A 1970s Chinese Communist Socialist-Realist pencil study of a nude male, dated 1972

Description

A muscular back is presented to us by a seated Chinese male art class model who has closely cropped hair. He is wearing shorts and rests on his left arm, and gestures at something unseen with his right arm. Focusing on the muscles of an arm and back, this study was probably executed during a life study class at an art school. It is signed and dated for 1972 in Chinese characters near the bottom left corner.

Paper 38.6cm high, 27.1cm wide.

Art in Revolutionary China
As early as 1942, Chairman Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks on Literature and Art’ ordered that arts were to “serve the people” and, for at least the next four decades, the Chinese Communist Party and Maoist ideology totally controlled the arts. As such, art had to educate the population and celebrate and illustrate the ideals of Communism. Art became almost entirely figural and idealised, showing happy, healthy and industrious workers and soldiers going about their work, crowds enthusiastically supporting Mao, and bountiful crops and industries. All were idealised illustrations of the wealth and successes of Communist China, and ‘enforced’ celebrations of the emancipation of the proletariat.
Not only did this art differ greatly from what was produced in Imperial China for centuries in terms of theme, but it also differed in terms of style. This change of direction required education and re-education, and many art students and established artists were sent to the Soviet Union, or Eastern Bloc countries, to learn how to draw in a Soviet-Realist manner. Some Soviet artists were also brought to China to train artists in the ‘new’ style at educational institutions. Even after relations between China and the Soviet Union cooled in the late 1950s, and the death of Mao in 1976, the style continued to be the only way forward for a comfortable life as an artist. The period also saw a boom in the production of colourful, stylised posters in this new style, which were an affordable way of displaying and disseminating the art and its message across the country. This original drawing from the 1960s or ‘70s is part of that movement in the history of art - a fascinating, powerful and visual snapshot of the time.

Condition
As photographed. Some rubbing from other drawings, probably from being stored in a portfolio, glued onto a mountboard at the top corners.

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