Art

                                Art during the Cultural Revolution

         

           Art during the Cultural Revolution in China shared a few common themes. One of the themes that you could find in art during that period was that there were a lot of paintings of Chairman Mao. The most famous was named Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan (Shown below), a painting by Liu Chunhua, which depicts Mao Zedong as a young man on his way to the city of Anyuan. This painting is believed to have been reproduced over 900 million times. Another common theme in art was the color red.  Red was the color that representing Communism, which was the form of government during the Cultural Revolution. People believed that Communism was the only way to succeed, which was why Communism and the color red were so popular in the art. Another common theme was the little red book. The little red book was a small, red book filled with different quotations from Chairman Mao. It was considered a prized possession for many people, and it was in many works of art with people holding them to the sky, his wife (Qiang Jing) holding the book, and just people having them in general. In February of 1976, the Ministry of Culture released a statement, saying that “special attention should be paid to artworks representing the struggle against those in power but taking the capitalist road in the socialist period".