The Studios

A brief relaxation of pressure on artists in the spring and summer of 1959 led to experiments in decentralizing instruction at some art academies. In Beijing and Hangzhou, the color-and-ink painting department had been renamed the Chinese painting department in 1958 as part of the Anti-Rightist campaign and reorganized by genre, with students specializing in landscape, bird-and-flower, or figure painting, along traditional lines.^[57] The oil painting and print-making departments were later divided into separate studios that would teach slightly different styles.^[58] The presumed goal was to contribute to the Hundred Flowers policy by increasing artistic variety and by diminishing the stranglehold of Soviet art on the academy's curriculum. Ai Zhongxin claims credit for the idea; the first studio at CAFA was named for the academy's director, Wu Zuoren, whom Ai assisted in administering it. Both men were disciples of the European-trained Xu Beihong.

Whatever its political justification may have been at the time, the studio system was hardly a new idea. Many Chinese artists who studied in France learned painting at privately run studios. The national academy in Hangzhou, which had a strong French tradition, had been organized by studios as early as the late 1940s. Moreover, Chinese artists who failed to obtain teaching posts before 1949 often survived by running instructional studios at home. Enterprising students, even those enrolled in the art academies, might explore different approaches by taking lessons at such private studios. Several private studios continued to operate in Shanghai during the 1950s and 1960s, led by artists who were technically very skilled but unemployable for political reasons. The most prestigious of these was the Zhang Chongren Studio, taught by a Catholic sculptor who had been trained in Belgium. Ha Ding, one of Zhang Chongren's students, taught Renaissance-style drawing and British-style

watercolors at his less expensive studio.^[59] The Repin Art Academy in Leningrad, where Chinese students studied in the 1950s and early 1960s, was also organized by the studio system.^[60] Apparently the French academic and Soviet systems were similar enough to satisfy both Communist and non-Communist realists.

The Soviet practice of referring to studios by the names of their directors was soon recognized as an ideological error in Communist China. Consequently, the CAFA oil painting studios changed to a numbering system. Studio One, the former Wu Zuoren Studio, was taught primarily by Ai Zhongxin, with the assistance of Xu Beihong students Wei Qimei and Feng Fasi. Its mission was to teach European styles of oil painting, by which was meant premodernist styles. Studio Two, headed by Luo Gongliu, was taught by enthusiasts of Soviet and Russian art.^[61] When Luo became involved with other administrative duties, his Soviet-trained assistants, Li Tianxiang and Lin Gang, carried on.

As we have mentioned, the failures of the Great Leap Forward led to a nationwide reevaluation of administrative practices in 1961.^[62] Investigation of educational policies led to the drafting of Sixty Regulations Governing Work in Institutes of Higher Education, commonly referred to as the Sixty Articles on Universities. Deng Xiaoping asked that the draft include a provision that rightist teachers could return to educational roles. Documents concerning high schools and primary schools soon followed, thus ending the half-work, half-study system of the Great Leap Forward. The documents stressed adjustment, consolidation, augmentation, and improvement (tiaozbeng, gonggu, chongshi, tigao ), an approach usually abbreviated in China as the Eight Character Directive. Party supervision of academic activity was to be minimized. Lu Dingyi called for a staffing system in universities that would yield one-third proletarian intellectuals, one-third left bourgeois, and one-third neutral bourgeois.

CAFA began to reemerge from its obscurity in this new atmosphere. Oil Painting Studio Three, headed by Dong Xiwen and Japan-educated Xu Xingzhi,^[63] was founded in 1962,^[64] the same year that some rightists were allowed to resume high-profile educational positions. Although Dong, like Wu Zuoren, had been protected during the 1957 Anti-Rightist campaign, he was criticized in 1959, probably because he was believed by students to value art over politics. Dong Xiwen sought to imbue the Western medium of oils with a Chinese aesthetic so as to produce "national-style" oil paintings. His work, like that of his students, was based on study of both Chinese and European art, with faint echoes of prohibited early modern styles.

The CAFA goal of attaining variety through the studio system was hindered by both high-level politics and practical administrative concerns. Dong's studio was in formal operation less than two years before the system was eliminated, targeted by the cultural crackdowns leading to the Cultural Revolution. None of the studios survived long enough to develop an artistic tradition of its

own. Moreover, the younger faculty in each studio, who did much of the teaching, had themselves been trained in a uniform Soviet manner. Maksimov pupils Jin Shangyi and Zhan Jianjun worked in Studios One and Three, respectively; Soviet-trained Lin Gang and Li Tianxiang assisted Luo Gongliu in Studio Two. Drawing fundamentals remained grounded in the Soviet-inspired Chistiakov system; hence, students assigned to studios in their second or third years were already steeped in principles of Russian art.

The print department was divided in 1961 into four studios similar to those of the oil painters, with Li Hua, Gu Yuan, Huang Yongyu, and Wang Qi the head instructors.^[65] One former student characterized the differences between the print studios on the basis of political outlook more than artistic style. Li Hua, who had worked in Chongqing during the war under Guo Moruo and Zhou Enlai, is remembered best for the rigor of his teaching methods. He required students to master a standard set of knife strokes before they could carve their first picture, much as a traditional guohua teacher might require students to copy ink strokes endlessly before allowing them to paint a landscape.^[66] He was a devoted disciple of Lu Xun and held his students to a canon of styles approved by the master. Gu Yuan, a veteran of the Yan'an print movement, was considered the most "revolutionary." Most of his students were party members. Wang Qi was interested in Soviet prints but diligently supported the party line.

Huang Yongyu, who attracted unfavorable publicity by refusing to join the party, was a particularly lively teacher who, like Dong Xiwen, was believed to value art over politics. His only requirements were that students love China and study hard, though he rejected potential students whose sole talent might be spying for the CCP.^[67] Huang's official art, as exemplified by his New Sound in the Forest (fig. 69), tends to be sweet and optimistic. His more personal pictures, most notably his cartoons, are satirical, however, and were more welcome in Hong Kong than in Beijing.

Changes in guohua instruction between 1958 and 1963 were probably the greatest of any medium. Jiang Zhaohe taught drawing in charcoal and ink wash; Ye Qianyu and Li Hu taught outline drawing from life with a Chinese brush. While the deemphasis on academic pencil drawing and on rendering three-dimensional forms was an important shift, its effects were not immediately noticeable. The most competent students in the 1958 entering class were the CAFA middle school graduates. Yet because they had already received four years of training by the Chistiakov method, they were slow to adapt to different techniques. Zhou Sicong, one of the most talented CAFA middle school graduates to enroll, recalls that she saw objects as volumes rather than as linear forms when she entered college and had to work very hard to master outline ink sketching.^[68] In 1961, the Chinese painting department was formally divided into specialties that functioned as studios. Ye

Image not available

Figure 69
Huang Yongyu, New Sound in the
Forest, 1954, polychromatic woodblock
print, 36.8 cm × 25.2 cm, Chinese
National Art Gallery.

Qianyu and Jiang Zhaohe directed figure painting instruction. The landscape painting specialty was headed by Li Keran and Zong Qixiang. The bird-and-flower specialty was taught by Guo Weiqu, Tian Shiguang, and Li Kuchan.

A former student recalls Li Kuchan's group as the daxieyi (large idea writing) studio.^[69] Assigning Li Kuchan to teach was intended to correct "errors" of the previous administration by reviving a style and subject that had suffered

neglect since 1949. Li's position was somewhat special. In 1949, he had been retained as a professor at the National Beiping Art Academy, but he was not on regular salary and was assigned to decorate pots in the ceramics department. One summer night in 1950, after consuming a copious amount of liquor, he dashed off a long calligraphic complaint to Mao Zedong. The epistle, written in the "crazy-cursive" script of the Tang-dynasty monk Huaisu, took up most of a large sheet of Chinese painting paper (about one by ten feet, according to his biographer) and must have been impressive to the calligraphy enthusiast Mao Zedong. Within a month, Mao had written to Xu Beihong asking him to solve Li's employment problem. Li was subsequently assigned to the National Art Research Center and paid a steady salary.^[70] This may have solved his economic difficulties, but the research center was segregated from the teaching staff. It was not until the conclusion of the Great Leap Forward that Li emerged as a teacher of traditional painting and his freely brushed pictures rose in official status.

Most exhilarating for young artists in 1962 was the burgeoning of unofficial student-organized activity. Students had been extremely enthusiastic about the Great Leap Forward. According to one CAFA graduate, they had covered every blank wall with mural paintings, built blast furnaces in the school courtyard, and carried baskets full of dirt to help build the Ming Tombs Reservoir as part of their patriotic effort. They believed the propaganda they painted—that grain was piled to the sky and that pigs were as big as elephants. The bubble burst with the onset of rationing in 1960 and real hunger in 1961. Students did not know of starvation in the countryside, but morale was low nevertheless.

In 1962 an academy leader, probably responding to Zhou Enlai's suggestion to improve and broaden the cultural level of cadres, suggested that study groups be established to improve the academic atmosphere. Several good students in the upper classes, including Guang Jun and Yao Zhonghua, were asked to organize informal groups. The students were permitted to study almost anything, including impressionism and abstract art. At night they held informal critiques of one another's work. They conducted drawing classes for students in other specialties and eventually branched out into musical performances and dancing lessons.^[71] Guang Jun's group was so popular and successful that students began referring to it as "Guang Jun's salon."^[72]

Students who entered the CAFA middle school in the early 1960s recall an equally lively atmosphere among high school students.^[73] Their daily schedule involved ten hours of class, organized around a rigorous Soviet curriculum. Drawing, taught according to the finely sharpened pencil method associated with Chistiakov, was extremely strenuous. Despite hunger due to growing food shortages, they spent their Sundays and evenings practicing drawing, taking turns posing for each other.^[74]

Enjoying the freedom and incentives of the studio system, the faculty poured their efforts into teaching and painting. Huang Yongyu, who lived in a courtyard next to his classroom, would hop out his back window to pay late-night visits to the studio, where students worked into the wee hours. One memorable and mildly shocking event was his "no-shirt party," held for his all-male studio on a hot summer evening. Former students describe the very close artistic and personal relationships that developed between professors and the pupils in their studios.^[75] Some recall other practical benefits—teachers, including Huang Yongyu, provided snacks to the hungry adolescents during the three famine years. Largely for reasons that lay outside the academy, however, the short-lived studio system had little impact on the stylistic development of Chinese art.

Ominous signs were to be seen even in the midst of the liberalization. In 1962, Cai Ruohong published a letter he had sent to an unidentified art educator that implicitly advocated strict limits on creative freedom in the classroom. He proposed a list of topics that students should be required to paint. For example, guohua students should depict the teenage martyr "Liu Hulan Delivering Army Shoes," in both the hanging scroll and horizontal format. They were to base the picture on the Biography of Liu Hulan , a text describing the peasant girl's heroic virtues in the face of the enemy, and on their own imaginations. Their goal should be to convey the assistance Liu gave the Eighth Route Army, for which she was executed, by means of the arrangement of shoes.^[76] Even if the CAA leader's proposal was not adopted, it is evidence that the liberalization was narrowly interpreted by some.

Another important event of the period was the second oil painting training class. It was originally planned that a second Soviet expert (identified by one student as Myl'nikov) would begin training Chinese oil painting students in 1960, just as Maksimov had done five years before. When the USSR pulled its personnel out of China just as the class was slated to begin, the Ministry of Culture decided to demonstrate Chinese self-sufficiency by conducting the class without Russian help. As a result Luo Gongliu, an artist trained in Hangzhou, Yan'an, and Leningrad, was appointed to teach the eighteen students. The group, which referred to itself as the "Eighteen Arhats," included many artists from Beijing, such as CAFA painters Zhong Han, who served as secretary, Wen Lipeng, and Du Jian; a cadre from the Creation Studio at the People's Art Press; and an army artist.^[77] Although the students' graduation works, exhibited in 1963, were all history paintings, they were more varied in style than were those of the Maksimov class. This evolution probably had as much to do with developments in Soviet art, which was still the predominant model, as with the Chinese cultural thaw of 1962. In addition, Luo Gongliu himself was quite open-minded about painting styles; as we shall see below, his own work of the period is somewhat experimental. The best-known and most dramatic

Image not available

Figure 70
Du Jian, Advancing Among Swift Currents,
1963, oil on canvas, 220 cm ×
332 cm, formerly Museum of Chinese
Revolutionary History (reported destroyed).

painting of the group was Du Jian's Advancing Among Swift Currents (fig. 70), which no longer survives.^[78]

The encouragement of diverse views within the academy and the bonds that developed between students in studios had an unexpected effect once political circumstances changed. When Communist authorities renewed political attacks on artists in 1964, they found fertile soil for the factional competition that drove their rectification movements. Unfortunately, by 1967 factionalism became bloodshed. CAFA seems to have been better prepared in the 1969s to respond to political swings to the left than to liberalization.