Introduction
From 24 September to 23 October 1955, Piero Calamandrei, the well-known Italian jurist and anti-fascist intellectual, headed an Italian cultural delegation visiting Socialist China. It was quite an unusual event. Italy did not have diplomatic relations with the People's Republic and Piero Calamandrei, who was not a Communist, had been one of the most important members of the Constitutional Assembly. Diplomatic recognition of Mao's China was apparently not on the agenda of the government in Rome. Yet attempts at strengthening ‘unofficial’ relations between China and Italy were considered useful in order to pave the way to an increase in Sino-Italian trade and to future political developments.
Indeed, between 1955 and 1957 Sino-Italian cultural contacts became even more intense. Several Italian intellectuals, artists, and writers were invited to visit the People's Republic, and Italy was regularly included in the European tours made by Chinese missions. These were organized within the framework of a flourishing ‘people's diplomacy’ with the aim of improving China's relationship with the world.Footnote 1
In Italy these developments were viewed as an opportunity to explore new cultural horizons, mirroring the attempt to overcome the ideological barriers of the Cold War. In China, they reflected a changing attitude towards Western Europe. Up to that moment most of the international cultural activities of the People's Republic were carried out through the network of cultural cooperation that existed within the Socialist camp dominated by Moscow.Footnote 2 As Nikolai Volland has argued, China's active participation in these exchanges was connected to its search for ‘political recognition’ as a Socialist state by the other Socialist ‘brother’ states.Footnote 3 Nevertheless, in the mid-1950s, China seemed eager to open up a more direct dialogue with the capitalist West, following a new trend in foreign policy which was intended to develop its relationships with the states belonging to the so-called ‘intermediate zone’, which was where Mao Zedong placed the countries of Western European.Footnote 4 It was hoped that developing cultural relations with Italy would help Beijing to build Socialist China's image as an independent and peaceful state. Moreover, it was hoped that by widening the scope of Chinese cultural and economic exchanges, these contacts might also offer new opportunities for internationalization, thus reducing Beijing's dependence on Moscow.
This article reconstructs the attempts of Calamandrei's mission and Italian progressive intellectuals to promote new cultural relations between Italy and the People's Republic thereby circumventing the ideological barriers of the Cold War. It also explores the Italian travellers’ perception of revolutionary China's cultural identity, drawing from their reports and comments published in Italian journals and books, and from private archival sources such as letters and personal diaries. In so doing, it shows how Chinese efforts were actually received and interpreted in the international context of the mid-1950s.
Calamandrei's mission in context: Sino-Italian contacts during the early Cold War
The historical circumstances in which the Italian cultural delegation's mission to China took place in 1955 were characterized by the less tense international climate which followed the end of the Korean War and the end of French colonialism in Asia. At the same time, Beijing was keen to widen the scope and impact of China's relations with the outside world.
The Geneva Conference, convened in 1954 to discuss the situation in the Indochinese peninsula after the end of French colonialism in the area, was a turning point in the People's Republic of China's relationship with Western Europe. In Geneva Zhou Enlai met several European economic and political delegations, which were seeking new business opportunities, in spite of the limits imposed by the American-led Western embargo on trade with Socialist China.Footnote 5
During the same period, activities aimed at developing Chinese ‘people's diplomacy’ were formally institutionalized. Modelled on the Soviet example, a Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (Zhonguo renmin duiwai youhao xiehui) was established in order to manage unofficial relations with the world. The Association's tasks included organizing the travels of foreign guests in China, a complex enterprise that was carefully planned in order to control and influence the visitors’ impressions and ideas about Chinese socialism.Footnote 6 The new Chinese society born out of the revolution was staged in front of foreigners in selected factories, schools, hospitals, and rural communities, and through a plethora of social and cultural events, starting with the annual celebration of National Day on 1 October. At the same time, the Association planned and managed several international cultural activities abroad, such as tours by Chinese cultural, scientific, and artistic delegations. The most significant of these was the traditional opera. In the Republican era, Chinese opera had gained an appreciative following abroad, mainly thanks to the ability of the actor, Mei Lanfang, who managed to make the traditional Chinese theatre an object of international intellectual and artistic interest.Footnote 7 After the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949, traditional opera, now under state control, was partially reformed (in terms of operatic plots)Footnote 8 and was included in many programmes of entertainment offered to foreign visitors. The popular ‘The story of the white snake’ (Bai she zhuan) now had a specifically ‘overseas edition’ (haiban).Footnote 9 In the mid-1950s the National Opera Troupe's international tours began to include Europe. In 1955 the People's Republic participated in the Second Paris International Festival of Dramatic Art, and between 1955 and 1956 the Official Ensemble of the Chinese National Opera's show was successfully staged in France, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Hungary.
In fact, as has been noted by Herbert Passin,Footnote 10 in the first decade after 1949, between 75,000 and 100,000 foreigners made official visits to Mao's China; in the same period, Chinese citizens sent abroad as official delegates amounted to nearly half this number. While the bulk of these exchanges continued to be with the Soviet Union and the ‘people's democracies’ in Eastern Europe and Asia, after 1954 (and especially in 1956) contacts between China and Western European capitalist countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, northern European states, and also Italy, became more intense. One of the most important was the mission of the British Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee in 1954, an event that probably contributed to the emerging interest by Italian intellectuals in the Chinese revolution.Footnote 11
Before this, cultural contacts between Italy and the People's Republic had been sporadic. Only a few Italian intellectuals had visited China, and their travels had been mainly organized in the context of Socialist transnational cooperation centred on Moscow.
The first Italian to make this journey was the Communist, Velio Spano, who arrived in China in August 1949 and left in January 1950, thereby witnessing the founding of the People's Republic.Footnote 12 At that time Spano was a correspondent of l’Unità, the Italian Communist Party's daily; later he was put in charge of the Party's department of foreign relations. In 1953 l’Unità sent a resident correspondent, Franco Calamandrei, Piero's son, to Beijing. Franco Calamandrei lived in the People's Republic with his family until 1956Footnote 13 and his presence certainly influenced Piero Calamandrei's decision to visit China. Besides journalists from left-wing newspapers, some leading Italian Communist intellectuals also visited China, thanks to Socialist transnational organizations under the aegis of the Soviet Union, such as the World Peace Council. In 1952, at the time of the fifth centenary of the birth of Leonardo da Vinci, the philosopher, Antonio Banfi, was invited to Beijing; in 1953, it was the turn of the literary critic, Francesco Flora, who had earlier held the position of director for cultural international relations in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On his return to Italy from Beijing, the police withdrew his passport, which resulted in vibrant protests in Italian intellectual and academic circles.
From 1954 onwards, most of the initiatives aimed at strengthening relations with China were carried on by the Center for the Development of Cultural and Economic Relations with China (Centro Cina), founded in 1953 and directed by the politician and anti-fascist intellectual Ferruccio Parri. The Center's goal was to improve the contacts and ensure the flow of reciprocal knowledge between the two countries.Footnote 14
In 1955 Calamandrei's mission was organized with the support of the Center. It was expected that the mission would herald a new stage in cultural relations with the People's Republic, and the Italian government was aware of the initiative. At around the same time, another eminent Italian politician visited China. Just a few days before Calamandrei's arrival in the Chinese capital city, Pietro Nenni, leader of the Italian Socialist Party, arrived in Beijing after a short stop in Moscow.Footnote 15 The Geneva Summit had just taken place among the ‘Big Four’ (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France) in July 1955, offering the first concrete prospect of political détente between the two opposing Cold War blocks.Footnote 16 In its wake, Nenni wanted to demonstrate that any international dialogue on the issues of global peace and security had to include the People's Republic, with its 600 million citizens. The Italian government had been informed of Nenni's initiative, and the Socialist leader hoped to prove Italy's interest in improving its relations with China.
The relevance of Piero Calamandrei's cultural mission to the People's Republic was therefore connected to Nenni's high political and intellectual standing, but also to the group he led, which was composed of academics, journalists, intellectuals, and artists.Footnote 17 As Calamandrei emphasized later, the ideological and political affiliations of the members of the delegation were quite diverse, since Catholic and right-wing intellectuals were also included. The principle governing the formation of the delegation was that its members should be inspired by intellectual curiosity, not by ideological affinity. The goal was to understand the problems of culture, education, literature, art, and science in a Socialist country born out of a popular revolution, while trying to look at China through an objective lens, not as Communists nor as anti-Communists. In addition, the mission aimed to identify possible paths of cultural cooperation between Italy and the People's Republic. Finally, it was planned that Calamandrei's mission would produce a volume ‘La Cina d'oggi’ (‘China today’), to be published as a special issue of the journal edited by Calamandrei, Il Ponte.Footnote 18
The journal Il Ponte gathered together a group of intellectuals eager to reaffirm the human and moral values of the anti-fascist Resistance, which they perceived as weakened in post-war Italy and the capitalist West. In mid-1955 several of them were affiliated with Unità Popolare (The People's Unity), a political organization whose mission was to set the ideological divisions of the Cold War aside, build a kind of ‘third force’, and look for new models of democracy and socialism in both the West and the developing world.Footnote 19 Among the models reputed to be of interest was that of the People's Republic of China, which at the time had not yet become the target of Western intellectuals’ ‘political pilgrimage’ in their search for the good society (to quote the title of Paul Hollander's well-known work),Footnote 20 but whose revolution and efforts at Socialist construction could certainly be considered worthy of intellectual and political attention.
The special issue ‘La Cina d'oggi’ of Il Ponte aimed at offering an overview of revolutionary China for the benefit of the journal's readers, who would surely have defined itself as progressive and democratic, but who did not necessarily share the ideological and political beliefs of communism. The volume was carefully planned as a collection of essays that would portray the country's cultural landscape from various perspectives and possibly without any ideological prejudices. Nevertheless, the practicalities of Calamandrei's visit and the volume dedicated to China were planned with the help of Franco Calamandrei and his wife Maria Teresa Regard, who were both members of the Italian Communist Party.
As correspondents of the Italian Communist mouthpiece in Beijing, the two Italians were in constant contact with the Chinese Communist Party's foreign propaganda institutions and with long-time friends of China working on the external publicity of the People's Republic, such as Israel Epstein. In practice, they acted as a bridge between the Chinese institutions and Il Ponte, seeking a balance between the goals pursued by Chinese propaganda and the intentions of Piero Calamandrei, the chief editor of the volume, who aspired to offer an assessment of China's progress and limitations, and avoid the ideological pitfalls of being considered a supporter of Stalinism.
The exchange of letters between members of the Calamandrei family makes it clear that these issues were discussed between father and son, who thought that the goal to improve knowledge of revolutionary China in Italy had to come first, regardless of other considerations.Footnote 21 As Franco wrote to his father:
I think that Il Ponte can play a fundamental role regarding the relations between Italy and China, [by] publishing an exhaustive and not questionable documentation about culture in contemporary China. You can find the reasons of my support of this goal in my first letters and I think that we have already overcome issues related to the use of Communist or non-Communist sources, to orthodoxy or heterodoxy (something about which we risk to debate to infinity) as a sterile problem.Footnote 22
Piero Calamandrei's desire to prevent accusations of being used as an instrument of Communist propaganda was demonstrated by his decision to raise the case of Hu Feng with his Chinese counterparts during his visit. In 1955, Hu Feng, an outstanding writer and literary critic who had worked in the Communist Party since the early 1930s, was accused of being a reactionary because of his opposition to the assimilation of literary endeavour with sociological analysis.Footnote 23 In the cultural Cold War between East and West, the issue of intellectual freedom and artistic creativity was central. Consequently, the campaign against Hu Feng in China was denounced by the international Congress for Cultural Freedom organization as unquestionable evidence of the oppressive nature of the Chinese Communist regime. The attitude of Il Ponte on issues concerning intellectual freedom were usually consistent with those of the Italian branch of the Congress for the Freedom of Culture, but several contributors to the journal did not explicitly share the Congress's anti-Communist position. With the opportunity presented by his visit to China, Piero Calamandrei felt obliged to investigate the meaning of the campaign against Hu Feng as a way to better understand the Chinese Communist Party's policy towards culture and the arts.
With the help of his son and daughter-in-law, he was able to submit a list of questions to the Chinese authorities and these and the official replies were later published in La Cina d'oggi.Footnote 24 Moreover, Calamandrei discussed the Hu Feng's case with his interpreter Hong Sheng:
Travelling from Shanghai to Canton by train, I discussed the Hu Feng case with my friend Hong, a nice young Cantonese, the interpreter for French language. Obviously he supported the official aesthetic theories and criticized Hu Feng. In order to demonstrate Hu's aberrations, he told me: ‘In order to affirm that artists should not be involved in the people's fight for redemption, Hu Feng dared to say this abnormality: you could write a good poem just talking to the moon!’
I tried to explain to him why I agree with Hu Feng on this point: I told him that one of our poets had composed a great poem that actually began: ‘Why are you there, moon, in the sky’? And I added: ‘In the world, dear Hong, there are not only the problems of the social struggles between the rich and the poor, between the oppressors and the oppressed; there are also problems—and maybe they are more important and eternal, which concern all the people, the human condition shared by the rich and the poor: the mystery of life, the causes of human sorrow, love and death. . .’
Hong listened to me with the greatest attention: and in the end he sighed: ‘Peut être vous avez raison, professeur. . . Mais. . . But what could the poor, the peasants and the workers do if all the writers and all the poets were only concerned with love and death, or wrote just to the moon, leaving the poor alone in their struggle against social injustices?’Footnote 25
The call to the political and social responsibility of writers and artists might have sounded convincing to Calamandrei's group. He and his fellow travellers tried to look at the Chinese cultural and artistic landscape beyond the political pedagogy of both the Chinese and the Western anti-Communist propaganda.
The Italian cultural delegation's views of Chinese revolutionary culture
The main goal of Calamandrei and the group of intellectuals who visited China with him was to understand contemporary Chinese culture, avoiding ideological prejudices, and to investigate the opportunities for stronger cultural cooperation between China and Italy. They all assumed that mutual comprehension could be built by putting ideological divisions aside and focusing on a shared heritage of social values and ideas.
Putting aside Marxist world revolutionary ideology and class analysis, the foundation of the dialogue between China and Italy had to be uncovered in the moral legacy of the united front of the Second World War and the historical experience of the resistance against fascism, both of which were considered to be the basis of a cross-class international friendship. The legacy of anti-fascism was deemed to have nourished a shared democratic culture that crossed over different political parties and countries. Actually, anti-fascism was not a strong factor in delineating the post-war political order at the international level. As Federico Romero has written regarding Europe, ‘anti-fascist culture was simultaneously the seal of a shared past, but a weak, if not irrelevant, fact in defining the post-war future’.Footnote 26 Nevertheless, after the end of the Second World War, the narrative of the Resistance played an important role in constructing the international image of a new and democratic Italian republic. As for China, anti-fascism, which had given a transnational dimension to the War of Resistance against Japan and connected it to the European war, was used by the Communist Party after 1946 as an instrument of moral and political legitimization of their war against Chiang Kai-shek. After 1949 it remained a symbolic resource for internal and external propaganda.
The search for affinity between the two national experiences of the war against fascism is evident in several of the pieces published in the special issue of Il Ponte. The memory of the Italian Resistance was evidently the lens through which members of 1955 mission read Chinese revolutionary society. It also shaped their view of Chinese literature and art.
In a long article in which he collected his thoughts about his travels in the People's Republic, Piero Calamandrei made explicit reference to the Resistance as the moral foundation of revolution in China, suggesting that, in contrast, the promise of the war of liberation against fascism in Italy had been betrayed:
Only here I saw and fully understood what is the real meaning of the words ‘social equality and dignity’ that in our Constitution art. 3 are just written. If we try to sum up all the features of this moral renovation, the word which spontaneously comes to the lips is a word that in Italy used to have the same magical meaning: ‘liberation’. In Italy too, just for some months (or for just some weeks) this word had stirred the same hope that, after almost ten years, you can still fully breathe in China; in order to understand contemporary China, we should remember that it has come out of a civil and external war that lasted more than twenty years and that the people who now govern China are the same who had led and supported the Resistance against domestic and foreign enemies till the victory. [. . .] All this bears the stamp of the Resistance, which has won [,] not only from a military point of view, but also from a social point of view. This is the great secret of China: it is led by the same men who were politically and morally trained by the hardships of the Resistance.Footnote 27
Chinese foreign propaganda contributed to strengthen these Italian travellers’ perception that the Chinese revolutionary experience was similar to that of the Italian Resistance. For example, among the materials offered to the Italian visitors were writings and photographs of Wang Xiaohe, a worker executed by the Nationalists in Shanghai in 1948 and who was celebrated as a Communist and anti-fascist martyr. The photographs and a small, translated selection of Wang's letters, which the delegation had seen in the ‘Exhibition of the Resistance’ in Shanghai, were published in ‘La Cina d'oggi’ as ‘Last letters of the Resistance fighters’, echoing one of the fundamental readings of anti-fascist culture in Italy. Piero Calamandrei explicitly wrote in his comments that ‘in all the countries of the world, the last letters of the Resistance fighters have all the same accent’.Footnote 28
The tragic and heroic memory of the Resistance against fascism permitted the Italian visitors to overlook existing ideological or cultural differences and find a path for cultural cooperation. But the actual prospects for interaction required a better understanding of Chinese cultural policy and an objective evaluation of the state of the cultural relationship between the two countries. Calamandrei discussed this last topic in a long article.Footnote 29 He assumed that literature was the most important tool to improve reciprocal understanding, and that it was necessary to translate classical masterpieces from both Chinese and Italian traditions in greater numbers than had been the case up to then. In fact, in the People's Republic, editions of previous Chinese language translations of Italian classics, such as Dante's Commedia and Boccaccio's Decameron, had been published.Footnote 30 The challenge was to increase knowledge of contemporary Italian literature as well. Before leaving for Beijing, Calamandrei wrote, the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles had requested a list of Italian books, mainly narratives and histories of the War of Resistance. Until then, only two contemporary Italian novels had been translated into Chinese from Russian editions. The first one was L'Agnese va a morire by Renata Viganò, one of the most famous literary works about the Italian Resistance; the other was a children's novel by Gianni Rodari, Cipollino. According to Calamandrei, the moment had come to establish a systematic exchange of bibliographical information between Italy and China, since there only were a tiny number of Italian books in the collection of foreign books held at the National Library in Beijing.
Chinese authorities probably shared the idea that literature could represent an important avenue of exchange and contact with the outside world, and be an important tool in building China's international image. Since 1950, China had engaged in the massive task of translating literary works that could be used as symbols of the new Socialist state.Footnote 31 Nonetheless, in the 1950s, there was scant awareness of Chinese contemporary literature in Italy: it was only in 1955 that an Italian translation of an English edition of Lu Xun's tales was published.Footnote 32 The choice of Lu Xun was quite obvious. Mao himself had indicated that the writer was an iconic literary figure who embodied the values and experience of Chinese revolutionary culture. It was not by chance that a visit to his house in Shanghai was included in the itinerary of Calamandrei's delegation.
One member of the delegation, the poet and essayist, Franco Antonicelli, published a long article in ‘La Cina d'oggi’ describing his visit to Lu Xun's house and offering the public an emphatic portrait of a cosmopolitan and engaged intellectual of world importance:
It is not easy for a Western reader, who ignores most of Chinese history and of Chinese literature and is acquainted only with mediocre and sophisticated amenities for European consumption, to understand the place and the meaning of Lu Xun literary works, and why he has been called the chief commander of the Chinese revolution in culture and the father of realism. [. . .] I just know the tender and thoughtful fruits of his imagination, introduced to me in the Italian edition of his tales. [. . .]
Now, going to the deep bottom of things, I feel that contemporary Chinese history is not only Chinese history, so distant and insignificant to us, and that Lu Xun is not only a Chinese writer.Footnote 33
The discovery of Lu Xun by Italian intellectuals in the mid-1950s reflects the contemporary promotion of the Chinese author in the Socialist world. But it was quite a genuine discovery, and in the years that followed, Lu Xun's fortune's in Italy were greater than in other Western countries.Footnote 34 A year after Calamandrei's mission to China, Curzio Malaparte, a famous Italian writer, was invited to participate in the international commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the death of Lu Xun. During his stay in China Malaparte developed a true affection for his Chinese hosts, and he began to nourish a deep admiration for Chinese revolutionary society and for its great literary tradition as well.Footnote 35 When he fell ill in the People's Republic, he refused to move to Hong Kong for a long time, preferring to be treated in a Chinese hospital.
On the agenda of the 1955 Italian cultural mission and its editorial enterprise was the plan to offer the Italian readership an overview of Chinese revolutionary literature. A selected ‘package’ (mainly comprising an anthology of left-wing realistic literature from the Republican era, new literature written by peasant writers and modelled after the orthodox guidelines of Soviet Socialist realism,Footnote 36 and lyrics) was published in ‘La Cina d'oggi’.Footnote 37
The selection reflected Chinese official national guidelines in literature. Invited to comment about the texts, the literary critic, Margherita Guidacci, who was not a Communist, could not refrain from noticing that if compared with the artistic offerings of great authors such as Guo Moruo or Mao Dun, the recent fruits of the ‘planning of cultural production as an industry’ pursued by the Communist regime risked pushing Chinese artistic creativity towards an involution. According to her, Socialist China's cultural policy was tainted by a kind of ‘orthodoxy complex’ which suffocated artistic creativity, thereby lowering the quality and attraction of new China's literature.Footnote 38
In his comments on the Hu Feng case, Calamandrei also reflected on the awful implications of the emerging state aesthetic in China:
The Soviet origin of this cultural policy is evident, and we hope that it will not cause a withering of literature and figurative art which it has produced in Russia in these last decades. Indeed, I got the impression that in China, the adoption of this State aesthetic remains just at the surface, without cutting the roots of artistic inspiration. The anthology we have published shows how even in this climate of ‘engaged’ art, aesthetically effective works of art have been produced. It is not by chance that Mao Zedong is also a poet and that for him the model to keep in mind is Lu Xun, who is a great writer even if judged according to Western standards.Footnote 39
According to his view, Chinese literature and arts, even if they had to incorporate an educational aspect as dictated by state policy, were escaping the risk of becoming poor products because of political propaganda guidelines. In most cases they still retained an aesthetic value worthy of admiration. At the root of this was their attachment to artistic tradition.
At the beginning, it is difficult to understand how it is possible to reconcile, in the official aesthetic canons in China, Socialist realism with adhering to the classical tradition. [. . .] But it seems to me that the attachment to its own artistic tradition, so strong in China, will prevent the new Chinese art from becoming so poor up to being only a ‘formula’ for political propaganda.Footnote 40
Looking at revolutionary China's cultural landscape, Calamandrei was persuaded that the living moral legacy of the anti-fascist struggle he had thought to find in Chinese society and the patriotic attachment to Chinese aesthetic tradition were still saving art and literature from being strangled by the political propaganda guidelines inspired by the Soviet model. It was to be hoped that a space of cultural cooperation with the West could be opened in China's search for her own revolutionary, democratic (but still aesthetically valuable) art, and that Italy too would have the opportunity to make its contribution.
Italian painters and the attempt at a cultural interaction
After the cultural mission to China in 1955, figurative art was singled out as one of the most promising fields for building interaction between Italy and the People's Republic.
Unlike their colleagues in literature and performing arts, the Italian travellers, and especially Calamandrei, gained the impression that Chinese painters had not yet found their own way, torn as they were between Soviet influences, traditional and folk culture, and the intellectual and artistic legacy of pre-1949 Westernized progressive culture.
In his comments on the report written about Chinese painting by his son, Franco, for the special issue of Il Ponte, Piero Calamandrei suggested that the mass pedagogical functions attributed to figurative arts and Chinese painters’ isolation from the West were inhibiting Chinese creativity:
The new Chinese painting has first of all taken up the task of doing political, sanitary, educational propaganda producing posters and leaflets. It has poured a great effort in [to] this task. Obviously practical considerations about the efficacy of the message have been prominent, and [Chinese painting] had not had the opportunity to assimilate Western painting as an artistic factor. Worse, it has been compelled to take the Soviet art which is clumsily realistic, apologetic and artistically worthless as its model. Up to now the barrier between China and [the] West has prevented to the new Chinese painters to understand the true European art in Italian, French, and Spanish museums.Footnote 41
Moreover, Calamandrei perceived that in the artistic community there was an unresolved tension between the importance still granted to traditional painting, the legacy of the former Westernization of art, and the officially sanctioned significance of the Soviet model.Footnote 42 He hoped that the mild thaw in attitudes to art and literature which was emerging in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev would have a positive influence on Chinese artists’ opportunities to widen their cultural and aesthetic horizons:
Only in figurative art we get the impression that continuity between old and new has not been found yet. But the revision of aesthetic canons which is now happening in Russia will benefit China, especially if the contacts between Chinese figurative art and Western art will be soon resumed.Footnote 43
The importance attributed to painting in the development of cultural relations with China was demonstrated by the fact that the 1955 Italian cultural delegation included the painter, Ernesto Treccani. Apparently, the original plan was that Renato Guttuso would participate as a member of the delegation. Guttuso was the most politically active and most representative Communist painter in Italy, and an icon of socially and politically engaged art in Italy and Western Europe. However, his trip to China never took place for personal reasons.Footnote 44
Ernesto Treccani was one of the strongest supporters of the Italian Communist Party's officially endorsed Realist painting, but he was also critical of dogmatism and academicism. Like Guttuso, he belonged to the artistic group Corrente, which was devoted to the promotion of so-called Neo-Realism. Treccani's paintings, which were dedicated to showing the experiences of the lower classes in the industrial suburbs or poor countryside, made him a fine representative of this group's aesthetic style and concept. In China he produced a series of portraits of Chinese people and landscapes, which were used to illustrate the travelogue of the writer, Carlo Cassola.Footnote 45
During his stay in China, Treccani had the opportunity to meet local artists. The cultural broker with the Chinese was the Chilean painter and ‘friend of China’, Josè Venturelli, who explained to the Italian visitors the peculiarities of Chinese traditional aesthetics and the new official policy of using figurative arts as an instrument of mass education and political propaganda. Ernesto Treccani's notes about his travels in China reveal his awareness of the dilemmas of Chinese contemporary art, as does his long report about the trip which he wrote in 1957, two years after his return from China:
Today Chinese painters adopt both the traditional ink technique and the modern oil painting. Very popular is also xylography. Keeping the great national tradition alive at the revolutionary breath of the great transformations of new China, this is the task of modern Chinese artists. To be able to express the reality of their own time and their own country is a difficult challenge for all artists, for Italian, French, American, and Soviet ones alike. All have to take into account the special features of national traditions and the renovation which occurs in life and the conscience. But what is happening in new China is so huge, the novelty and the weight of transformation so rapid if compared to the centuries of stagnation, and our Chinese brothers are dealing with very complex problems of artistic creation and critical orientation. China has destroyed her feudal structure and has awakened people's participation to democratic life; the ground where artistic creation blooms has been completely tilled. The temptation to simplify all artistic expression, uncritically refusing the past and passively adapting to the mass cultural needs, could be strong.Footnote 46
Nevertheless Treccani sincerely praised Qi Baishi and considered him to be a champion at portraying the small aspects of reality. In fact, his view simply reflected official Chinese judgement of the old master's work. Qi Baishi (1864–1957) was one of the most well-known Chinese painters outside China. He had had a following in Europe since the 1930sFootnote 47 and, in the wake of his fame abroad, he was deemed to be one of the most important painters in China since the Republican era. After 1949, although he had never been a supporter of communism, he received the protection of the new regime, which was eager to use him as an icon of Chinese cultural tradition. Celebrated as a champion of the renovation of traditional painting, the old, self-educated craftsman was portrayed as the ‘painter of the people’, although his art was rather distant from the new national guidelines for art.Footnote 48 Moreover, as the most famous contemporary Chinese painter on the international stage, he was instrumental in foreign propaganda; an exhibition of Qi Baishi's paintings, for example, was hosted by the Venice Biennale in 1956.
Treccani had the opportunity to meet the venerable artist in his studio, under the watchful eye of interpreters and fellow painters. When he recalled that experience, what the Italian painter remembered best was Qi's loyalty to the aesthetic value of art:
I remember one episode of our visit to his studio in Beijing's suburbs. There were some painters—Italian, French, Mexican. Our talks focused on several things, Italy's national situation and our own history as anti-fascist painters; the interpreter introduced us to him, emphasizing our ‘democratic attitude’. Qi Baishi silently listened. But at a certain point he asked: ‘But are they good painters?’Footnote 49
Back in Italy, the relationship between Treccani and Chinese painters did not develop further. But in the wake of Calamandrei's 1955 mission, some new opportunities for interaction between Italy and China arose in 1956 as the Hundred Flowers Movement promoted an intellectual and political climate which encouraged a new wave of cultural openness and internationalization on China's part.Footnote 50
Nine months after the return of Calamandrei's delegation to Italy, in spring 1956, a group of Italian artists arrived in China to exhibit their work in Beijing. They were neither the first nor the only Western artists to display their works in the People's Republic. An exhibition, ‘British graphic art, 1450–1956’, had already been staged in Beijing, and two exhibitions of Mexican art and one of Greek art were also organized in the same year. All these initiatives were signs of China's activism in the field of international cultural exchange; at the same time, they might also be seen as an attempt to limit the hegemony of the Soviet model in the artistic field. In this respect, it is worth noting that in the Socialist camp, especially in Eastern Europe, Western Neo-Realist progressive artists were considered an alternative to Soviet Socialist Realism, and several exhibitions took place in the early 1950s in Socialist bloc capitals.Footnote 51
The Italian initiative on art was managed by the Center for the Development of Economic and Cultural Relations with China. Nevertheless, the painter and art critic Mario Penelope who was also secretary of the Federation of Artists, which was under the control of the Italian Communist Party, was the actual promoter of the event.
The delegation included six artists: Aligi Sassu, Tono Zancanaro, Ampelio Tettamanti, Giulio Turcato, Agenore Fabbri, and Antonietta Raphael Mafai. They were bonded together by political belonging or affinity to the Communist Party and by their participation in the Resistance. Most of them would have been classified as representative of the Neo-Realistic school in figurative art.
The Italian artists’ experience of China was certainly positive. They were evidently impressed by the kind and generous treatment they received, as shown by Antonietta Raphael Mafai's gratification at the cash she received from the Chinese as payment for her works of art.Footnote 52 For Tono Zancanaro, after his return to Italy and for many years to come, the trip to China became a fundamental source of artistic inspiration: he portrayed Chinese young pioneers, ordinary people, cities, and countryside landscapes.Footnote 53 He had a specific interest in the organization of art education in factories, something that he considered fundamental to the progress of modern popular art and for the proper function of art in society.Footnote 54
The exhibition ‘Contemporary Italian artists’ was held in May 1956 in Beijing. Officially presented as evidence of the international openness of Socialist China to the world, the Italian painters’ work was mainly praised for its adherence to the canons of realism in its choice of subject matter, if not in the artistic styles and techniques. As Mafai noted in her diary, the works of Giulio Turcato, the only Abstract painter, were defined as puzzling, since the painter's subject matter was not immediately understood.Footnote 55
The Italian artists perceived the interest and the curiosity of their Chinese colleagues and yet, according to the sources, they seem to have been unaware of the significance the Chinese attributed to their works at that time. Had they been able to read Chinese, they would have gained some insight into the cultural and intellectual discourse behind the appreciation of their paintings. Yan Han, who wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, was the standing director of the Chinese Association of Artists and a veteran of the Chinese Communist artistic establishment, well known for his intense woodcut prints. In his work as an artist and professor of art, he always emphasized that the most important feature of politically engaged art was the choice of subject, and that the choice of an appropriate style should follow accordingly. This view complied with the Party's guidelines for cultural production that Mao Zedong gave in his Yan'an talks in 1942.Footnote 56 In his introduction, entitled ‘Progressive thinking, unique style’, Yan suggested that adherence to Realism, conceived of as the only way for an artist to really ‘serve the people’ as Mao Zedong had indicated, could not simply be reduced to a celebration of the Socialist construction; it had to be concerned more with the political and moral attitude of the artists than with a specific style of painting or choice of subjects:
The six famous progressive artists who had come to visit China have all joined the anti-fascism partisan war, and they have lived close to the masses, so their art is in service of people's progress, and they have acquired fame, and have become an advanced strength of support in the artistic circles.
The painting ‘Café’ by the famous painter Aligi Sassu, by portraying the appearance of the upper class characters in a capitalist society, makes us understand the decadent life of the bourgeoisie. The people portrayed in the painting, even if they think that from the elegant vanity of the café they could search for a weapon in order to remedy to the emptiness of life, in the end are people whose life has the melancholy taste of loneliness. At the same time, Sassu is an able painters of horses, and through the representation of different horses, he expresses romanticism and the active spirit of painting. So these paintings are really moving.
The works of art of Italian progressive painters are mostly sympathetic with peasants and workers, and they show their difficult life. Works of art such as Sassu's ‘Workers’, Giulio Turcato's ‘Mine tunnel’, Ampelio Tettamanti's ‘Workers’ and ‘Picking rice’, and Tono Zancanaro's ‘Women working in the paddy fields’ inform us about the sufferings and the misery of workers and peasant under capitalist oppression. The famous painter Ampelio Tettamanti, who once belonged to Cubist school, in order to better express his advanced thinking, in order to give his art to his people, and to make them easier to accept it, has worked hard to cancel the formalistic influence of Cubism and he has fully adopted the modes of Realism. [. . .]
By the way of these peculiar works of art, we can have a better knowledge of the life of Italian people and of their art; at the same time, we believe that the Italian people, on the basis of the magnificent tradition of their artistic ‘Renaissance’, will make bloom new beautiful flowers.Footnote 57
Yan Han was aware that the Italian paintings shown to the Chinese public did not comply with the canons of Soviet Socialist Realism and its emphasis on the brilliant present and future that the revolution would bring. Still the Italian paintings portrayed life in a decadent capitalist country and the heroic partisans in the anti-fascist war, and in so doing they emphasized that the moral duty of artists was to denounce the injustices of society. As such, they could be considered consistent with Mao's call for putting art and literature to the service to the people and the dictates of Realism were not questioned. Nonetheless, these works suggested to the Chinese observers that engaged art did not require artists to subsume their creative endeavours to rigidly defined aesthetic or technical criteria in accordance with the Soviet model. While the latter was founded on political and ideological bases, Yan suggested that respecting national traditions was also fundamental to artistic progress. His argument resonated with contemporary debates about the importance of ‘national painting’ (guohua) which were current in Chinese artistic circles at that time.Footnote 58
Notwithstanding its significance, the exhibition of Italian painters in 1956 China was not destined to have a long-term impact on the development of Chinese revolutionary art. Nor did the cultural cooperation between China and Italy gain momentum from this event. The prospects of a fruitful interaction in the field of figurative art slowly declined after the Italian artists went back home. The end of the Hundred Flowers Movement a year later and the emergence of a stronger cultural nationalism with the launch of the Great Leap Forward in 1958 drastically reduced the possibilities of cultural cooperation developing between Italy and China as Calamandrei had envisioned just a few years earlier.
Conclusions
The attempt to establish stronger cultural relations between China and Italy in the mid-1950s was a reflection of a slow restructuring of the PRC's position in the international system.
Although its alliance with Moscow was not yet being questioned, China developed a new political interest in Western Europe and worked to establish a positive image by means of a more sophisticated cultural diplomacy. In Italy a latent dissatisfaction with the rigid binary logic of the Cold War in progressive intellectual circles facilitated the emergence of an attitude towards the People's Republic that was less influenced by ideological prejudices.
The experience of the Italian cultural delegation led by Piero Calamandrei mirrored this changing context. If its practical impact on Sino-Italian cultural relations was less than the expectations it generated, it nevertheless contributed to redefining revolutionary China's cultural identity in the mind of the Italians. It was certainly part to the emerging wish to reach beyond the ideological bipolarity of the times.
Two aspects of the delegation's perception of Chinese cultural identity are worthy of consideration. The first was the importance that was attributed to the legacy of the anti-fascist Resistance which was viewed as a shared heritage of values and historical experiences. Choosing to read revolutionary China's society and culture through the lens of the anti-fascism movement, Calamandrei and his fellow travellers emphasized an idealized affinity between Republican Italy and Socialist China, notwithstanding the cultural, political, and ideological divide.
The second aspect is the overwhelmingly negative judgement that was made of the impact of the Soviet model on Chinese cultural policy and cultural production. This view was matched by the conviction that the heavyweight Soviet influence on China was also the result of the cultural isolation of China from the West which was imposed by the logic of the Cold War. Breaking this isolation would help China to develop the artistic and cultural potential created by the revolution. For Calamandrei and his fellows, Italy—and Western Europe—had to contribute to this goal, with the hope of laying the foundations for a long-term transformation of East–West relationships.
