xun's thought. The artist also manages an allusion to Luts patronage of the central European social protest style by adding, on the wall behind the writer, a schematic rendering of a print from Kaethe Kollwitz's series called The Peasants' War&emdash;a symbol of mass revolt. In keeping with his message, Li chooses a Soviet print style for his portait. (This print is currently featured on the Internet with the unpolitical title Lu Xun.)

Feminism and Political Campaigns

Feminism had been a motif of art since Yan'an days, when elevating the status of females had already been a main Party objective. Because it was of special interest to Jiang Qing, however, feminism received particular emphasis throughout the Cultural Revolution. Like all propaganda campaigns, the feminist campaign was announced by slogans in all media, and its interpretation was made clear at political meetings, at which attendance was obligatory for peasant, worker, soldier and artist. From the decade of the Cultural Revoution, there is scarcely a print with figurative subjects that does not feature females.

They are shown in the most responsible of jobs, in Li Huasheng's Ten-Thousand Mile Voyage, 1975 (cat. 99), and as fearless defenders of the country, in Xu Kuang's Epic of the Grasslands, 1975 (cat. 93); as political leaders, in Xu Kuang's Cordial Love, 1976 (cat. 94) and Cai Dian's undated The Revolutionary Generation Is Like a Swelling Tide (cat. 108); as educated, in Li Huanmin's The People Are Changed, 1979 (cat. 87); and as happy participants in the movement to rusticate city youth to the communes, in Ah Ge's Yizu People Happily Welcome New Commune Members to Their Village, 1976 (cat. 97).

From interviews with the artist Li Huasheng, Jerome Silbergeld gives us a glimpse of how the genesis of a particular print, Ten-Thousand Mile Voyage 1975 (cat. 99), was influenced by the feminist campaign: "One of the leaders at a political meeting [Li] attended happened to say, 'Now women can even operate a ship,'and some of the other leaders ... suggested that artists should create more female figures in their work."60 Li then set about creating the print Ten-Thousand Mile Voyage. He used his wife as a model, but his superiors at the Yangzi Shipping Company found her insulficiently sturdy and complained that "workers, peasants, and soldiers should appear more robust" (p. 48). Li according]y reworked the image. In his analysis of the work, Silbergeld notes how the meticulous detail (done to socialist realist standards) lends an air of reality to the print. He then comments on its symbolism: "Metaphorically, the 'ten thousand mi]e voyaget of the title refers to the progressive course of Chinese socialism; the female navigator with her binoculars represents farsighted leadership; and the radiant sun&emdash;rising, of course&emdash;indicates the bright light of Chairman Mao's ideological wisdom" (p. 48). We might add that the robust characterization of the female ship commander also suggests the strength and health of the nation's people. The technique by which the artist depicts passengers through a transparent window pane also has political significance. A clever technical innovation, it is Li's way of expressing commitment to the Cultural Revolution campaign to advance scientific innovation, not so easily demonstrated in art.61 (The "scene beyond a window" also appears in Qijia Dawa's The Gratefulness of the Liberated Serfs, 1975 [cat. 100] and seems to have been one of the answers by artists, at least in Sichuan, to the period requirement.) Accustomed to "reading" a print for its messages, the Chinese viewer would have taken note of all of these meanings.

Peasants and Ethnic Minorities as the Subjects of Prints

China's peasantry is perhaps the most frequent subject of Cultural Revolution prints. (Many of the peasants portrayed are females, enabling the artist also to promote feminism.) Artists lived in close proximity with peasants for years because, by 1968, almost all had been sent to communes to have their ideological perceptions reformed through manual labor. Although the unfamiliar conditions and laborious work in the communes were very difficult for them (including the fact that most were not permitted to create art), many rusticated artists related in later reminiscences that they also developed strong attachments to the places to which they were sent and the people with whom they lived, and did indeed gain insight into the lives of those who grew their food.62 The purpose of manual labor during the Cultural Revolution was to eliminate class differences, but the experience of living with the peasantry for an extended period also affected the art of professionals. Portraits of the peasantry from the l 970s and 1980s, when these artists could again create art, have a strong sense of presence, grounded in the kind of detail that comes from close personal knowledge. Depictions of clothing, artifacts, and the physical structures found in villages are done with empathy, accuracy, and respect.The peasants from Sichuan's ethnic minorities had been the particular subjects of a number of artists from that province even before the Cultural Revolution.

The Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts also had a special department for training

artists from the minorities who, quite naturally, specialized in portraying their own people. Sichuan printmakers created outstanding depictions of these distinctive ethnic peasant milieus. Xu Kuang's representation of the clothing of a group of Yizu people in Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored, 1974 (cat. 92), is full of rich, accurate detail; his mastery of technique makes the clothing appear to have a solidity that invites our hands to reach out and touch it. The staged effects of the print detract, perhaps, from a Western viewer's empathy with the participants in a way that the same artist's collaborative work with Ah Ge, The Master, 1978 (cat.95), does not. Shown with his pick, a Tibetan peasant stares out at us, proud to pose for friends, tool in hand. Something of the theatrical still resides in the light pouring down from above, but the picture nevertheless has the character of an intimate portrait. For a Chinese viewer at the time, the clarity and nature of the message in Don't Let the Serf System Be Restored may have made it an even more interesting picture. On the wall behind the speaker is a slogan admonishing the people to fight Lin Biao and Confucius. Like Confucius, Lin Biao was already dead, therefore the intended struggle, well understood by the print's viewers, was against the ideas for which, according to the Party, these men stood. The picture's message is that, since such ideas had brought people into serfdom, any attempt to revive them must be resisted.There is no background in The Master or in Li Huanmin's The People Are Changed, 1979 (cat. 87). Both prints follow the classical Chinese format that places a figure against a blank ground: our attention is thus concentrated on the subject, without distractions. In The People Are Changed, the Tibetan ethnic origins of man and child are evident from details of their hair styles, their adornments, and the clothing of the man&emdash;shirt opened and fur-lined garment dropped from the shoulder. The child's easy relationship with her male elder is clear. The man's blindness and the girl's literacy suggest that the young (female) generation is enabling its elders to "see" a new way of life. Both this print and The Master bring the subjects almost up to the picture plane, increasing our sense of intimacy with them. In Li Huanmin's print, however, the girl's absorption in reading her boolc and the man's blindness make them unaware of our presence, thus removing all barriers to our approach. Both Ah Ge and Qijia Dawa come from peasant minority ethnic groups and excel in conveying the ethnic particularities of their peoples. In the Tibetan artist Qijia Dawa's print The Gratefulness of the Liberated Serfs, 1975 (cat. 100), a ceremony is about to take place, and rich, realistic detail lays out before our eyes the objects which will play a part. The title specifies the reason for the ceremony: the peasants are about to pay homage to *Mao Zedong (represented by the stacked books) and to Communism (symbolized by the scythes as well as the red banners beyond the window) for freeing them from serfdom. The picture does not aim at a photographic quality, however. Specific and typical objects have been chosen (and arranged by the a