From the Sino-Soviet “Ma Program” to the Sino-Romania “Luo Program”: A Tri-National Art History (1955-1962)

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the art world began learning comprehensively from the Soviet Union. From 1955 to 1957, the Soviet oil painter Konstantin Maksimov’s “Maksimov Training Class” at the Central Academy of Fine Arts established the dominance of the “Soviet School” of Socialist Realism in China. However, starting in the late 1950s, Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated, with differences becoming public at the 1960 “Bucharest Conference” in Romania. Simultaneously, Romania-Soviet relations also began to grow more complex due to historical and contemporary issues. Against this backdrop, friendship and mutual assistance gradually became the main theme of Sino-Romanian relations.

Consequently, just two months after the comprehensive withdrawal of Soviet experts from China in 1960, the Romanian oil painter Eugen Popa (Bo Ba) arrived at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts and conducted a two-year “Popa Training Class.” This introduced an oil painting pedagogy distinct from the “Soviet School,” one aligned with early Western Modernist art styles, thereby imprinting distinct political connotations onto different artistic choices. However, the closed nature of the training and the widespread marginalization of graduates upon returning to their home institutions also reveal the complexity of this subject within the international and domestic contexts of the time.

This lecture will review and discuss this intertwined art history of three nations, tracing the path from the “Maksimov Training Class” to the “Popa Training Class.”