Chinese Posters Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

by Cushing, Lincoln; Tompkins, Ann

• ISBN13: 9780811859462
• ISBN10: 0811859460
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-09-27
• Publisher: Chronicle Books

Summary

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China produced thousands of powerful social and political posters to exhort the Chinese people in the sweeping transformation of Chinese society. Revolutionary Chinese Poster Art collects more than 150 of most the striking of these posters, complemented by an insightful and thoroughly researched text on their social and artistic context, and a personal account of living in Beijing during the Revolution. In a nutshell, from 1966 to 1976, there was a countrywide mass campaign to reform Chinese society and the Communist Party, directed by Mao Zedong, that resulted in mass social upheaval. Those who were not considered to be following the right socialist path were called out as class traitors, some sent to re-education labour camps. Everything and everyone was meant to serve the greater effort of the socialist revolution, including these posters, one of the few art forms sanctioned by the party. Theposters are uniformly utopian, bright, and graphically powerful, portraying the ideal society that they were at least ostensibly trying to achieve. A short (politically neutral, as much as possible) primer on the GPCR and contexton the production, social circumstance, graphics, and design influence of the posters.

Author Biography

Lincoln Cushing is the author of Revoluci+â-¦n: Cuban Poster Art. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Ann Tompkins lived and worked in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. She lives in Northern California.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 4
Revolutionary Chinese Posters and Their Impact Abroad	p. 7
People, Poverty, Politics, and Posters	p. 24
Nature and Transformation	p. 39
Production and Mechanization	p. 51
Women Hold Up Half the Sky	p. 67
Serve the People	p. 81
Solidarity	p. 97
Politics in Command	p. 109
After the Cultural Revolution	p. 127
Bibliography	p. 138
Index of Posters by Title	p. 140
Acknowledgments	p. 142
Technical Note on the Production of this Book	p. 143
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.