Revolutionary Historical Event Themes in the Nationalisation of Chinese Oil Paintings, 1950-1960

Abstract

Most current research on creating and nationalising Chinese oil paintings focuses on natural, social, and figure themes. Researchers have yet to pay attention to the revolutionary historical event themes. Thus, the researcher strives to take the oil paintings depicting revolutionary historical events created from 1950 to 1960 in the painting album The Art of the Party as examples to conduct research. This research aims to discuss how Chinese artists interpret revolutionary historical events and analyse their creative characteristics through historical storytelling, content observation, and textual analysis. Ultimately, the researcher tries to generalise the methods and regularities for Chinese artists to express revolutionary historical event themes. The researcher attempts to find the theme’s source, the methods or techniques to convey the theme and the spiritual connotation represented by the theme through data analysis. After that, the researcher strives to contribute new knowledge to studying the nationalised themes of Chinese oil painting.