In 1962, Mao advocated the Socialist Education
Movement (SEM), in an attempt to 'inoculate' the peasantry against the
temptations of feudalism and the sprouts of capitalism that he saw
re-emerging in the countryside. Large doses of didactic politicized
art, whether figurative or literary, were produced as serum for this
inoculation process. The Party organization saw the initiatives
proposed by Mao and his even more radical followers as interfering with
its successful program of economic rehabilitation that had started
after the Great Leap Forward.
Given the scope of the problems, the Party preferred more technocratic
solutions and was averse to Mao's millennial visions. There are no
indications that open opposition to Mao actually existed, although the
Chairman believed there was. He was truly convinced that the more
moderate leaders were trying to steal his place in history by
subverting the nature of the revolution he had fought for. In order to
reclaim his rightful place at the apex of power and to oust those he
perceived as revisionists, Mao turned towards the People's Liberation Army, the only organization he still deemed ideologically correct.
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Mao already had appeared prominently on propaganda
posters as far back as the 1940s, despite his ambiguous warnings
against a personality cult. The intensity of his portrayal in the
second half of the 1960s, however, was unparalleled. Under Lin Biao,
the PLA increasingly was employed to bolster the personality cult
around Mao, and thus to produce art that would contribute to the
construction of Mao's god-like image. All this took place with Mao's
consent. Already before the compilation of the Quotations from Chairman Mao (Mao zhuxi yulu 毛主席语录, the 'Little Red Book', published in May 1964) for use by the armed forces, the PLA had been turned into "a great school of Mao Zedong Thought". The army became the driving force behind the campaign to study Mao's Quotations.
A study session with the Quotations "...
supplied the breath of life to soldiers gasping in the thin air of the
Tibetan plateau; enabled workers to raise the sinking city of Shanghai
three-quarters of an inch; inspired a million people to subdue a tidal
wave in 1969, inaccurate meteorologists to forecast weather correctly,
a group of housewives to re-invent shoe polish, surgeons to sew back
severed fingers and remove a ninety-nine pound tumor as big as a
football."
The PLA also supplied most of the behavioural models that embodied the "spirit of a screw" (luosiding jingshen
螺丝钉精神) by blindly following the instructions from the Party and/or
superiors and attachment to the larger group. The best known of these
were model soldiers as Lei Feng, Wang Jie, Dong Cunrui, and Ouyang Hai.
Logically, the Army became responsible for art. This
art should unite and educate the people, inspire the struggle of
revolutionary people and eliminate the bourgeoisie. Art had to be
guided by Mao Zedong Thought,
its contents had to be militant and to reflect real life. Proletarian
ideology, communist morale and spirit, revolutionary heroism were the
messages of a new type of hyper-realism that took precedence over style
and technique and that differed in all aspects from art creation until
then. In the PLA paintings of the time, the color red featured heavily;
it symbolized everything revolutionary, everything good and moral; the
color black, on the other hand, signified precisely the opposite. Color
symbolism continued to be important in the following years, not only in
visual propaganda, but in printed propaganda as well.
Mao's wife Jiang Qing supported the artistic direction set by the PLA. The conceptual dogmas and theatrical conventions provided by the model operas (yangbanxi
样板戏) that she supported also became the standard in the visual arts.
For the stage, she formulated the 'three prominences' (三突出，stress
positive characters; stress the heroic in them; stress the central
character of the main characters). In the arts, this was translated as:
the subjects were to be portrayed realistically, and they were always
to be in the centre of the action, flooded with light from the sun or
from hidden sources. Moreover, when we look at the propaganda posters
of these years, it always seems as if we, the spectators, are looking
upward, as if the action is indeed taking place upon a stage.
The subjects were represented hyper-realistically,
as ageless, larger-than-life peasants, soldiers, workers and educated
youth in dynamic poses. Their strong and healthy bodies functioned as
metaphors for the strong and healthy productive classes the State
wanted to propagate. In line with the egalitarian character of the
Maoist culture of the body, the gender distinctions of the subjects
were by and large erased—something that was also attempted in
real life. Men and women alike had stereotypical, "masculinized"
bodies; they were dressed in cadre grey, army green or worker/peasant
blue; their hands and feet often were absurdly big in relation to the
rest of their bodies; and their faces, including short-cropped hairdos
and chopped-off pigtails, were done according to a limited standard
repertoire of acceptable examples. Even in the many propaganda posters
that featured Mao, the Chairman was subjected to these stylistic
dictates. As a result, he appeared as a muscular super-person.
As the Great Teacher, the Great Leader, the Great
Helmsman, the Supreme Commander, Mao came to dominate the propaganda
art of the first half of the Cultural Revolution. His image was
considered more important than the occasion for which a particular work
of propaganda art was designed: in a number of cases, identical posters
dedicated to Mao were published in different years bearing different
slogans, i.e., serving different propaganda causes.
Mao could be depicted as a benevolent father,
bringing the Confucian mechanisms of popular obedience into play. Or he
was portrayed as a wise statesman, an astute military leader or a great
teacher; to this end, artists represented him in the vein of the
statues of Lenin, which had started to appear in the early 1920s in the
Soviet Union. Another group of posters visually recounted the more
illustrious of his historical deeds.
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s.r.landsberger@let.leidenuniv.nl
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International Institute of Social History