New painters - and wine

I’m not the only one casting my mind back to the murderous behaviour from which this part of the world has suffered in the past century as Empires came unstuck and national fervour gripped men’s minds. Eastern Approaches and Open Education both have postings on the Balkan Wars of a hundred years ago.

These (and other) wars were, of course, an important focus for many Bulgarian painters some of whom were official war artists.

My booklet on Bulgarian Realist painters was very much a first draft – I felt if I waited for the missing information on various painters, nothing would ever be produced. And it’s only now that I’m back in Sofia that I can think properly about its distribution – so far it has been sent only to the Sofia galleries, to Regional municipal galleries and to EC Embassies in Sofia. With encouraging responses (apart from the Embassies!) It’s a useful calling card to show how serious I am! Now I need to approach the big Hotels – and the National Gallery who (amazingly) don’t really have anything for the foreign visitor.

And, slowly I can update the entries both on artists and galleries. Yesterday was a good example. The Inter Nos Gallery (sadly its website no longer seems active) is just at the junction of Bvds Levski and Ignatieff  (just round the corner from where Alexander Bozhinov built his house in Nikolai Pavlovich St) and has I think the best collection of the Bulgarian Realist painters in the country.
This wasn’t obvious to me on my first few visits – and I got to feeling guilty about visiting more since I haven’t so far bought anything.
But when Dr Stephanov saw my booklet, he opened up and I discovered some great paintings – and promises of more since (like many other Sofia galleryists) they have more stuff stored away in inaccessible places than on display.
So, for example, one painter whose name was known to me - Constantine Mikrenski (1921-1999) – suddenly started to look very interesting (eg the one at the top of this post). My entry about him in the book is no more than his date of birth and death.
Why is it that I want to know more about the (dead) painters I like? Technically, it adds little to my appreciation - perhaps its intimations of mortality?

There are a lot of articles (and books) predicting the disappearance of the book. New Criterion has published an article with a very elegant (and passionate) defence of the book (and elegy to the death of second-hand bookshops) which I thoroughly recommend   

Once, staying overnight at an airport hotel in Los Angeles, I found myself without a book. How this happened I can no longer recall; it was most unusual, for by far the most useful lesson that life has taught me, and one that I almost always heed, is never to go anywhere without a book. (In Africa, I have found that reading a book is an excellent way of overcoming officials’ obstructionism. They obstruct in order to extract a bribe to remove the obstruction; but once they see you settled down for the long term, as it were, with a fat book, Moby-Dick, say, they eventually recognize defeat. Indeed, I owe it to African officialdom that I have read Moby-Dick; I might otherwise never have got through it.)Reduced in my Los Angeles room to a choice between television and the yellow pages—no doubt now also on the verge of extinction—I chose the yellow pages, and there discovered just how unusual my obsession with books was. I looked up bookstores, and found no more than half a page. Teeth-whitening dentists, on the other hand, who promised a completely renewed existence to their clients, a confident smile being the secret of success, and success of happiness, took up more than twenty pages. Not poets, then, but teeth-whitening dentists, are now the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Now sipping a superb new Bulgarian Chardonnay - Ethno - produced in the village of Sungurlare inland from Burgas on the Black Sea.

The 1944 communist takeover of Bulgaria

It was a throwaway phrase in the introduction to the superb Alexander Bozhinov book which I picked up earlier in the week which alerted me “Stoyan Venev pled for him before the People’s Court”. So even this Bulgarian trailblazer of satire (67 years of age when the communists swept into power in September 1944) was caught in the net of deranged and murderous suspicion (by virtue apparently of his foreign travels and bourgeois life-style) and condemned to a year in prison. He was lucky – compared to the fate of thousands of his compatriots!

As I was compiling my little book on Bulgarian Realist painters of the 20th Century I had noticed that many had had to emigrate in the immediate aftermath of the communist takeover – whether from painting (into cinema or theatre design) or from the country altogether. And that some who remained in the country (like Nikola Boiadjiev and Boris Denev) were totally banned from any artistic endeavour. But I had not understood just how savage the communist takeover in Bulgaria was in 1944 – by far and away the worst in the Soviet bloc. 

Forgive the length of this post - but we owe it to those killed in such circumstances to remember them - particularly when the nature of their demise is known by so few outside the country. A recent issue of the Vagabond journal has the clearest statement

The killings of opponents of the Soviet system started as early as 9 September 1944, the very day the Communists seized power in Bulgaria.
Nobody knows how many Bulgarians lost their lives in the first weeks of the "people's democracy," their only crime being their political opinion or their social position. However, the number of victims of the so-called People's Court, which was created to give legitimacy to the murder of politicians, artists, writers and even physicians considered "dangerous" to the new regime, is well documented. From December 1944 to April 1945 the court issued 9,550 verdicts, with 2,680 death sentences and 1,921 life terms. To understand why the Bulgarian Communists were a lot more cruel than anyone else in Europe at the time one needs to go no further than the numbers: the Nuremberg Trials against top Nazis issued just 17 death sentences.
If you are looking for a single day when the Bulgarian political class was decimated with one blow, you get 1 February 1945. On that day the People's Court sentenced to death 67 MPs and 22 ministers who had held office between 1940 and 1944, including the former prime ministers Dobri Bozhilov and Ivan Bagryanov. Also killed were the regents Prince Kiril, Bogdan Filov and General Nikola Mihov, nine secretaries to the palace, publishers and journalists of national newspapers, and 47 generals and senior military. They were shot dead on the same day, beside an unused pit left on the outskirts of the Sofia Central Cemetery after the Allied air-strikes in the winter of 1943-1944, and were buried on the spot. The mass grave was left unmarked and several years later was turned into an ordinary burial ground. In 1995, in lot 124 of the cemetery, a monument to the victims of 1 February 1945 was finally erected. The following year the Supreme Court posthumously repealed the death sentences.
The victims of the People's Court are just a fraction of the number of Bulgarians who suffered various forms of repression during Communism. Between 1944 and 1989 thousands of opponents of the regime were detained, interned or denied education or work advancement. The reasons for the repression were many and varied: accusations ‒ usually bogus ‒ of espionage and plotting against the Communist state, or opposing the forced collectivisation of agricultural land, or disagreeing with the Bulgarianisation policies toward the country's Muslims. Telling political jokes, wearing mini-skirts, having a "bourgeois" past or the "wrong" relatives could all land you in a labour camp. So could listening to Elvis Presley music. The total number of those repressed between 1944 and 1990 is estimated at about 300,000.

And a website devoted to the communist takeovers and rule in Central Europe is even more specific

The date of the communist coup – 9 September 1944 – was a signal for revenge and the start of blood-drenched Bacchanalia on the territory of the entire country. The victims of the class wrath were not only politicians, businessmen, lawyers, civil servants, police and army officers. The self-proclaimed “people’s revengers” attacked the Bulgarian intellectuals with the same zealousness: teachers, priests, journalists, writers, editors, artists, professors, lecturers and all kinds of people of the pen, of culture and of the spirit perished without trial or sentence in the cities, little towns and villages. It would be logical to ask ourselves why was the country’s cultural elite branded and persecuted as the most dangerous “enemy of the people”?

The indictment produced by the Sixth Panel of the so-called “People’s Tribunal” attached the following qualifications to the cultural elite: “career-seeking intelligentsia that had lost its touch with the people”, “public evil that needs to be cut out so that it would not contaminate the public organism”, “mercenaries of the pen and of speech”, “instigators and collaborationists” of the persons responsible for the national catastrophe, etc. The answer is very well known: propped on the bayonets of the occupiers, the communist upper crust followed the example of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917-1921. Without choosing its means, it showed determination to deprive the nation of the voice of free speech, and – as it proclaimed itself – “to cut the democratic values from the public organism”, to obliterate the notions of democracy, freedom and fatherland from public space, the carrier of these notions being the patriotic intelligentsia.

Thinking people are a barrier before any dictatorship, therefore the first task of usurpers is terror and genocide on a mass scale against the intellectual class.
Outstanding representatives of Bulgarian culture perished without trial or sentence in the first wave of the red terror: Danail Krapchev – journalist, writer and editor of the Zora [Dawn] newspaper, Yordan Badev – literary critic, Nencho Iliev-Sirius – writer, Konstantin Gindev – talented young poet, Boris Roumenov – satirist, Professor Lyubomir Vladikin, Rayko Alexiev – humorist, satirist and cartoonist, publisher of the Shtourets [Cricket] newspaper, beaten to death in prison.
A second large group of writers, journalists, scholars, artists and intellectuals were thrown into the Central Prison in Sofia and were given sentences of different length, combined with confiscations and fines. Among them were the writers Zmey Goryanin, Fani Popova, Yordan Stoubel, Dimiter Simidov, Georgi Kanazirski, Boris Makovski, the cartoonists Konstantin Kamenov, Alexander Bozhinov and Alexander Dobrinov, the journalists Hristo Bruzitsov, Krustyo Velyanov, Atanas Damyanov and Stefan Damyanov, Stefan Tanev, Matey Bonchev-Brushlyan, Dr. Peter Djidrov, Dimiter Gavriyski, who wrote for the leading daily papers in Bulgaria: Zora, Utro, Dvenvik, Slovo, etc., as well as dozens of other eminent figures in the sphere of culture. That group also included Professor Stefan Konsoulov, Professor Georgi P. Genov, the literary historian Professor Mihail Arnaoudov, Minister of Education in Bagryanov’s government for two months. Their life in prison is colourfully described in the miraculously preserved notes of Zmey Goryanin, "Sketches and Stories". Even when they were at such a critical moment in their lives and their endurance was put to the test, these internationally famous scholars succeeded in preserving their dignified behaviour and continued to live with their science and with their ideas. Their example has proven that only a man of the spirit is capable of bringing light, sensibility and nobility during times of sinister arbitrariness and social cataclysms, that only man’s creative genius has the strength of withstanding the sinister downfalls of history.
A part of the intellectuals who passed through the cells of the State Security and of the Central Prison were dispatched without trial or sentence directly to concentration camps that had been established under a special law and were given the name of labour-correctional communities: Bogdanov Dol, Koutsiyan, Rossitsa, Sveti Vrach, Belene, Doupnitsa, etc., where the writers Dimiter Talev, Slavcho Krassinski, Chavdar Moutafov, Pavel Spassov, Zvezdelin Tsonev and Yordan Vulchev, as well as the artists Alexander Bozhinov, Alexander Dobrinov and Konstantin Kamenov, were sent. A new phenomenon – political-literary toponymy – emerged in the geography of the Bulgarian literature. It linked the colourful names of small villages, localities and small towns in the countryside with the saga of prominent writers and creative artists. The spiritual elite of Bulgaria were banished to mines and stone quarries, to be replaced in the cultural centres by aggressive ignorance, marginal individuals and vulgarity. The concentration camps turned into coexisting spaces accumulating the energies of violence and the suffering, amongst which the freedom-loving spirit of the Bulgarian nation waned and died.
New martyrs were added to the prisoners of the first wave shortly after 9 September 1944 in 1946-1947: together with thousands of opposition figures from the Nikola Petkov Bulgarian Agrarian People’s Union and the Bulgarian Social-Democratic Party, emblematic names of the legal opposition became victims of terror, having stood up against the hegemony of the camouflage Fatherland Front: Trifon Kounev and Tsveti Ivanov – Editors-in-Chief of the newspapers Narodno Zemedelsko Zname [People’s Agrarian Banner] and Svoboden Narod[Free People], and also writers, journalists, public figures and freedom fighters. Standing at the crucial historic dividing line, they were condemned to suffer both for their political and moral compromises, and for their dignified and valiant fight to defend the democratic ideals and the independence of Bulgaria. Together with political leaders like Nikola Petkov and Krustyu Pastouhov, the writers carried on their shoulders the heavy cross of their re-enslaved nation and proved that the real artist is ready for self-sacrifice to defend his national dignity.
During the autumn of 1944, more than 30 thousand peaceful Bulgarian citizens were killed: slaughtered with axes, bludgeoned to death, shot at point blank, thrown off cliffs into precipices, burned, hanged or buried alive. The sense of impunity and arbitrariness, encouraged openly or behind the scenes by the leaders of the ruling Communist Party, notably Georgi Dimitrov, Traycho Kostov, Tsola Dragoycheva and Anton Yugov, made the public atmosphere fraught with aggressiveness of the reactions and with frenetic hatred. Mass paranoia, thirst for blood and vindictiveness flared. Frenetic mobs shouting death slogans attacked homes and offices, lynched, stampeded and clubbed to death innocent people in the streets merely because a finger had been pointed at them as “enemies of the people.” That was not a nationwide revolution, nor an uprising, nor a civil war, because there were no two fighting armed groups, as in 1923 during the insurgence. That was a political slaughterhouse. Life and the individual had lost their value, humanity was trampled and forgotten in the gigantic social and geopolitical collision. After World War II, when Bulgaria did not have even one casualty at the frontline, instead of peace and a spirit of constructivism on the basis of the protected status quo, the country was involved in a catastrophic psychological situation of self-extermination and moral genocide. The land of Bulgaria was covered with thousands of secret graves, its tolerant people were desecrated by fratricide and were stained with the blood of its own worthiest and most talented sons. The mass act of insanity reveals how it is possible with the mechanisms of ideology and politics to bring to extremes the mentality of the community so as to be directed in the service of party, power and imperialist goals. The unabated wartime aggression of the masses was easy to manipulate and to transform into political revenge-seeking by ideological profiteers and central offices of the party. The normal behavioural thresholds of the extremist individual were deliberately undermined in the direction of regression and barbarianisation so as to serve hidden power goals. And again, literature anticipated, caught and depicted the shadows of horror, fear and death in the spiritual space of Bulgaria. The writer Yana Yazova, a contemporary and witness of the events, recreated both concrete events and the frenzied rhythm of historical time, revealing its paranoid symbols and states. In her political and psychological novel "War", which was published in 2001, i.e., 25 years after her death and 55 years after the actual events, Yana Yazova documented the social, political and existential psychological motivations of terror and hatred, depicting the traumatically distorted mentality and the images of the “revengers” susceptible to manipulation, as well as the sufferings of the defenceless victims. 

Bulgaria had apparently about 100 concentration camps in the post-war period to deal with its various “dissidents” – in most cases those whose dress or joke sense was not acceptable.

Voices from the Gulag – life and death in communist Bulgaria(1999) looks in harrowing detail at this.

The photograph of bombed Sofia in 1944 is one of a series

Private collections

A mixed experience at the recently re-opened National Gallery of Art here in Sofia. It had been closed for refurbishment for almost a year (still is according to its website) and, frankly, is worse than it was before – with one major room still under repair and a small and inferior exhibition of the Bulgarian classics. Only the first few paintings by Mitov, Murkvichka and Vesin stood out from the collection.
Sadly they also have a really stupid display of contemporary “art” taking up some of the restricted space. Hardly surprisingly, they could offer me no book on their permanent collection – although I was able to buy a very nicely presented book about Alexander Bozhinov which the Gallery had produced in 1999. It's amazing the number of such books about its artists which Bulgaria has produced over the years. I've built up a nice little library collection!

The saving grace was the superb temporary exhibition they have of Hungarian works from the Gabor Kovacs collection

Gábor Kovács has been purchasing works of art for fifteen years, with the intention of creating a collection that offers a worthy representation of the history of modern Hungarian painting. Covering the period from the early 18th century to the present, the collection is comprised of more than 250 masterpieces.
The collection offers an almost complete account of the development that began with the Romantic and Realistic landscape representations of the 19th century, continued with the plein air painting of the Nagybánya school (now Baie Mare in Romania) and ended with the ”isms” of the first decades of the 20th century. Continuously enlarged, the Gábor Kovács Collection is one of the most prestigious private art collections in Hungary.

János Vaszary was one artist who caught my eye.

This is the first time I have seen an exhibition of a private collector – and follows hard on my spotting a stunning new book in the Humanitas bookshop in Bucharest about Romanian art collectors. It was in Romanian – but profusely illustrated and showing that we are not alone in our walls being crammed with paintings. In trying to find reference to it online, I came across this interesting site about private art collections in central Europe which contains this useful entry on Bulgaria’s first collectors

Two more paintings were added to my own collection yesterday – another Nikolai Tiholov

and a small Toni Todorov from Vihra’s current exhibition of that artist.

That brings my collection of Bulgarian paintings to about 120 – 100 of them by known artists, the others anonymous   

Does it really matter?

I had a premonition Obama wouldn’t make it – the sites which I was accessing wanted him to win and, I suspect, put a particular spin on the polls. In 2008 three points of Obama's putative lead in 2008 apparently vanished because people didn't like telling the pollsters they would be voting against him. And he didn’t have such a lead this time.

Of course, it was all down to swing states – in some of which the Republican power system has been disenfranchising voters. 

Obama seems a decent (if ineffective) guy. Romney also comes across in some ways as decent but, basically, he has disowned so many of the policy positions he has taken over the years that I would not know what I was voting for (except for the loony tea-party stuff his VP brings). 

In so many ways the election no longer matters – corporate power rules OK.

But we all want a good guy there – and we haven’t entirely given up hope on the community activist I almost met when I was placed in the Chicago mayor’s Office for a week in 1987 as part of the German Marshall Fellowship.  

Three years ago I had a post about making sense of public sector reform and, last year, I called in the clowns

Finally a great story about a Scottish guy trying to restore a Romanian palace

The painting is a wonderful Stanley Spencer - adoration of elderly men

Artist's studio in Sofia

I left Bucharest in mild fog at 08.00 on Saturday but, once across the Danube, Bulgaria welcomed me with blue skies and a superb display of autumnal colours - and also a typical culinary experience from Sylvie, starting with pumpkin soup. And great help from her two sons in transferring my belongings to the new flat.

  

Being given a foreign friend’s flat is a great cultural experience - as well as privilege. By definition there are shared interests – and therefore new books and objets d’art to explore and appreciate. My new flat here in Sofia is a bit of an artist’s studio – on the top floor of a 1960s 10 storey building with two huge, heavy rectangular windows in the slanted roof.  And the flat is liberally endowed with paintings, sculptures and books – with many of the books being on painting. So I am in my element – already having discovered a beautifully designed book on Bulgarian paintings in the 1920s – published in 1996 by Ruzha Marinska.  

For the last 5 years, my base in Sofia has been in the reasonably fashionable Lajos Kossuth St just off Xristo Botev. The new flat may only be 10 minutes’ walk from my old one but it is in the quartier of brutal socialist modernism and post-modern capitalistic brutalism – with one of the early huge Shopping Malls which are now slowly strangling the lifeblood of the vibrant Sofia which first attracted me cheek by jowl with the 10 and 20 story blocks of the 1960s. Fortunately I am still within the same easy walking distance of the swimming and keep-fit facility of Rodina Hotel.

Pork sausages, Marmite and....Romanian politics

One of the many pleasures I’m looking forward when I (Insallah!) get to Sofia at the weekend is at last visiting the shop of the guy who has sold me my haggi in the last few Januaries. Up until now, these small bags of succulence have been exchanged like quality drugs on quick encounters on Sofia corners. But Andy’s foods offers, amongst other British delicacies, pork sausages and also a strange dark jar with a yeast-based product (loved and hated equally by the world) whose name I now always forget – so forgive me as I use my usual technique of rattling through the alphabet to trigger off the old memory- that’s it MARMITE!!

I wonder if Andy has seen this article on this sausage event in the UK - and whether any of its products will show up in his Sofia shop?

The painting is a Stanley Spencer - "the sausage shop" - who is vastly underrated by the British cultural afficiandi.....And I know of it only because of Barbara's It's About Time site

Here in Bucharest, I can't begin to recount the latest nonsenses - apparently parliamentarians are now (for the third time!!) contemplating impeaching the President. This time they seem to have some merit on their side. But this place really has become Ruritania!!! 

Jules Pascin - man of the world from the Danube

Last year, while I was compiling my list of almost 150 20^th century Bulgarian painters whose work appealed to me, I would occasionally come across the name Jules Pascin – associated with (for me) unimpressive sketches being auctioned locally.

Slowly I learned there was more to the man – and that he had in fact spent little time in Bulgaria (even schooled for 6 years in Vienna) and was more famous in France and America for his paintings of women. Barbara’s It’s About Time blog gives a great series of these -which have, for me, more than a touch of Egon Schiele to them.
I have unashamedly stolen most of the text which follows from her blogpost about him - for which many thanks!

There’s a great catalogue of his works on paper here which gives a detailed chronology. And also here.

He was born in Vidin in 1885 on the Danube as Julius Mordecai Pincas of well-off Italian-Serbian & Spanish-Jewish parents who moved first to Russe (my Bulgarian sources tell me) and then Bucharest, Romania. He was educated in Vienna from age 10-15, returning in 1901 to Bucharest, where his family had settled, working briefly in the office of his father's grain-merchandizing business.

He was, however, becoming passionately interested in drawing, for which he showed precocious talent. His early talent drew the attention of the famous Bulgarian caricaturist Alexander Bozhinov.

At the age of 16, he became the lover of a woman who ran a brothel in Bucharest; and was allowed to draw the residents.In 1902 he went back to Vienna to study painting and, in 1903, he moved to Munich, where he attended the art school run by Moritz Heymann. Some of his drawings appeared in the renowned German satirical journal Simplicissimus when he was only 19 when he got a contract with them and met Georg Grosz.

After Pascin moved to Paris in 1905, he changed his name to spare his family who were apparently ashamed of his dissolute life-style and became a central figure in the social & cultural life of the cafes & studios of Montparnasse – meeting in 1906 his future wife Hermine David (also a painter). He lived in the United States from 1914 to 1920 where he taught at the Telfair Academy in Savannah, Georgia, associated with the Telfair Art Museum. Pascin married Hermine David at City Hall in New York City and become a citizen of the United States.

He & Hermine painted in New York City as well as in Miami, New Orleans, & Cuba.

Returning to Paris in 1920, he continued to compose paintings of delicately toned, thinly painted, but poetically bitter & ironic studies of women - including his wife, his mistress, & some prostitute acquaintances. 

Although Pascin's watercolours, oils, and drawings were generally well received, a series of unfavourable reviews in 1930 left him severely depressed. Suffering from depression & alcoholism, he committed suicide on the eve of a prestigious solo show by slitting his wrists & hanging himself in his studio in Montmartre. On the wall of that studio, he left a message written in his blood saying good-bye to his love, Cecile "Lucy" Vidil Krohg. In his will, Pascin left his estate equally to his mistress, Lucy Krohg, & to his wife, Hermine David.

winter arrives in the village

A few flakes of snow drifted gently down at 08.00 and the village (1,300 metres high) now lies with a thick covering.....and winter preparations are not quite complete.
This is my neighbour in the early afternoon preparing to recycle his cow manure on his fields.

My house is in the immediate background.

It's remarkably warm in the house with its solid rock base - although the car doors are already frozen.