标题: 1959.12 共产党领导下的艺术 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-7-23 00:16 标题: 1959.12 共产党领导下的艺术 Art Under the Communists
DECEMBER 1959 ISSUE
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THE art created under and approved by the Communist regime in China resembles the traditional art of the country about as much as a tractor resembles an early bronze, but it would be unjust to attribute the contrast entirely to socialist realism and the doctrine that art must appeal to the masses. Chinese art was, at the time of the Communist accession to power, in a curiously unsettled condition.
The indeterminate character of Chinese art in the twentieth century resulted from the breakdown of a very old tradition. The strong, elegantly monumental work of the Han period (218 B.C. to 206 A.D.), with its predilection for human and animal figures, had been succeeded by a linear style with much emphasis on landscape. This style was supported to some extent by Chinese aesthetic theory, which held painting and calligraphy to be equal arts deriving from the same source and devoted to the same end: the expression of meaning through pictures. It was quite natural that painting, viewed as a more realistic form of picture writing, should retain the elements of calligraphic technique. Structure was created by brushwork in ink, and color was confined to washes. Once established, this style of painting proved capable of such great variety and expressiveness that it remained dominant for fifteen hundred years.
An early Chinese painting was intended to be an elaborate calligraphic symbol conveying an intellectual, philosophical, or religious meaning. Painters were members of the intellectual elite and enjoyed the respect and freedom granted that class. Their work was done for an audience of their own kind.
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As early as the fifth century, one Hsieh Ho formulated six principles of painting which became the foundation of all subsequent aesthetic discussion and practice. His writings are translated in various terms by scholars, but it seems to be generally agreed that his first law enjoins the artist to render the true, inner meaning of a subject rather than the superficial appearance, while the last recommends the study and copying of older masters. The other four rules are practical admonitions on the importance of brushwork, color, composition, and accurate drawing. Acres of paper and seas of ink were lavished on the interpretation of Hsieh Ho’s succinct principles, but he remained on the whole as firmly entrenched in Chinese criticism as Aristotle in medieval science.
The Chinese painter, seeking to capture the inner life and meaning of his subject, evolved a technique in which volume was defined by line and distance by the suppression of detail. Since surface realism was not the aim, a significant part could stand for a whole object. Why paint a mountain when one peak would say “mountain” to any intelligent observer? This technique enabled the great landscape painters of the Sung period (960 to 1280) to translate intellectual concepts directly into pictorial symbols with concentrated power and brilliance. Their successors continued to work in the same spirit, with minor variations due to geographical location and the tastes of the reigning dynasty.
Every artistic style has its limits, however, and by the end of the nineteenth century many young Chinese painters had become dissatisfied with their native tradition. The style that had served so well to express the meaning of Buddhism and Taoism now seemed unsuited to deal with the torrent of new ideas coming into China from the West, and painters seriously feared that their art might degenerate into a mere repetition of old and now meaningless forms. Even before the Revolution of 1911, conscientious attempts were being made to extend the technique and content of Chinese painting, usually by an infusion of European methods. Young painters went to Japan to study Western art — there was an academy for this purpose in Tokyo — and, more sensibly, after the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, to Paris. They discovered perspective, plastic color, oils — a whole arsenal of alien weapons which they carried hopefully back to China.
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By the middle 1920s, academies and studios in the European style existed in most of the larger cities of China, attracting pupils, public interest, and occasional scandalized outcries against life classes from the more conservative citizens. The wide variety of European styles available for borrowing led to a great deal of eclectic experiment among Chinese painters, who nevertheless fell roughly into two groups. In Shanghai, Liu Hai-su, who had studied in Europe after a thorough training in the traditional Chinese school, became the center of a group of painters who seemed determined to try out every vagary of French artistic fashion. In Nanking, Hsü Pei-hung, a very able painter of similar background, dominated a coterie which concentrated on technical proficiency. Thanks to the efforts of these men and others like them, painting in the European manner had become fairly familiar in China by the end of the thirties.
The work of these Chinese modernists was, however, hardly more related to the actual progress of events in China than that of the traditionalists had been. An exhibit of contemporary Chinese painting at the Metropolitan Museum in 1948 included Hsü Pei-hung’s dashing, loosely fluid paintings of horses, and economical, vivid, heavily linear representations of crabs and vegetables by Ch’i Pai-shih, but not a painting that hinted at the turmoil of revolution, invasion, and civil war that had swept over China in the past thirty years.
Alongside the serious and somewhat detached experiments of the Chinese modernists, there developed a school of wood-block artists whose aims were primarily educational. The woodblock movement was one of the innumerable enterprises of the author, educator, agitator, and reformer Lu Hsün. He had observed that the Russian Communists used wood-block prints to convey propaganda and information to the semiliterate masses with considerable success. Wood blocks were relatively simple to make, and reproduction was quick and cheap. By 1930 he had opened a class of instruction in Shanghai.
The wood-block class immediately attracted a number of young artists who wished to use their talent for social and political reform. While not all the students were Communists, the movement was solidly political from the first, dedicated to the improvement of conditions and the enlightenment of the mass of the Chinese people. It was European in style, realistic in approach, proletarian in subject matter, blunt, emotional, and malcontent. It was detested by the authorities of the Kuomintang, and official persecution added to the messianic enthusiasm of the artists.
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The Communist Government of China, then, inherited three kinds of art: painting in the traditional Chinese manner, which was little more than a moribund remnant of its former glory; the modern movement, an experimental compendium of European styles plus some fairly promising attempts to blend European and Chinese techniques; the wood-block movement, which was perhaps nearer to graphic journalism than to art, but which at its best was capable of forceful communication.
THE Communist position on art is surely too well known to require elaboration. Art is the servant of the state — that is to say, the Party — and must convey those ideas which the Party wishes the citizens to accept. Artists who cannot or will not echo Party dogma in their work are induced to take up another trade, such as ditchdigging on a remote frontier. Artists who express orthodox Communist ideas with reasonable enthusiasm are rewarded with prestige and privilege. The question before the Chinese Communist Government was how to make proper political use of the available painters.
The wood-block group, always largely Communist in sympathy, was adopted by the regime with little difficulty. It was only necessary to weed out a few deviates who had drifted into the movement for non-Marxist, humanitarian reasons. The survivors continued to whittle out brisk illustrations of true Communist action, exhortations to street cleaning and prompt attendance at the assembly line, and celebrations of the triumph of workers and peasants. Unfortunately, their work lost, in the warmth of success, much of the nervous strength it had shown in the cold days of adversity. Ornament and needless elaboration crept in, and a general softening of line.
The modernist group presented a more complicated problem. Obviously, such bourgeois diversions as impressionism and personal whimsey had to go, but there was some danger that every competent painter in China would go with them. It would have been rash, for example, to hold his occasional reactionary dalliances against a man like Hsü Pei-hung, whose extraordinary versatility included the ability to turn out vast soap-andwater canvases in the most literal Victorian academy style and, moreover, to teach the trick to others. This sort of thing was exactly what was wanted for official pictures of Mao Tse-tung observing a new dam with his retinue at his heels and a group of beaming workers in the background. It also did nicely for posters. Hsü was appointed director of the National Academy of Peking and held the post until his death in 1953. His house and paintings have since been presented to the state by his widow, possibly under official pressure, and are preserved as a museum. Ch’i Pai-shih, who died in 1957 at the age of 94, was permitted to continue unmolested with his highly individual and hopelessly nonpolitical paintings of mice, birds, and plants; he had started life as a carpenter, and this respectably proletarian origin probably served him well. Some less tractable painters left the country, and others continue to do so. Chang Ta-ch’ien, a respected artist and connoisseur of painting, only recently departed to South America.
Although the Communist authorities made occasional allowances for old, established painters, the younger generation is being firmly trained in socialist realism. In September of 1950, the China Weekly Review reported on the result of five weeks of work by the faculty and students of the National College of Fine Arts in Hangchow, who had been sent on a field trip to paint factories and farms. The paintings they produced were exhibited and judged on “their artistic merit and their reflection of the actual life of the people in the new China.” The winning entries carried such titles as Analysis of Class Status by Nyetai, Spies in the Temple by Yu Ying-ch’uan, and Dancing on the Way to Night School by Chang Yang-i. No reactionary doubts or capitalist pessimism disfigures any of these canvases.
Sculpture, an art never as much practiced in China as in the West, has been specifically encouraged by the Communist Government, which considers patriotic monuments indispensable.
While contemporary painting and sculpture have been faced squarely toward Moscow by the Chinese authorities, interest in Chinese archaeology has been encouraged and practical measures taken to preserve and display what the Government describes as a treasure of the Chinese people. A real effort is being made to maintain the pride of the Chinese in their great artistic past and also to impress other nations with China’s attainments. As it happens, a great deal of material of historical interest has come to light through the Communist program of public works, for the digging involved in making highways, dams, and railroads has incidentally turned up many items of beauty and archaeological importance. These finds have been sorted and housed with such enthusiasm that the monthly report published by the Department of Cultural Affairs claimed, in November of 1958, that China is now the third country in the world in the number of its museums.
Activities at the caves of Tun-huang are another example of the interest in traditional art displayed by the Communist Government. Tunhuang is an oasis near the western border of China Proper, on the old silk route into Central Asia. Near it there was created, following the penetration of Buddhism into China, an agglomeration of cave temples containing religious statues and elaborately painted walls. The place was never entirely abandoned, but it was much neglected, and in the early years of this century, English, French, and Japanese explorers, getting wind of a cache of scrolls and manuscripts at Tun-huang, carried away everything portable. There was no opposition from the Chinese authorities at the time, for there was no official interest in the place, but the present Government testily refers to those particular visitors as bandits and imperialist robbers.
The Communists are making a considerable effort to protect, discreetly restore, and publicize what remains at Tun-huang.
They did not actually initiate official interest in Tun-huang. In 1942, when the place was still ten or fifteen days’ travel from Peking by any transport available, the Kuomintang established the Tun-huang Research Institute, now the Art Research Institute of Tun-huang, with a crew of fifty copying the paintings. Colored copies of figures from the Tun-huang murals have been exhibited in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Japan.
All in all, the Chinese Communists must be credited with making shrewd use of most of the artists at their disposal, with improving the status of sculpture, and with a conscientious effort to preserve the great artistic heritage of their country.
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到20世纪20年代中期，中国大多数大城市都有欧洲风格的学院和工作室，吸引了学生和公众的兴趣，偶尔也会有比较保守的市民对生活班发出丑闻。多种多样的欧洲风格可供借鉴，导致中国画家进行了大量的折衷性试验，但他们大致分为两类。在上海，刘海粟在接受了传统中国学校的全面培训后，又到欧洲学习，成为一群画家的中心，他们似乎决心尝试法国艺术时尚的各种变化。在南京，具有类似背景的非常能干的画家徐悲鸿主导了一个专注于技术能力的小圈子。由于这些人和其他像他们一样的人的努力，到三十年代末，欧洲方式的绘画在中国已经相当熟悉。