By Paul Bevan
Reviewed by John A. Crespi
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August, 2016)
In his Introduction, Paul Bevan relates how he borrowed the title of his book, A Modern Miscellany, from the English name of the early 1930s magazine Shidai huabao (時代畫報), one of many pictorials that he consulted in his research. The wide-ranging content of these popular periodicals, he explains, is reflected in the eclectic topics he takes on in the book. Indeed, to read Modern Miscellany from cover to cover is to be immersed in a formidable array of cultural minutiae, all researched with admirable diligence, and most of it related, directly or indirectly, to the development of the Chinese cartoon, or manhua (漫畫), across about a dozen years from the late 1920s up through the start of the War of Resistance against Japan. Through it all, Bevan forwards several arguments about the period. First, he argues for recognition of manhua within the canon of Chinese modern art alongside accepted modernist works such as those of the Storm Society (決瀾社) artists of the same era. Second, the book aims to extricate manhua from a nationalist perspective that insists on linking cartoon art and artists to a discourse of patriotic, anti-imperialist resistance. In place of that narrative, Bevan demonstrates a transition from an ideology of “art for art’s sake” influenced by English Decadence in the late 1920s, toward a left-wing “art for life’s sake” approach from the mid-1930s onward. Both arguments have strong merits. China’s manhua are underappreciated in the history of modernism in Republican China, and manhua undoubtedly did shift to a more political stance through the 1930s, largely in response to the global spread of fascism and, closer to home, the threat of Japanese invasion. The book supports its two arguments through exhaustive engagement with primary sources, drawn mainly from an impressive array of newspapers and pictorial magazines, both English and Chinese, as well as letters and other ephemera from multiple archives. Modern Miscellany does an excellent job of fact-checking biographical detail on China’s cartoonists and their associates. In the process Bevan reveals a number of errors in both primary and secondary sources, while also providing a paper trail invaluable to future researchers. Quite often, however, the very richness of the sources lures the author into lengthy digressions that distract from the core arguments. This is a book with a lot to offer, but one whose focus would be sharper, and page count shorter, with some judicious editing.
Modern Miscellany is structured in three parts that, as a whole, describe manhua’s increasing engagement with politics from the late 1920s to the late 1930s. Part One, “The Beginnings of the Modern Chinese Cartoon,” comprises two chapters that explore in turn the arts pictorial Shanghai Sketch (上海漫畫) and the social and artistic circles of Shanghai socialite and cultural entrepreneur Shao Xunmei. The explicit argument of these two chapters is to establish manhua as integral to the modern art scene in China at the time, and to demonstrate its relative disengagement from overt political discourse. Implicitly, and perhaps more interestingly, these two chapters show how modern Chinese cartoon art was not born from a particular event, such as the founding of the Cartoon Society (漫畫會) in 1926, or created as a form of patriotic resistance to warlords and imperialism, but rather was spawned within a matrix of commercial activities and artistic borrowings centered upon the genre of the pictorial magazine. We witness how early cartoon art develops and takes shape in Chapter 1, which registers the keen interest that members of the Cartoon Society, such as Ye Qianyu, Zhang Guangyu, and his brother Zhang Zhenyu, took in illustrated magazines like Vanity Fair that found their way to Shanghai. Similar to their close comrades in literary modernism, China’s cartoonists found inspiration in the foreign periodical press. This reliance on popular magazines, rather than, say, formal study of art in Tokyo or Paris, goes far toward explaining the unsystematic way that cartoonists emulated the styles of international art movements such English Decadence, Cubism, Fauvism, and Symbolism.
Chapter 2 extends the inquiry into the cultural ecology of the cartoon through the person of Shao Xunmei, facilitator of the several enterprises in which early cartoonists such as Ye and the Zhang brothers were involved, from pictorial magazines to fashion and furniture design. The discussion of Shao includes a section on his view of pictorials as a medium of popular education far more accessible to the “masses” than publications by members of the literary elite, including their attempts at “proletarian literature.” One could envision chapter 2 extending this intriguing topic further, perhaps with a focus on cartooning as an emergent pop art, straddling the border separating entertainment and politics. Instead, it tapers off with a discussion of two events that occurred quite some years after the main focus of Part One: a disparaging caricature of Shao on a cartoon magazine cover from late 1935, and an emotional letter Shao wrote to his erstwhile lover Emily Hahn in 1939. Both of these items are interesting in their depiction of Shao as a misunderstood and somewhat tragic figure, but connect only tenuously, or “miscellaneously,” to the proposed goals of the chapter.
Chapters 3 and 4, comprising Part Two, pick up the theme of artistic influence through accounts of Chinese cartoonists’ reception and emulation of Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias and German artist George Grosz. These two chapters act as a hinge to show the mid-1930s shift in cartoon art from “soft” entertainment, as influenced by Covarrubias’ slick decorative caricatures, to “hard” social critique, as seen in a brief vogue for Grosz’s early period line drawings. In both cases Bevan undertakes an ambitiously thorough documentation of available sources, reconstructing with great precision the effect these two artists had on the Chinese cartoon. Bevan first relates in detail Covarrubias’s 1933 visit to Shanghai, during which Shao Xunmei entertained the Mexican artist, often in the company of Ye Qianyu, Zhang Guangyu, and Zhang Zhenyu. He then observes the impact of Covarrubias’s style on Chinese cartoonists, many of whom closely imitated his work as they encountered it in Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Chapter 4 details the selective appropriation of George Grosz’s art by a “second wave” of younger Chinese cartoonists, including Lu Zhixiang and “China’s New Grosz,” Cai Ruohong. One of the great finds of the book emerges from Bevan’s comparison of Grosz’s 1933 photomontage “American Landscape” from Vanity Fair with the 1934 “Shanghai Landscape” (上海風景) featured in the manhua pictorial Modern Sketch. The latter is such a close copy of the former that one has to wonder if the anonymous, presumably Chinese artist of “Shanghai Landscape” was paying homage to the German artist, or shamelessly plagiarizing him, or, somehow, both. Whatever the case may be, the striking visual correspondence speaks directly to the image-driven, ethically ambiguous dialogue between the pictorial presses of Shanghai and New York.
The final three chapters of Modern Miscellany, grouped under the heading “The Dissemination of Chinese Political Art,” examine the promotion of the Chinese cartoon through its exhibition in international and domestic contexts. Chapter 5 recounts in great detail Trinidad-born, Moscow-trained cartoonist and journalist Jack Chen’s travels within and beyond China from 1936 to 1938, with particular attention to his enthusiastic promotion of Chinese cartoons and woodcuts in a traveling exhibition to Europe and the US. Chapter 6 describes the November 1936 First National Cartoon Exhibition in Shanghai, an event that arguably represents the apogee of pre-war Chinese cartooning. The final chapter returns to the peripatetic Jack Chen as he toured China in the year 1938, in a loop from Hong Kong and Guangzhou to Hankou and Yan’an, and back to Hong Kong, from whence he returned to Europe. The chapter also includes a section on the versatile cartoon artist Hu Kao, who accompanied Chen to Yan’an, and whose work is cited to demonstrate a “turn to the left” among Chinese cartoonists, who by this time, Bevan argues, were part of a global anti-fascist art movement.
These three chapters do the important work of bringing to light unexamined aspects of Chinese modern art, and specifically cartoon art, of the time. Jack Chen in particular is a fascinating character whose unique ethnic and racial background, coupled with a missionary zeal for leftist art, deserve deeper probing. The First National Cartoon Exhibition likewise asks for more analysis, not least as a conscious intervention by Chinese cartoonists—who were a remarkably tight-knit, mutually supportive group, especially compared to writers of the time—into the very definition of China’s modern art as it was understood in the inter-war years. Bevan’s meticulous research into both Chen and the Exhibition opens the way toward these and other projects, though here as elsewhere readers would certainly welcome some filtering out of extraneous information.
In his Conclusion, Bevan proposes that the 1930s saw “the formation of what could be termed the ‘Chinese cartoon’,” an art form that, following a decade of experimentation, evinced a “national style.” It is an attractive idea, and one that invites closer scrutiny. Modern Miscellany itself points out repeatedly how manhua artists borrowed, sometimes creatively, sometime slavishly, from artistic imagery high and low, native and foreign, popular and propagandistic, decorative and didactic. What could be more heavily stressed is how this culture of appropriation flourished within the distinct milieu of the Chinese treaty port, a cosmopolitan, commerce-driven, culturally hybrid space. Might we venture to say, then, that the most accomplished manhua artists developed not national styles but “trademark” styles, with all the commercial baggage that term implies? In any event, answers to questions like these await further studies into the nature of this intriguingly marginal visual genre. With its careful scholarship and respect for historical accuracy, Modern Miscellany helps lay a foundation for many years of manhua research to come.
John A. Crespi