Thursday, June 19, 2014

Adam House lends itself to many activities and currently houses a wonderful exhibition, The Poster Art of Modern China.  The material comes from the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Center.  You can see it all on their site but it's much more impressive in the flesh as it were.

Here's Mao the culmination of the Marxist Leninist ideal.  We can see his forebears Stalin, Lenin and Marx.  It looks as though Marx is there twice but I think one of them must be Engels.  Their ideas were the same but their noses are slightly different.
 I love this one of the infamous Gang of Four being done to death by a terribly young set of communist heroes.
This one, which celebrates the founding of communist China is fascinating.  It was first printed in 1952 and revised several times as political tides ebbed and flowed.  Gao Gang who was to the left of the bearded chap at the extreme right of the front row disappeared in this post 1956 version and during the Cultural Revolution Dong Biwn's face replaced Liu Shoaqui's (dark suit third from the left).  Then after the Cultural Revolution Gao and Liu were reinstated (both were dead by that time).  All this before Photoshop had been invented.

No comments: