The value of human nature
First of all, it was the paper horse worshipped as a god that entered the custom of the New Year and became a prototype woodcut New Year picture. It is known that there are several kinds of paper horses in Song Dynasty, such as "Zhong Kui, Color Horse, Back Deer Horse". It has the content of avoiding evil spirits and the meaning of blessing. Some people think that the lost New Year pictures of Liu Songnian, Su Hanchen's Kaitai and Song Li's Sui Dynasty pictures are quasi-New Year pictures, meaning to pray for blessings. In fact, this kind of auspicious and auspicious picture that was put up for hanging during the Chinese New Year is recorded in many historical books. Although it is not a woodcut print or a customized product used by the general public during the Spring Festival, it shows that blessing is a universal festival psychology. When these wishes for blessing really become the theme of New Year pictures and enter the category of customs, the theme of woodblock New Year pictures will become Wang Yang's wantonness.
Facing the New Year pictures, people can intuitively see their own imagination. Life is rich, the family is happy, the weather is good, the grain is abundant, the official career is proud, the business is prosperous, the interpersonal relationship is harmonious, the world is peaceful, the old people live long, their children are disease-free, everything goes well, and they travel safely. All their desires and longings for life are on the New Year pictures. Among them, the image of money is the most common image in folk New Year pictures. The woodblock New Year pictures of Yangjiabu, Wuqiang and Yangliuqing are all cash cows, and their financial resources are rolling in. In Linfen, Shanxi, there are even paper horses that worship money, not to mention the ubiquitous folk god of wealth. But this can't be called money worship. In the farming era of material shortage, it is only an idealized symbol of happiness in life. In essence, New Year pictures are idealistic pictures. No matter how real life scenes and details there are in the New Year pictures, they all show the image world of ordinary people's idealism. Especially in the days of saying goodbye to the old and welcoming the new, these pictures are particularly infectious and intimate, bringing comfort, encouragement and hope to people; A year of entertainment is a lifetime of entertainment. What other folk arts can fully show people's life ideals and feelings? Therefore, the most important value of New Year pictures is spiritual value.
Another layer of folk content in New Year pictures is posted. Folklore is a kind of life rules and cultural norms that follow conventions and eventually become a kind of * * *. No one can go against it. There are strict rules on posting time (such as kitchen king, god of wealth, door gods, all kinds of paper horses, etc.). ), location (gate, screen wall, door, barn, kang wai, window, water tank, till, hatch, carriage, stable, pigsty, cowshed, etc. ) and the specific part and content of posting. It is a folk custom to paste a specific New Year picture at a specific time and location. Different regions, different living environments and different demands for New Year pictures will naturally emerge as the times require. As an intangible cultural heritage, it contains very rich cultural memories. Therefore, these contents are also one of the key points in the general survey of woodcut New Year pictures in China.
Woodblock New Year pictures are often an important tool for the general public to carry out moral and ethical norms, life knowledge education and cultural and artistic exchanges. Woodblock New Year pictures involve a wide range of history, religion, myths, legends, novels, production, architecture, scenery, opera, nature, games, festivals and social life. In the farming era, the charm of China traditional opera art is no less than that of today's movies and TV series. There are countless repertoires depicted in woodblock New Year pictures, and most of the local operas shown in China traditional opera New Year pictures are their own. Many repertoires that were once vivid in New Year pictures have long since disappeared. In addition, how many novels and legends have been moved to woodblock New Year pictures? "The Legend of the White Snake" and "Tianhe Match" alone have been described over and over again in various forms-single picture, multiple pictures, complete sets of comic books and comic books. As for countless New Year pictures depicting folk customs, they have recorded a lot of precious cultural information with the temperament of different regions and different times, and they are even more valuable wealth left by woodblock New Year pictures. It is particularly important to note that these pictures are unique perspectives of farmers. Farmers are the ancestors of woodblock New Year pictures. Their brushes and knives directly reflect their likes and dislikes, tastes, attitudes towards life, cultural psychology and values. A Yangliuqing woodcut New Year picture "One Man, One Sex, Hundreds of Birds" collected by Tashi Museum in Elmy, St Petersburg, Russia, expresses farmers' tolerant attitude towards people with different personalities and makes us understand people's pursuit of good interpersonal relationships. There is also a picture of "One-knife dish for pigs and sheep", which depicts that after the butcher killed a big pig, the pig complained to the jade emperor in the sky, and the jade emperor advised the pig to relax, because "pigs and sheep live in the world and only provide people with a' one-knife dish'". It is in this humorous way that farmers have solved the injustice caused by the law of the jungle in the world. Does this humor also contain a kind of ridicule and helplessness? These two New Year pictures, which deeply externalize the farmers' hearts, are deeply hidden in the remains of New Year pictures. However, these remains are scattered in the fields and no one knows.
It is particularly noteworthy that those woodcut New Year pictures which show social scenes and major events at that time in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China reflect farmers' political sensitivity and thinking vision, and their value is no less than that of current affairs magazines in metropolis. Many such works have appeared in Yangliuqing, Taohuawu, Yangjiabu, Xiaojiaochang and Wuqiang. They are unconventional, realistic and realistic in details. Before photography was popularized, these woodblock New Year pictures became dazzling portraits of society at that time. At this level, what other folk arts can be compared with it?
No one can answer how many pictures have been created in the history of woodblock New Year pictures for hundreds of years. New Year pictures are consumer goods. No one has preserved them, and no one regards them as history and culture. Even when they disappeared in the 20 th century, they were still ignored and collected by the world, not to mention all kinds of man-made destruction and damage. But now as long as an ancient painting or an ancient version is found among the people, most of them are orphans who have never seen it! There should be thousands of New Year's resolutions in China and abroad. In such a vast array of woodcut New Year pictures, there are three-dimensional images of China people in the farming era, a wide-angle life and society, and spiritual feelings that have disappeared in the past. The humanistic value of woodblock New Year pictures can be said to be bottomless and boundless.
The value of art
Another great value of woodblock New Year pictures is their artistic value. Its distinctive artistic features, complicated means of expression and high aesthetic content have formed a very unique aesthetic system. It is divided into three aspects, namely specificity, locality and regionality:
First of all, the artistic characteristics of woodblock New Year pictures come from the specific requirements of old customs. In order to meet the rich psychological needs of young people, it is characterized by fullness of pictures and prosperity of content. The pictures of New Year pictures are basically blank, and even the sky and the ground are enriched and filled with various images. Most of the characters in the painting are smiling, which is related to the taboo of not crying in 2008. All the children in the painting are strong and plump, everyone has new clothes, New Pants, and all the appliances are perfect, symbolizing the richness and auspiciousness of life. In order to express this longing, a large number of auspicious patterns (all kinds of animals, flowers, fruits, articles, dark eight immortals and purple auspicious clouds, etc. ) is added to the picture in the same way. Artists are not afraid that these swarming mascots are irrelevant, because this kind of auspicious celebration, which has been strengthened again and again, is people's wish for 2008. The artist's cleverness lies in the harmonious and beautiful combination of these dense images with decorative techniques. Therefore, joy, auspiciousness, prosperity, enrichment and decoration are the most prominent features of New Year pictures, and they are also an infectious beauty of New Year pictures.
It is the colors of woodcut New Year pictures that render the characteristics of this kind of New Year pictures. Most New Year pictures are overprinted. Overprint is only six colors at most. So the color must be concise and expressive. In order to meet the psychological requirements of the New Year, woodblock New Year pictures pursue bright and warm colors; Among all kinds of colors, fiery red is the main color, and it is also the most used. Because red is the main color of China culture. In terms of color relations, contrasting colors are often used. For example, the folk formula says, "red with green, a piece of meat;" Yellow with purple will not die "(Tianjin). "Red and yellow, hi evil spirit niang; Red heavy purple stinks its shit "(Shandong). All these experiences show that the tone of woodblock New Year pictures is contrast rather than harmony, so as to emphasize each other and make the picture strong and bright. The colors of New Year pictures are mostly made directly from plants and mineral raw materials, and mixed colors are rarely used. In order to make these simple primary colors expressive, the artist adopted the way of color alternation, making the whole picture colorful, mottled and loud, concise and rich, with strong impact. This is the unique color language of woodblock New Year pictures.
The locality of woodblock New Year pictures lies in its value. This kind of art, born in the field and raised in the countryside, is simple, optimistic and humorous. Artists cultivate in busy farming season and paint in slack farming season. They live in a remote hinterland and have nothing to do with the imperial literary inquisition. Throughout the history of China woodblock New Year pictures, none of them caused trouble by attacking the disadvantages of the times. They are farmers who entertain themselves, laugh and curse, and are free for one term. Therefore, the human feelings on the screen are all full-fledged peasant character forms. Farmers don't have much rational skills in painting, except for the stylized experience accumulated from generation to generation, which is their own nature and self-defeating talent. Although their images are sometimes simple and sometimes naive, they have a simple, naive, extremely vivid and natural local beauty. This local beauty contains an emotional freedom and nature.
At the same time, this peasant art is highly intelligent. The highest expression technique is homophonic image. In the farming era, farmers' educational level was limited, or they were simply illiterate. They skillfully use homophones to display beautiful words and phrases intuitively. There are two kinds of homophonic images. One is the homonym of an image and one or two words (such as the image of a chicken and the word "chicken"); The image of bat and the word "Fu"; Open the peel to reveal the image of multi-seed pomegranate and "multi-seed". ); The other is the combination of two or three images and the homonym of an idiom (such as the combination of horses, bees and monkeys and the homonym of the idiom "Hou Feng suddenly"); The combination of magpie and plum tree is homophonic with the idiom "beaming"; The combination of lotus and goldfish is homophonic with the idiom "more than every year, more than every year." Homophonic words and idioms are auspicious words to express happiness, so these images with special meanings are also called auspicious patterns. Strangely, the combination homophonic image that has nothing to do with life is very interesting here, showing people's yearning. Farmers are really clever. They cleverly bypassed the defect of illiteracy. Through these homophonic images, people can guess the meaning (idiom) in the painting. This idiom is well known, and anyone can slowly discover the idioms hidden in it through the images in the painting. On the one hand, this improves the interest of the picture, on the other hand, it also gives the viewer a pleasure of appreciation when guessing the theme in the painting. At the same time, the connotation of homophonic image itself has also been wonderfully expanded.
In addition to homophonic, there is another disharmonious auspicious image in woodblock New Year pictures. Disharmonious auspicious images are mostly derived from historical allusions, which are symbolic and moral in nature. For example, the flat peach symbolizes longevity, pine, bamboo and plum (three old and cold friends) symbolize everlasting friendship, and the carp Yue Longmen represents a kind of ascension, and so on. In New Year pictures, a large number of homophonic and discordant images are matched with various pictures of New Year pictures, forming a strong, rich, beautiful and romantic scene. This peculiar painting atmosphere and realm can only be seen in New Year pictures.
Another thing that can reflect the extraordinary value of woodcut New Year pictures is its regionality. Woodblock New Year pictures cover almost the whole of China. Except Qinghai, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Xinjiang and Jilin, almost all have their own woodblock New Year pictures. Due to the regional diversity, ethnic diversity, different cultural attitudes and customs in China, woodcut New Year pictures are different in subject matter, genre, style, techniques and production methods, showing a colorful situation.
The portrait of the Northern Year is as bold as Yangjiabu and Wuqiang, while the portrait of the Southern Year is as delicate and lovely as Taohuawu and Foshan. But look closely, only the painting styles of the northern producing areas are far apart. For example, Yangjiabu, Gaomi and Wuqiang in Hebei are located between Lin Mang and the countryside, with strong local flavor and the most mellow peasant temperament; Zhuxian Town, Henan Province is located in the hinterland of the Central Plains. The history of engraving can be traced back to the Song Dynasty, and it still has the elegance and atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Tianjin Yangliuqing is located in the capital. In order to meet the aesthetic requirements of urban families, it advocates elegance and beauty. In the middle and late Qing Dynasty, with the intervention of urban professional painters, advanced painters made their mark in local painting workshops. Woodblock New Year pictures show a positive trend towards urban literati paintings, and at the same time absorb foreign nutrition in composition and techniques, so hand-painted paintings become more and more exciting, and with gold and silver ornaments, they reach the other extreme. Although the origin of these northern woodblock New Year pictures belongs to the northern rural art, they all have their own characteristics.
Further, Yangjiabu and Wuqiang New Year pictures, which are also characterized by the northern peasant temperament, also have great differences in artistic personality. The cultural background of Yangjiabu is Qilu culture, which is strong, masculine, vigorous and optimistic. Wuqiang's cultural background is Yanzhao culture, full of vigor and spicy taste. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, it introduced the popular "caricature" in the city, and many ridiculous, ironic and even weird pictures appeared, vividly showing the personality of people in this land of Zhao Yan. This is what Yangjiabu does not have.
Due to the great differences between natural and geographical environment, the traditions of history and folk customs are different, and the theme and genre of New Year pictures also have their own characteristics. Yangjiabu is cold in winter and the walls are thick. In New Year pictures, there are "window tops" and "windows" specially pasted on windows. In the countryside of Yangliuqing, there are water tanks at home to store drinking water. So there is a kind of crude road goods "cylinder fish" which is half printed and half painted, and it is specially attached to the wall above the water tank. Every time the cylinder head is opened, the bright red and green fish shadow staggers into the cylinder, such as swimming in the cylinder; Rural areas in Hebei like lanterns, so Wuqiang's "Lantern Square" is the main project in New Year pictures. There is a big sandstorm in Shanxi, so there is a kind of New Year pictures hanging on the cabinets and doors, which are called "dust blowing paper", one is for decoration and the other is for covering dust. These different paintings will be described in all volumes of this atlas.
In the long historical process, each producing area has formed its own set of production experience and artistic and technical characteristics, and also created a number of typical New Year pictures that are deeply loved by the public and enduring. For example, Yangliuqing's New Year pictures "There is still more than one year", Mianzhu's "Door God", Zhuxian Town's "Big Head", Taohuawu's "Harmony", Yangjiabu's "Deep Mountain Tiger", Wu Qiang's "Six Boys Fight for the Head" and so on. In today's globalization, these artistic images, which have been circulated for hundreds of years, have become the most dazzling and charming symbols of folk culture in these producing areas and even in China.
Another important contribution of China woodblock New Year pictures is carving. As mentioned earlier, woodblock New Year pictures began with woodcuts since the Tang and Song Dynasties. In the Song Dynasty, the workshop was mainly carved with scriptures, and the origin of large-scale production of New Year pictures was not formed until after the middle of the Ming Dynasty. Engraving books belongs to ancient book culture, while printing New Year pictures belongs to folk culture. The former is mostly in cities, while the latter is in rural areas. From a big perspective, book engraving is influenced by literati's aesthetics, advocating elegance, exquisiteness, implication and poetry; The printing of New Year pictures is subject to the requirements of public aesthetics and customs, and it pursues distinctiveness, intensity and enthusiasm. Therefore, the techniques, techniques and aesthetics of seal cutting are completely two languages. The origin of many New Year pictures is skilled in carving techniques and superb in carving skills, which can be called the top grade of wood carving. But the lines are simple and smooth, and the knife moves with emotion, which is extremely vivid and full of tension; Print out the picture, the version is full of flavor. If we compare the classic editions of Huizhou School and Jinling School in Ming and Qing Dynasties with the ancient editions of New Year pictures of Yangliuqing, Zhuxian Town, Wuqiang and Yangjiabu, we can see at a glance that they are completely two aesthetic worlds. The contribution of woodblock New Year pictures to the history of woodblock printing in China is "half of the country". Woodblock New Year pictures are the great heritage of China folk art. Due to the long and vertical historical changes, diverse and horizontal geographical backgrounds, unique and profound New Year customs, and the creation of talented artists from generation to generation, New Year pictures have developed into a peak of China culture. Above the summit, it is almost overcast and brilliant.
It most clearly describes the spiritual world of people in the farming era, most vividly expresses people's spiritual yearning, and most richly expresses the panorama of social life in that long historical era. Therefore, woodblock New Year pictures are the leading folk art in China.