Printed Art and Social Radicalism

[Marxism is the Most Lucid and Lively Philosophy] Portrait of Lu Xun by Li Yitai

Li Yitai China, born 1944
[Marxism is the Most Lucid and Lively Philosophy] Portrait of Lu Xun, 1974
Woodcut, oil based ink on Chinese paper

Museum purchase, 2001.0022
View full record The subject of this woodcut is the writer Lu Xun (1881-1936), the founder of the Creative Print Movement in communist China. The Creative Print Movement explored the use of woodcuts as ideological tools. Mao Zedong once called Lu Xun “the chief commander of the revolution in Chinese culture.” Lu Xun introduced European printmaking techniques and the work of social activist printmakers such as Käthe Kollwitz and Frans Masereel (both exhibited here) to Chinese artists.

Li Yitai has placed Lu Xun in an environment with clues to his intellectual interests. A portrait of Karl Marx is on the cover of one of the books on his desk, and Kollwitz’s print of “Black Anna” from The Peasants’ War series hangs on the wall.