Art in the Era of Mao Zedong

Info gathered/taken from Art and Artists of the Twentieth Century by Michael Sullivan.

1949 -1976 Art in the Era of Mao Zedong

The years during which Mao Zedong exerted total control over cultural life in China were, for creative men and woman, at first a period of commitment and hope, then of uncertainty as the reins were alternately tightened and loosned, and finally of growing despair and frstration culminating in the nigtmare of the Cultural Revolution. Artists were required to "serve the people." The dialetical struggle between tradition and revolution, Chinese and Western art, continued , with Western modernism replaced by Soviet socialist realism.

Mao and the Party controlled what art and literature was allowed and they demanded it had Marxist themes.

Side info: the abstract art movement in the USA was actually a kind of revolt/knock at the art movement going on in Russia at that time from their artists. So important to the USA the C.I.A. was formed to protect the abstract expressionists. They represented America with their expressionistic style reflecting values of freedom, democracy etc.

With the death of Mao Zedong, a new era dawned for Chinese art. So complex had been the Party's control over the minds and hearts of creative people that several years passed before their powers could stir to life again. Not unitl 1979 were all the artists once branded as "Rightists" finally rehabilitated, and that year saw an astonishing outburst of creativity that come to be known as the Peking Spring. During the 1980s. in spite of sharp attacks and periodic persecutions carried out by an increasingly nervous Party apparatus, Chinese art became ever richer, more complex, adventurous, drawing inspiration from China's past, fromthe West, from Japan, and from the arists' own experience. The old debates- past versus present, Chinese vesus western were not resolved, but they were now carried on at a new level of depth and sophisication while the development of new forms and styles was stimulated by the work of Chinese modernists in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Yet the atmosphere of uncertainty, tension and insecurty never cleared away. During the late 1980s many younger artists sought greater freedom abroad, notably in America, where they faced a different challenge - the loss of their identity as Chinese artists.