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Jiang Zhaohe
Refuges
1943
Ink and color on paper
"Refugees" is a milestone in Chinese modern painting history. It is a great success to present real life and the painting is a master piece of Jiang Zhaohe. The work experienced many setbacks and was full of legendary stories. Jiang Zhaohe started the creation of "Refugees" at the Japanese occupied areas in Beiping in 1941. He had to hide the painting though it was just partly done in order to avoid trouble. The painting was renamed as "Portraits of the Mass" and was exhibited in a temple. However, the exhibition was soon found and banned by the Japanese military police on October 29, 1943. It was confiscated when exhibited in Shanghai in 1944. The first part of it, moldy and broken, was found in Shanghai in 1953, but the second half has never been found. Xiao Qiong, Jiang Zhaohe's wife, donated the painting to the country in 1998. The vividly describes a hundred refugees trying to escape from the bombing by the enemy. Thus it explores the root of the war and shows the crimes commited by the Japanese incaders. The painting is full of tragic consciousness and humanitarian spirit and epical strength. The value of the painting lies not only on its spiritual power but also on the breakthrough in art. The painter combines Chinese line drawing with weastern light and shade shaping skill and achieves the peak of Chinese portrait painting. The painter establishes him a famous modern portrait painter after Xu Beihong.

Jiang Zhaohe(1904-1986), born in Luzhou, Sichuan Province, encouraged by his parents, studied poetry, literature and art when he was young. He went to Shanghai at 16 and lived on charcoal portrait and commercial paintings. He taught pattern art at Nanjing Central University in 1928 and then became a professor of Shanghai Artistic Training School. He went to teach at State Art Training School in Beiping and shifted his interest from weastern painting to portrait wash painting, which is the peak of his artistic life. He became a professor of Central Academy of fine Art in 1950 and established the basic teaching system of portrait wash painting. His other masterpieces are Portrait of A Q and A Basket of Spring is Popular All Over the World.

Yan Han
A People's Fighter
1939-1940
Woodcut

Woodblock print; communist territory during the war period; combined folk art elements; changed woodcut into New Year’s painting format, replaced traditional door guardian with Red Army soldier, sword raised in protective gesture; new style in which European shading was abandoned in favor of the simple outlines of Chinese folk art; to please conservative rural consumers, figures needed to be clean and faces and bodies free of the black smudges of shading; replaced religious images with propaganda, encouraged faith in Communist army

Zheng Wucheng
Gazing at waterfall
1948
Ink and Color on paper
Zheng Wuchang, also known as Zheng Yong, was an enthusiastic advocate of traditional Chinese painting, about which he taught and wrote prolifically. His position as art director for the Zhonghua Publishing Company in Shanghai gave him the opportunity to promote his ideals in art through modern publications. In his painting of the 1940s, like this dynamic landscape, he succeeded in his goal of building powerful, monumental, and original compositions by reviving landscape techniques of the Song and Yuan periods

Yang Keyag
The Professor
1947
Woodcut

Reflect social issues during inflation period, very difficult to rely on normal income to live; depicts professor selling books to bookstore in order to make money to support family; follow 1930’s German impressionistic style to depict modern social issues; commenting on inflation; waste of human talent and unnecessary suffering caused by the incompetent government

Ye Qianyu
Liberation of Beijing
1959
Ink and Color on paper
The city of Beiping (the Guomindang or Nationalist Party’s name for Beijing) is liberated by the arrival of the PLA, carrying flags and numerous portraits of Mao and Zhu De, a veteran of the Long March and commander in chief of the Eighth and Fourth Route armies. a well-known cartoonist in China. In 1954, Professor Ye Qianyu was appointed as head of the Chinese Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. In 1981, he was appointed as Vice President of the Research Institute of Chinese Painting. He was also elected as Vice Chairman of Chinese Artists' Association, Member of Standing Committee of Chinese Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and member of the National Committee of CPPCC. Many of his works were published such as A Supplementary Biography of Mr. Wang, Unofficial History of Xiao Chen Staying in Beijing, Traveling Sketch, Collection of Qianyu Sketches, etc. His representative works include Indian Dancing Gesture, Autumn of Summer River, The Great Unification of Chinese Nations, Summer, First-class Wool and the Liberation of Beiping, etc.

Dong Xiwen
Mao Zedong Declaring the People's Republic from Tian'anmen
1951
original version
The celebrated painter Dong Xiwen (1914-1973) was entrusted with artistically recording the first National Day event for posterity. When his oil painting was first unveiled in 1953, it was lauded as one of the greatest paintings ever made by a Chinese. Mao himself said that it showed "...a great country, which is China. Our paintings are unsurpassed if measured against others internationally, for we have our own unique national form". More than half a million reproductions were sold in the three months after the work was unveiled. But less than a year later, Dong had to re-edit his painting as a result of political developments. The person standing to the left of Mao, Gao Gang, had urged the Chairman to retire, had been purged from the Party and had committed suicide as a result. Dongpartly replaced him with a potted chrysanthemum.When the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, Liu Shaoqi fell from grace, and Dong had to redo the painting again, leaving Liu out. In 1973, the "Gang of Four" ordered another version, this one without Lin Boqu who allegedly had opposed Jiang Qing's marriage to Mao in Yan'an. By then, Dong was dying, so two of his students, Jin Shangyi and Zhao Yu, were assigned to assist him; in fact, most of Dong's contributions to this version consisted of consultations. And in 1979, when the Cultural Revolution had ended and massive rehabilitations had started, a reverse edit took place: all those removed from the painting in the past were restored; most of this work was done by Yan Zhenduo, as Jin was abroad. Some now even were sure that a previously unidentifiable figure in the back row now vaguely looked like Deng Xiaoping.

Luo Gongliu
Mao Zedong Reporting on the Rectification in Yan'an
1951
Oil on canvas
This work is one of the earliest paintings made to praise and publicize the history of the Chinese Communist Party. The painting depicts an event at which the artist may have been present, a series of speeches to artists and writers at Yan'an delivered by Mao Zedong in 1942. Later published as the Yan'an Talks on Art and Literature, Mao's exhortations to serve the people and the party became China's dominant arts policy between 1949 and 1979. This work, along with a small group of similar paintings, were originally hung in a section of the old imperial palace that became the temporary home of the Museum of Revolutionary History.

Luo Gongliu was trained in painting at the Hangzhou National Art Academy in the 1930s. He joined the Communists in Yan'an and became an important figure in the anti-Japanese woodcut movement. After 1949, he was appointed to the administrative team that made policy for the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he made substantial contributions to the development of its oil painting programs.

Zhang Jianjun
Five Heroes of Mount langya
1959
oil on canvus
'Five Heroes On Langya Mountain' is a patriotic movie based on a true story well known in China. In 1941, during the Sino-Japanese war, a group of five Communist soldiers were able to deceive the advancing Japanese army and drew them up to the slopes of Langya Mountain. The Japanese, thinking they were besieging the main army, lost valuable time and troops trying to eliminate them. When the five heroes ran out of bullets, they jumped off the cliffs. Three of them died but two could hang by a tree branch, survived and could recount the story. In the mean time, the Chinese main force could escape and regroup.Mount Langya (Wolf-Teeth Peak), in Yi county, Hebei, was the site of fierce resistance by a group of five soldiers of the Shanxi-Chahaer-Hebei Military Region, who, in 1941, defended the evacuation of the main Chinese forces. When they ran out of bullets, they smashed their rifles and leaped to their deaths. The style of this painting is clearly adapted from that of Soviet socialist realism.

The artist, like his classmate Jin Shangyi, entered the Beiping National Art Academy, the forerunner of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, in 1948. In 1955 he was selected for further training in Konstantin Maksimov's two-year course in oil painting. This work was commissioned for the Museum of the Chinese Revolution as part of the first of three history painting campaigns organized in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Zhan Jianjun is today an influential painter and teacher on the faculty of the Central Academy of Fine Arts

Quan Shanshi
Unyielding heroism
1961
Oil on Canvas
Painted for the second of the three history painting campaigns of the period, this work commemorates in general terms the heroism of rural fighters whose peasant uprisings led to establishment of the first Chinese Soviets in the 1920s. Quan Shanshi was a graduate of the East China campus of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, as the Hangzhou academy was then known. He studied at the Repin Art Academy in Leningrad from 1954 to 1960 and then joined the faculty of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. Although working in the same socialist realist manner, his use of color was more complex than that of many of his contemporaries.

Hou Yimin
Liu Shaoqi and the anyuan Coal Miners
1961
oil on canvas
This painting of Liu Shaoqi was one of the most politically significant of the history painting campaign because it supplemented the endless series of Mao images with that of a competitor in the making of China's revolution. Liu Shaoqi was appointed chairman of the People's Republic of China in 1959 after Mao retired in the face of modern China's worst famine.

Liu Shaoqi became a primary target of the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and sought to restore Mao's position. By 1967, Hou Yimin and his painting were castigated in the little newspapers published by the Red Guard, and the painting itself was destroyed. This version of the painting was recreated by the artist after Liu Shaoqi's political ally, Deng Xiaoping, came to power in 1979.

Hou Yimin, who studied with Xu Beihong, was an underground communist at the academy in Beijing during the late 1940s. After his graduation in 1949 he served for many years on the faculty of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Like He Kongde, Jin Shangyi, and Zhan Jianjun, he received post-graduate training from the Soviet expert at the Central Academy between 1955 and 1957.

Wu Biduan and jin Shangyi
Chairman Mao Standing with People of Asia, Africa, and Latin American
1961
Oil on canvas
The well-known portraitist Jin Shangyi collaborated on this work with his colleague at the Central Academy, the printmaker Wu Biduan. Wu was educated after the Japanese surrender at the North China United University, in the communist-controlled territory, where he was instructed by veterans of the Yan'an woodcut movement.

Sun Zixi
In Front of tiananmen
1964
Oil on Canvas
While this work, with its heroic figures, is typical of the socialist realist painting produced by artists trained primarily after the Communist victory of 1949, it presents an alternative to the heroic determination that dominated works made for the history painting commissions. The Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 and the Great Leap Forward of 1958, which were followed by widespread food shortages, exhausted the Chinese people. Art works produced by academic painters of the early 1960s tended to downplay political sacrifice, and instead emphasize the pleasures of life. Smiling citizens from all parts of China are assembled in front of Tiananmen as though for a group photo. Sun Zixi is a 1958 graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts who serves on the school's faculty.

Fang Zengxian
Every grain is Hard Work
1955
Fang Zengxian (1931) is from Lanxi, Zhejiang Province. After his graduation from the middle school attached to the Central Art Academy in 1953, Fang Zengxian remained as a research student. Upon his graduation Fang Zengxian took up teaching, which brought him to the Zhejiang Art Academy. He became head of the Shanghai Fine Arts Museum in 1983

Shi Lu
Fighting in Northern Shaanxi
1959
Ink and Color on paper
Shi Lu redefined the meaning and appearance of the landscape in Chinese art, viewing it politically, as a symbol of the integrity of the Chinese nation, rather than as a philosophical model of the workings of nature. This grand history painting, commissioned for framed display in the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, has a very different intended purpose and audience from that of earlier Chinese scroll painting. Mao Zedong is envisioned at a moment in 1947 when the Communist forces had withdrawn from their base at Yan'an and begun a strategy of mobile warfare. Behind him spreads the panorama of his country. This painting, with its slightly wild landscape brushwork, exemplifies the new techniques and formats developed by China's painters in the traditional medium after establishment of the People's Republic of China

Fang Zengxian
Telling a Red tale
1964
hanging Scroll Ink and color on paper
Fang Zengxian uses a lively line and a complex figural recession to animate his image of a story-teller who engages his neighbors with accounts of the Red Army's exploits. The Hangzhou figure painters, led by Fang Zengxian, were well-grounded in academic drawing. They thus abandoned the traditional methods of painting drapery folds, and instead developed new types of brushwork that somewhat resemble Western watercolor painting. However, the facility they developed in controlling their ink on the absorbent Chinese paper helped them to more vividly describe their figural subjects. In subject and execution, their break with tradition is clear, but Fang Zengxian maintains the importance of the outline, the rich tones of ink, and the blank backgrounds characteristic of much Chinese figure painting