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Documenting the Heroic Rescue of Soviet Paintings in The Desert of Forbidden Art
By Ernest Hardy Wednesday, Mar 9 2011

Details
The Desert of Forbidden Art
Directed by Amanda Pope
and Tchavdar Georgiev
Opens March 11, Cinema Village

At its core, Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev’s engrossing documentary is a hero’s tale: Archaeologist and frustrated painter Igor Savitsky rescued more than 40,000 Soviet artworks (mainly paintings) from obscurity—tucked away in family closets and under beds, used as patching for roofs—and created a museum in the outback of Uzbekistan to house them. Many of the salvaged paintings are now considered 20th-century avant-garde masterpieces. After being told by one of his art heroes that his own work was rubbish, Savitsky devoted himself to recovering work that had run afoul of Stalin and the government-sanctioned Socialist Realism movement, which ruined not only careers but lives, as is painfully detailed in the film. Using wit and cunning, the obsessive Savitsky was able to con the government into providing funds for the creation and maintenance of his museum of dissident art. Pope and Georgiev let their camera linger on this collection, and create a dense but accessible context that illuminates the deadly political, religious, and historical tensions that made life precarious for the work and its creators—pressures that still linger today. It’s a must-see for anyone interested in art.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-03-09/ ... idden-art/

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Deser ... 5270678632

Art of Mu Xin survives oppression of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution
By Carrie Golus
News Office

Mu Xin, Spring Brilliance at kuaiji, 1977-1979

During the Cultural Revolution in China, which lasted a decade (1966 to 1976), artists and intellectuals experienced a level of oppression that is difficult, even now, to comprehend.

In an attempt to survive during this period, artist and writer Mu Xin held low-profile posts and chose not to participate in official life. Even so, he was imprisoned three times, and more than 20 book-length manuscripts and hundreds of paintings that he had produced in secret were destroyed.

Under these conditions, most artists in China stopped creating art as self-expression. Mu Xin, however, continued to write and paint, even though he risked his life to do so. Remarkably, some of the work he produced during this period and immediately afterward has survived and will be exhibited for the first time at the Smart Museum of Art beginning today.

“Mu Xin is really a remarkable case,” said Wu Hung, the Harrie H. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Art History and the College and co-curator of “The Art of Mu Xin: Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes.” Wu discovered Mu Xin in the early 1980s, after the artist had immigrated to the United States.

Mu Xin, Prison Notes, 1971-1972 (detail)

“I was struck by the sense of natural beauty in his paintings, which draw upon Chinese and western classical aesthetics and also by the way he dealt with the trauma of the Cultural Revolution,” Wu said. “Other painters dealt literally with this trauma, while he internalized it and produced paintings that were so tranquil and so beautiful.” Soon afterward, Wu organized the first exhibition of Mu Xin’s work, a show at Harvard University.

Mu Xin was born in 1927 in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, to an wealthy, aristocratic family. Like most intellectuals in the late 1940s, he rallied around Mao Zedong’s vision for a new China, but he quickly became disillusioned. Between the Communist victory in 1949 and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, his family was dispersed, imprisoned or killed and their estate destroyed.

For Mu Xin, the harshest period came during the Cultural Revolution, when, Wu explained, “every school, institute and factory had its own jail.” From 1971 to 1972, Mu Xin was confined in one of these makeshift prisons, an abandoned air-raid shelter in Shanghai. The conditions in these so-called “people’s prisons” were brutal; inmates were routinely denied food, medical care, exercise, even light.

One thing that was provided was paper, so prisoners could write the forced confessionals known as “self-criticism.” During his incarceration, Mu Xin stole 66 sheets of this paper, covering both sides with tiny, meticulous script and hiding his writings in the cotton padding of his prison uniform.

Mu Xin was certainly not the only prisoner who continued to do creative work in jail––but the fact that the “Notes” were never discovered and that he was able to leave with them intact, is almost miraculous. “I was jailed at exactly the same time,” Wu said, “and I also wrote novels and so on. You wanted to survive intellectually, not just physically. But when I was transferred to a camp, I destroyed my own work.”

The worn, ink-blotched, almost illegible sheets offer a powerful record of Mu Xin’s mental life in prison. “His writings have nothing to do with the real world. They are concerned primarily with fantasy,” said Wu. “They deal with philosophy, literature, ancient Greek art. He lived in harsh conditions, but he was not a slave to them; he was able to transcend them.”

After Mu Xin left China in 1982, several collections of his essays and poetry were published in Taiwan, where he was regarded as an undiscovered genius. His “Landscape Paintings,” 33 gouache and ink works, were created while he was under house arrest in the late 1970s.

Unable to work during the day for fear of discovery, Mu Xin produced the paintings under cover of darkness. “By day I was a slave,” Mu Xin has said of this period, “by night, I was a prince.”

These small works depict imaginary and real sites drawn from the tradition of Chinese landscape in painting and poetry; their titles evoke an ancient cultural past. At the same time, the influence of Western artists is clear, especially Leonardo da Vinci, whom Mu Xin has called “my early teacher.”

Many Chinese artists have struggled with the desire to reinvent modern art while remaining loyal to traditional Chinese subject matter, said Alexandra Munroe, Director of the Japan Society Gallery in New York and co-curator of the exhibition.

However, Mu Xin’s artwork “transcends the East-West polemic that has traditionally framed the debate,” she said. “The fact is that Mu Xin’s painting stands alone in modern Chinese art.”

As a counterpoint to the exhibition, the Smart Museum will present “Exposure: Chinese Photography from the Smart Museum Collection.” This show of six large-scale photographs and photo-based installations features prominent artists such as Rong Rong and Qiu Zhijie.

“The Art of Mu Xin” opens today with a gallery talk at 5 p.m., led by co-curators Wu and Munroe, and a reception until 8 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through Sunday, March 31.

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/020124/muxin.shtml

Project Willow wrote:Thanks for those Vanlose.

I was aware of the Desert documentary and mused that it probably contains its own pro-US (facade) slant. Regardless these are heartening examples from overtly oppressive systems.

nathan28 wrote:To throw in my unsolicited opinion...

nathan28 wrote:If you mean "high art" IDK. It's hard to know where to draw the line.

nathan28 wrote: I'm not an "artist" though when I was an adolescent I thought about it a lot but got scared away by the total lack of money and b/c I felt like it was just kind of narcissistic.

Project Willow wrote:

nathan28 wrote: I'm not an "artist" though when I was an adolescent I thought about it a lot but got scared away by the total lack of money and b/c I felt like it was just kind of narcissistic.

That's not an uncommon opinion any longer, but would you consider a novelist, an editorial writer, or a musician to be narcissistic? If not, then what does that signify about visual art, is it failing its audience in some way?

Project Willow wrote:That's not an uncommon opinion any longer, but would you consider a novelist, an editorial writer, or a musician to be narcissistic? If not, then what does that signify about visual art, is it failing its audience in some way?

Canadian_watcher wrote:I think that one reason (one among many) for the disparity of appreciation between visual art and the other two media I've mentioned might be accessibility.

nathan28 wrote:All that crap about quests for meaning and 'authenticity' etc. that makes every single person sound like Joseph Campbell and the Bolligen Foundation and that whole faux-Hegelian nonsense, which is really, really the other side of "corporate". Paul Mellon was funding all those books. There just has to be a way to back away from all that horseshit. I'm just very averse to "meaning" if it isn't extremely byzantine, referential and ironic. Syriana and Magnolia are two of my favorite movies and they're about as transparent as video game code.