Customer Reviews

Chinese Propaganda Posters: From Revolution to Modernization

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A superb collection of good quality color and "black and white" plates that give an insiders peek of the efforts of Red China's propaganda machine. The books many illustrations are a feast for the eyes and mind on their own right, but also offer a historic perspective for the inclined. Here you'll find many examples of East meets West in illustrations that mix academic painting with traditional Chinese landscape painting, a very interesting combination.I thoroughly enjoyed this collection and recommend it highly to anyone interested in masterful visual art and or political sublimation.

This review concerns the original hardback edition in English, published by M.E. Sharpe.

Hardback: cloth over boards with sewn binding. In dustjacket. 240 pp, large format on heavy paper. About 200 illustrations, over half of them in color, and many of them full-page. 10 pp of Bibliographies.

Landsberger is true authority, having spent over 20 years gathering a prodigious poster collection while undertaking a lot of research. Thus he is an ideal guide. His editorial eye and the extensive text allows the reader to experience these as both political artifacts AND works of art. Because, after all, they're both.

And the images! Stunning, moving, banal, twisted, subtle, obvious, colorful. There's a lot more here than what I expected -- the rock-jawed, firm-muscled worker hero of the Soviet type is only one way the Chinese chose to communicate.

If I won the lottery, I'd start collecting this stuff.

TABLE OF CONTENTS HIGHLIGHTS
Traditional and Modern Propagation of Behaviour in China
- Precursors of Visual Propaganda
- Communist Visual Propaganda
- Communist Propaganda Poster Until the Four Modernizations Era

The Four Modernizations Era

The Future Symbolized
- Analysis of General Subjects
- Analysis of Specific Target Groups
- Analysis of Symbolism and Imagery

Epilogue

Notes
Publication Data of Posters
Bibliography (Chinese language sources)
Bibliography (English language sources)
Index