China's other cultural revolution: history and Chinese art

Art in America, Sept, 1998 by Charles Ruas, Richard Vine

Strikingly contemporary in effect is Pan Tianshou's 1948 painting of a black chicken perched on a boulder, with its shorthand notation juxtaposing the black bulk of the rock a form that fills the work's foreground, against the intense opacity in the dominant mass of the ragged black chicken. The classical painting of the Shanghai School artists merged foreign and Chinese elements to create a synthesis. They developed significant innovations while retaining the stylistic coherence of traditional methods and subjects.

The second part of the exhibition, "The Modernist Generation, 1920-1950," overlaps in time with the first section. It focuses on Chinese artists working with oil paint and other Western means. During the years covered in this section, most Chinese leaders and government officials, as well as many artists, were educated abroad. The selection includes a number of works that were known to exist but had not been seen since the end of World War II. It is surprising that these modernist pieces, flaunting European influence, survived the Communist purges as well as the Cultural Revolution. They introduce a completely new range of color and style into Chinese art. The influence is directly from the School of Paris, and also from Japan. A cool intimiste light is seen in Xu Beihong's Sound of the Flute (1925).; Guan Zilan furnishes a wonderful Chinese version of van Dongen in the 1929 Portrait of Miss L., who appears with rouged cheeks and bobbed hair. The fluid range of Western stylistic influences moves from Matisse and Miro to Chagall and Leger, also introducing modern subjects such as circus acrobats and athletes. Within a Chinese context, it all seems daring and innovative; from a Western viewpoint, some pieces may appear derivative. For me the most affecting work was a 1940 oil sketch titled The Trumpet Call of July 7, done by Tang Yihe, who perished during World War II; the picture shows a line of young male and female college students, in all their idio-syncratic diversity, marching off to the patriotic call of their country in time of war. It is apparent in the closely observed depictions of these young Chinese that they lived in a completely, Western environment. Judging from their stances and dress, and allowing for national differences, they are clearly part of the larger world.

This section also includes a survey of woodcuts, in effect a show within a show, these prints merit close attention. They come from the collection of Lu Xun (1881-1936), China's greatest 20th-century writer and social reformer, who collected woodcuts from Europe and Japan, and in turn asked his artist colleagues in Shanghai to create works about conditions in China. The images shown, mostly from the '30s and '40s, are moving in their expressiveness and political commentary, reminiscent of WPA graphics and of works made in France and Germany after World War I. Their create join contemporaries all over the world in a 20th-century outcry against barbarism, coupled with a demand for social justice. Lu had seen enough of Mao's attitude towards the peasant class to tell him bluntly, "You treat them like dirt." After he died, his name, contrary to his wishes, was co-opted by the Communist at the beginning of World War II and soon canonized. A personality cult resulted -- to which we owe this collection of woodcuts from the Lu Xun Memorial Museum in Shanghai.