Art: The Arcadians of Huhsien County

Despite political openings between China and America, despite the brief flowering of Maoist chic along Fifth Avenue in the early ’70s, the art of the People’s Republic of China has never been properly exhibited in an American museum. Doubtless there is some ideological reluctance. Though the cold war is formally over, not too many U.S. museum directors are ready to confront their more conservative trustees with large comic-strip gouaches bearing titles like Occupying the Ideological-Cultural Field in the Countryside and Workers Condemn the “Gang of Four.”

In consequence the exhibition of 80 paintings made over the past five years by peasant workers in Huhsien county, Shensi province, which just opened at the Brooklyn Museum and will travel to San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston throughout 1978, is not only interesting but instructive. These bright-colored, Volk-ish scenes of collective labor, with their clear and pretty patterns, are, in fact, like posters a prime form of political instruction in China. As the catalogue remarks, they exemplify “the abolition of the distinction between manual workers and brain workers.” How complete this erasure has been the show makes all too clear.

Any visitor at the show soon realizes that the Chinese Revolution has also obliterated any notion of socialist realism, as practiced—however fitfully—in Russia. There are no sweating boatmen by the rivers. Not even a dirty shirt in view. Everything is swept, ordered, prosperous. The happy people of Huhsien county are the last Arcadians. Socialism, as it were, equals Ovid plus electricity. Their sacks of grain bulge like the bellies of good-luck gods. Every bulb of garlic in their fields is the size of a baby’s head. Each melon and gourd displays, in its massive and purposeful rotundity, the benefits of collective selfcriticism. Like the bulbous backside of a Cadillac in America 20 years ago, the distended cabbage and the steatopygous turnip are images of Good Government. In this land, imagination goes about its business with methodical certainty. There are no lopeared, ginger-bearded visionaries lurching about in the paddyfields, frightening the crows. “I thought the water pipes in this painting didn’t look nice bare,” one artist is quoted in the catalogue about his work, The New Look of Our Piggery, “so we painted some gourd leaves to cover them. We used the method of combining romanticism with reality, so we also added the water tower.”

The pervasive image of paradise is, however, the Smile. Everyone smiles in Huhsien county (est. pop. 430,000). The show presents regiments of faces reduced to the schematic affability of HAVE A NICE DAY lapel badges. They smile while dancing, while running, while hoeing the ground, while drawing water and hewing wood; the same monotonous white flash, the teeth never differentiated (perhaps because this could be read as an implied criticism of Maoist dentistry), lights up the seamed faces of old Long-Marchers returning from a cultural evening and the plump faces of three-year-olds lisping their love for Chairman Hua. The Smile is to China what the halo was to Byzantium: an emblem of spiritual authority. There is no tension in this world, no nuance of character or sense of colloquy. All portraits are types. If the ducks in the pens were somewhat bigger and the Wicked Stepmother replaced the Gang of Four, one might as well be in Disney World, being grinned at by authoritarian, eupeptic Mouseketeers for the larger good of the collective.

The charter for this peculiar mode of “revolutionary realism” lies in Mao’s address to the Yenan Forum in 1942. “Life,” the Chairman remarked, “as reflected in works of literature and art can and ought to be on a higher plane, more intense, more concentrated, more typical, nearer the ideal, and therefore more universal than actual everyday life.” The key phrase, of course, is “nearer the ideal.” That the peasant paintings of Huhsien county do have some relationship to reality is incontestable; some of them are veritable instruction manuals. You could learn from them how to pour concrete, saw logs into planks, or pick cotton or help build a dam for a giant hydroelectric plant. But they are in essence religious art, full of charming lollipop colors and promises of salvation through works. They are to production what TV commercials are, in America, to consumption—a form of inspirational mendacity. In this bright county there is no place for the ghosts of doubt and running dogs of anxiety, for reclusive Cézanne and snobbish wheezing Proust, for mad Munch, crabby Degas, Baudelaire the ingrate or Picasso the egotist. And quite right too. They don’t plant ‘taters, they don’t plant cotton, and they were born too old. — Robert Hughes