The Transformation of Chinese-Style Painting and Guohua Painters

After 1949, the Party implemented the management and leadership of artists through the official Artists Association; in view of the Party’s ideological and political requirements for art and artistic means, traditional brush and ink painting was considered unsuitable for the new era, and the Party proposed a transformation of Chinese painting, which engaged the painter’s political stance, artistic ideas, and technical requirements. The government, through organizations such as art academies, provided economic conditions for traditional painters to visit factories and rural areas, so that their paintings could reflect socialist industrial and agricultural construction. Under the Party’s ideology, there were obvious changes in the artistic thinking and creation of traditional artists, and the political transformation also affected the inheritance of traditional elements. In this period of transformation of Chinese painting, Fu Baoshi, Qian Songyan, Li Keran, Shi Lu, and Pan Tianshou became important representative painters.