Within the studio : drawing pedagogy, European-Soviet transnationalism, and academic realism -- Going into life : the anti-academic impulse, social investigation, and the peasant portrait -- A socialist Huang Gongwang : between brushstroke and wash, between brush-and-ink and watercolor sketching -- Going into the construction landscape : sketching labor and panoramas of the Maoist technological sublime -- Going into revolutionary history : military landscape, color, and the Impressionism debates -- Going into the world : the artist as diplomat -- In search of revolutionary romanticism : great famine and the collective landscape of new China. "Drawing From Life surveys drawings and sketches by seminal twentieth-century painters in order to trace how artists came to conceptualize socialist realism in the formative years of the People's Republic of China (1949-1965). Bringing together divergent approaches to artistic practice through works by Xu Beihong, Wang Shikuo, Li Keran, Li Xiongcai, Dong Xiwen, and Fu Baoshi, this book returns to the creative process to reconstruct artists grappling with the representational politics of an as-yet undefined, nascent socialist art. This book argues that practices of drawing and sketching must be understood as part of -- and a metaphorical expression for -- the Maoist art world's ambitions to forge new national forms, new registers of experience, new structures of feeling, and new aesthetic communities" -- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.