FAH262H1 Chap.11 Postwar and Cold War Art
Postwar and Cold War Art
A week framed by war and division
Week 11 of FAH262H1 runs from about 1945 to 1976 and treats Japan, the two Chinas and the two Koreas together.
The exam aid sheet supplies the frame: the Cold War from 1947, the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962 and the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Two terms on that sheet, Social Realism and Socialist Realism, are easy to confuse, and this chapter keeps them apart.
The common thread is a political question put to artists after defeat, revolution or dictatorship: should a picture serve the public by depicting the world, or by guarding its own freedom?
Japan and the realism debate of 1946 to 1950
Justin Jesty reconstructs a quarrel among critics and artists that he divides into three camps.
Social realists such as Hayashi Fumio and Nagai Kiyoshi used a Marxist account of history and valued art for the consciousness it awoke in ordinary viewers; Hayashi reversed the usual ranking of two Meiji oil painters, preferring Takahashi Yuichi to Kuroda Seiki.
Hijikata Tei'ichi, the modernist realist, answered that painting's worth lay in facture, the bond between an artist's embodied vision and the worked surface.
Avant-garde realists around Okamoto Taro and Hanada Kiyoteru distrusted skill altogether and courted popular culture. Jesty adds two contexts often left out: the US Occupation's reverse course against the left, and the Soviet cultural campaign led by Andrei Zhdanov.
He argues the debate marks the point where criticism of modern art and criticism of contemporary art began to split.
China and the politics of inscription
Craig Clunas asks what words do on Chinese pictures between the fall of the empire and the death of Mao. In the Republican years, a long inscription could cost a painting its claim to modernity, and artists experimented with signatures in two scripts.
After 1949 the double signature nearly vanished. By the mid-1970s, officially selected New Year pictures packed slogans, banners and documents into the depicted scene, an effect Clunas links to party circulars that prescribed approved wording.
He reads one such picture as masking the trauma of sending educated urban youth to the countryside, and closes with an oil sketch inscribed on its reverse by Zhao Wenliang of the secret No Name Group.
Echoes between the three readings
The readings rarely cite each other, but their arguments rhyme.
Okamoto Taro's provocation that everybody should make paintings anticipates the minjung critic Ch'oe Yol, who described the movement's art as made for, by and of the common people, and a Hongik University student collective painted a large reunification scene in 1989 on that principle.
The charge of art for art's sake also travels: Jesty notes that Hijikata's defence of painting's freedom invited it, and minjung critics aimed it at the monochrome painters. Repetition links China to a foreign witness, since Roland Barthes, touring China in the spring of 1974, complained in his diary about ritual phrases he called bricks, which Clunas uses to explain the slogans in late Maoist pictures.
Treat each parallel as your own comparison, not as a claim any single author makes.
Korea after Kwangju, and Gutai
Charlotte Horlyck's chapter, an optional reference, carries the story into South Korea after the Kwangju Uprising of May 1980. The label minjung art first appeared in 1983, and groups such as Reality and Speech and Turong argued over how art should reach the common people, while critics attacked the monochrome tansaekhwa painters as elitist.
For Japan's other postwar current, the syllabus assigns Yoshihara Jiro's Gutai Manifesto of 1956 for annotation; within the course readings, Chiaki Ajioka quotes its claim that spirit and material reach toward each other without either subduing the other.
What this chapter covers
- 01
The Japanese realism debate, 1946 to 1950
- 02
Social realism, modernist realism and avant-garde realism
- 03
Social Realism versus Socialist Realism
- 04
Gutai and the 1956 manifesto
- 05
Inscription on, in and behind Chinese pictures
- 06
New Year pictures and propaganda pictures in 1975
- 07
Minjung art and the critique of tansaekhwa
Worked example · free
Explain why slogans crowd a 1975 New Year picture
- 2Distinguish writing on a picture from writing in it: older colophons sat on the surface and stressed that a person made the image, while these texts belong to the scene itself.
- 2Give the institutional reason: party circulars fixed approved wording for each topic, and Clunas argues verbal formulae were far easier to prescribe in advance than images.
- 2State the effect: the repeated phrases and glossy detail lock in one reading and, Clunas suggests, cover the trauma of the policy sending urban youth to the countryside.
Key terms
- Realism Debate
- A dispute among Japanese critics and artists, held between 1946 and 1950, over what realism meant and what social role art should play after the war.
- Metadocument
- Clunas's name for slogans, banners and papers painted inside a Maoist picture's scene, which assert reality instead of marking the image as made.
- Dansaekhwa
- Korean monochrome painting, spelled tansaekhwa by Horlyck, which 1980s minjung critics attacked as elitist, detached from reality and too dependent on Western trends.
- New Nianhua
- A New Year picture format that the Communist Party took over after 1949 to carry policy to a mass, largely rural audience.
Postwar and Cold War Art FAQ
What is the difference between social realism and socialist realism in postwar Japan?
In Jesty's account, social realism names one Japanese camp, led by Hayashi Fumio and Nagai Kiyoshi, that judged art by its effect on ordinary viewers. The Communist Party's slogan of democratic realism was partly meant to separate its position from Soviet socialist realism.
Who were the No Name Group in China?
Clunas describes them as painters who worked essentially in secret during the Cultural Revolution, sharing work only with each other. Zhao Wenliang began his oil sketch 18 August on the day Mao first addressed the Red Guards in 1966.
When did the term minjung art first appear in Korea?
Horlyck dates the first use of minjung misul to 1983. The movement used woodblock prints, banners, murals and paintings, so it cannot be defined by style, and some later critics dismissed it as non-art propaganda.
Exam move
Fill a three-column table from memory with the years, camps and test of value for Jesty, Clunas and Horlyck, then write one sentence on where the words sit in Report on Graduation, Viewing Paintings and 18 August.
