Shen was in his final year in high school when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, the 1966-1976 campaign to restore ideological purity to China’s anti-capitalist revolution. His hopes of attending art school dashed with the closure of China’s universities, Shen joined the Red Guards and then the People’s Liberation Army, fully embracing the communist spirit of the times. In the PLA, his self-taught artistic talents were recognized, and he became one of the legions of propaganda artists who glorified workers, farmers, and soldiers in the Socialist Realism style of Soviet propaganda.What are we to think of the Vatican's choice of this man? If Shen paints the Pope, is it propaganda? Of course, it's propaganda. All official portraiture is propaganda! To say it's not propaganda is propaganda.
In 1974, during a tour of duty in remote Heilongjiang Province, Shen painted his most famous work, “Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland,” featuring three soldiers guarding the Sino-Soviet border from a watchtower. The piece was included in a 1974 exhibition at the National Art Museum in Beijing that was organized by Mao’s wife, who personally praised it.
Shen recalls, though, that when he eventually saw it hanging in the museum, he was stunned: The soldiers’ faces had been altered to adhere to the regime’s standards for revolutionary art: Their faces were fatter and redder to make them appear more healthy and heroic.
With the more robust soldiers in place, the picture was reproduced and turned into propaganda posters and Shen shot to fame; in the 1970s and ’80s, he was one of the best-known artists in China.
Shen laughs and says, "I stopped my propaganda work in the 1970s.... Even Church commission work, this is part of normal artwork, part of commission, and part of history." Yes, normal artwork, commissioned by powerful institutions and individuals, is propaganda. Whether Pope Francis is a saint or a devil or somewhere in between, this is propaganda:
ADDED: All right, Mr. Shen, I'm ready for my portrait...
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35 comments:
Propaganda or not, the painting is nice. It has a dynamic quality to it. Most papal portraits are of the subject sitting with his hands in his lap.
The painter of the Chinese propaganda image "Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland" has become the Vatican's portrait artist.
Somewhere, Karol Wojtyła is weeping.
The Doves look like they are about to attack. No better than rampaging chimpanzees.
I am Laslo.
For some reason this came to mind.
You're not going to go into the etymology of "propaganda"?
Yeah, the birds are ridiculous. It's the papal equivalent of a velvet Elvis. In the painter's case, the Cultural Revolution seems to have worked as intended. He can't stop himself.
I think it is pretty well known that Pope Francis in not a capitalist. But, he is also not a statist.
In the painting I see people of all races representing the Catholic Church's global reach and membership. Obviously the doves, symbolizing the Holy Spirit, seem ready to land on his shoulders granting him the approval of the Lord to spread the Gospel.
Francis' message of greater inclusivity and evangelical outreach for the church is needed. It is an organization that changes slowly. Fifty plus years after the reforms of Vatican II, Francis is pushing it further.
I don't think the propaganda is meant to condone Mao Zedong's form of communism.
If there is a message behind picking an Asian artist, it is consistent with his global outreach.
It almost says, "at least it's not another Italian".
Velvet Elvis...
Yes. Something your grandmother would have on the wall, along with The Last Supper.
At least there is no shadow of a blue dress hidden in the portrait. This artist seems to actually have some respect for the subject.
The Pope kinda looks like he could be surfing.
I am Laslo.
Of course official portraits have an official purpose. They are regularly ordered for CEO's of large companies, etc. I have seen plenty in boardrooms. I suppose it adds some sense of institutional continuity to see them there. A bit of a morale booster too. Seems to be a similar purpose to Roman patrician families keeping effigies of their eminent ancestors. But I dont know if one could call that propaganda. They aren't really meant to be seen by the general public. Or that's stretching the term propaganda pretty far.
Anyway, previous portraits of Popes are more in line with CEO portraits than this, which is rather hagiographical.
The guy is an ex-commie, so I suppose he would have been OK with JPII. JPII hired lots of ex-commies after all.
Birdemic 3: Not Even the Righteous Will Be Spared.
Red Guards Swiss Guards..what's the difference?
The pigeons are preparing to poop on the Pope.
How does anyone commission a masterpiece? it has to involve a certain amount of luck, eh.
There are classical painters out there; not everyone finds Francis Bacon portraits to be beautiful. Shen Jiawei's portrait seems to me to be entirely consonant, ahem, with the media/public persona of the reigning Roman Pontiff.
What happened to the Russian artist who was Shen's predecessor? Her work seemed solid and workmanlike.
I must wait until the next pontificate, I'm afraid, before Anselm Kiefer receives his commission for a new chapel at St Peter's.
It's a nice likeness of the Pope but the doves are trite and the throngs of people are creepily suggestive of a cult of personality.
Has no one else thought of this scene from Mission Impossible 2?
John Woo run amok.
That is a wonderful Tippi Hedren photo btw.
That poise, elegance and elan are hard to find these days.
She wasn't as good an actress as the photo implies, but what a photo.
Well, if Salvador Dali was good enough for the Bible, he's good enough to do a papal portrait. Another opportunity squandered by the Vatican!
On a more serious note, I think the Vatican chose a Chinese artist to help buck up the morale of Chinese Catholics, who suffer greatly at the hands of the regime. Now, the Chinese papers will have to cover the story as it's a real "local boy makes the big time" kind of story. It'll be difficult to tell this story & leave out that it's for the Vatican, much to the uneasiness of the regime.
He's traded one cult of personality for another. The black smoke of Satan has pervaded the Vatican these last two years and swirls alarmingly around the bishop of Rome.
CStanley said...
"[T]he throngs of people are creepily suggestive of a cult of personality."
Which is apt. You expect reform Catholics to love a liberal pope, but look at all the conservative Catholics who are functionally in thrall to him, unable to liberate themselves from the inertia of decades of reflexive ultramontanism.
I'm ultramontane and no apologies.
Goya would have painted that Tippi Hedren photo.
buwaya said...
"I'm ultramontane and no apologies."
I would have made the same claim myself two years ago, but the Francis disaster prompted me (as it must prompt anyone with intellectual honestly) to reassess. As I have explained at greater length, we have been lazy and sloppy in our use of the term "ultramontane," resting on the received wisdom that at Vatican I, the ultramontanes crushed their gallican rivals, and the council baptized the former as orthodoxy. That is, on close inspection, incorrect. Vatican I did not adopt the extreme claims of the ultramontanes, some of whom believed the pope to be personally infallible in each and every word from his mouth or pen, and most of whom believed that Rome should wield not only spiritual but political authority, almost after the fashion of a Catholic caliphate. Rather, the papal states would evaporate within months of the council's suspension, the council adopted a much narrower reading of the petrine charism, and while orthodoxy envisages a robust role for the bishop of Rome, the ultramontanes howled in protest at Pio Nono's endorsement of the Austro-German bishops' reply to Bismarck's ultramontane reading of Pastor aeternus.
In the postconciliar wasteland, conservative Catholics tended to be ultramontane because they saw Popes John Paul II and Benedict as counterweights to the awful reform catholic squishops and theologians who wanted to drive us directly into hell, or at very least take us there via South America. (The analogy is to reform, conservative, and othodox Jews.) It was easy to be casual and loose about our terminology when we had good popes. Now we have a bad one who wants to South-Americanize the Church, and I think we have to be honest and candid enough to recognize that those ultramontane tendencies were actually of instrumental value only, and that now their utility has disappeared, we should reconsider.
The analogy that I found most helpful was by NLM's Shawn Tribe: Noting that conservative Catholics have tended to cite our beloved Pope-emeritus' public masses as models, Tribe warned that we can easily be misread as making the ultramontane suggestion that the bishop of Rome's liturgical preferences have normative authority in the Church. They don't, and that was never the point. Rather, said Tribe, "Pope Benedict’s liturgies were indeed identified as exemplars in the recent past but that was not because it was the pope’s liturgy that it was an exemplar; rather it was an exemplar because they were liturgies celebrated according to sound liturgical principles. It is the principles that matter and we should keep that always closely in mind." Mutatis mutandis, same goes here. So say we all.
The Vatican has a pretty good record in sponsoring art. Maybe in a few centuries socialist realism will have a better rep than abstract expressionism.....However, I guess you could argue that Michelangelo had some cropping problems.
Peter,
You're not going to go into the etymology of "propaganda"?
Amen to that! It was the first thing I thought of. I'm puzzled that Ann didn't roll with it.
The Propaganda has a wonderfully varied and influential history: it's also significant that we all know, at least superficially, about the history of the Holy Office but about the Propaganda, not so much.
Half of the patibulum of the crucifix tucked into his cassock, suggesting a hammer. A mock crucifix pose. The folds in the pelligrina transforming into wrinkles. Only the white of the zuchetto remains. And framed by a Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band can club.
I love pop art
Whether Pope Francis is a saint or a devil or somewhere in between, this is propaganda:...
Well, that's the nicest possible way of putting it.
The word propaganda comes from the Roman Catholic Church. It originally referred to information put out by the Vatican Office for Propagating the Faith.
The gorgeous woman with the Raven is Melanie Griffith's mother and Dakota Johnson's grandmother.
Remarkable deterioration in just two generations. I'm speaking about appearance, of course. It's difficult to assess anything else since Melanie is obsessed with plastic surgery and Dakota's first role is, apparently, about a woman who allows herself to be exploited by a sado-masochist.
The more I look at it, the more I am creeped out. And thanks, McCullough, for pointing out a couple of elements I had missed.
But now I'm seeing some bizarre elements, too...
The only Caucasian in the crowd (perhaps there are others, since they are in shadow it's hard to tell) appears to be a boy whose face looks distressed and he's wearing a strange garment. Maybe it's a windbreaker jacket or something but it almost looks like he's bound up in semitransparent plastic wrap.
And then....there is a parrot near the Pope's left hand.
The hell??
There are other reasons for ultramontanism than the passing qualities of Popes. It is a matter of the independence of the local church, from the local political powers, who can easily capture the structure of their local church. The very last thing we want is something like a Russian Orthodox church owned by Tsar or Putin.
The matter was rather decisively settled decades ago, by Jaime Cardinal Sin. He was of course appointed by the Pope. The President of the Philippines would have preferred other churchmen, to suit his political purposes, but was unable to influence Popes or the Cardinal. In the end it was the Church that was the decisive check on his tyranny.
Inadequate Popes are transient.
If by ultramontanism all you mean is that the pope should appoint bishops rather than, say, cathedral chapters or civil authorities,I would entirely agree with that, although I would suggest that it is a practical consideration that augments the ecclesiological reason rather than standing alone. That's not the length and breadth of ultramontanism, by any stretch, but I'd agree that far.
Pope Julius had Michelangelo, Pope Francis has Shen Jiawei, I guess time will tell who made the wiser choice.
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