A Guide to Bulgarian painting - or rather to books about......

My blog is now, it seems, the only one in the English language giving any sort of coverage to things Bulgarian. There used to be several young US graduates with nice sites which gave a “flavour” of Bulgaria (Sofia and Smolyan at any rate) but they’ve moved on after their statutory year or so – and, in any event, wrote chatty rather than substantive stuff (apart from one list of books with Bulgarian subjects).

My Bulgarian posts of the past 4 years have tended to be about either the distinctive charm of central Sofia for the flaneur or about the Bulgarian artisitic heritage – with only the occasional gesture to Bulgarian society. I should therefore mention that last week saw the latest (2013) EC report on the judicial systems of Bulgaria and Romania. Bulgaria emerged wounded from this analysis – as is evident for anyone who knows the (increasing) scale of the kickbacks which are needed to win projects here under the Structural Funds.

A lot of Brits still holiday in Bulgaria – but at the Black Sea (or the ski resorts) where they will not encounter the Bulgarian painting tradition. And that’s one of the things which this blog tries to cover - what paintings can tell us about the Bulgarians…..

It’s a good handle onto a country – see Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily for a “food and Mafia” take or Simon Winder for a “cultural” take on Germany. For example, I’ve just come across this dissertation on Bulgarian cinema - The Conformists – creativity and decadence in the bulgarian cinema 1945-1989 by one Evgenija Garbolevsky (2011) which nicely complements the recent post about recent Romanian cinema which attracted a fair amount of interest (100 hits). "The Conformists...." looks at the cinema here during the communist period -

My research focuses on the development of Bulgarian film between 1944 and 1989, as the youngest and most dynamic medium during the period. I explore several forms of subversion, such as decadence, silence and irony, among others, which fostered the creative imagination of the intellectual elite, and made the film art successful. I search for resilience in the oeuvres, in the operation of the institutions, and by looking at the views of the filmmakers and the works of the film critics.
I argue that the Bulgarian filmmakers, similar to their counterparts across the Eastern Bloc, vigorously resisted fitting into the role of lackeys of the Communist regime. Instead, the cineastes articulated their personal visions in their oeuvres by developing aesthetic practices and coded language, expressing their dissatisfaction with the status quo, and communicating their complex political and cultural views to the audiences. The filmmakers eluded censors while including the spectators as accomplices. The tension between rebellion and conformism in the cinematic discourse was intense. Despite the powerfully oppressive cultural policies of the regime, the cineastes succeeded loading their works with subversive messages. Regardless of the ideological straightjacket imposed on them, they sublimated their artistic passions and creative impulses, protested, and mocked the Establishment.

I would be interesting to see if anyone has done a dissertation on Bulgarian art during this period!
You have to work hard to assemble anything remotely like a systematic treatment of Bulgarian art even in the Bulgarian language – let alone English. Four recent publications offer a good start – although only one is freely available to download on the internet ie The Treasures of Varna City Art Gallery (2013) - all 136 pages of superb reproductions. The other three can be bought here in Sofia -

·       A Possible History – Bulgarian art through the collection of Sofia City ArtGallery . It’s 200 pages of material well organised into the various time-periods with appropriate selections of reproductions and shorDimi Gachevt (bilingual) intros to each period - costs 25 levs

·       Last year the Bulgarian Union of Artists gave us a curious 350 pages (in English) - Bulgarian Art – 120 Years (2013) with 350 pages and costing a whopping 120 levs.  It’s a history of the various artisitic associations – with reproductions – but gives absolutely no information about the individual artists. The text gives technical and very boring details of the various splits which occurred – with no attempt made to explain the significance or reasons for the chages. 

·       last week the Academy of Art offered a marvellous catalogue to accompany its current, rather small, exhibition of some of the items from its extensive archives - Painting Collection (1896–1940)  (Museum Collection of the National Academy of Art) (2014) It’s 190 full page reproductions with a very short and general (bilingual)introduction and costs a very reasonable 25 levs.

But the one problem with all of these publications is that virtually no information is given about the individual artists (in whatever language)! This is also the problem with the other three older collections you can also download free of charge -

·         The Art Collection of the National Bank of Bulgaria (2009) 143 pages of beautiful illustrations 

·         Kazanlak Art Gallery’s offerings 

·         Socialist construction in the work of Bulgarian artists (Sofia 1954) 

Four other very good and substantial collections are available if you look hard enough -

·       The Stara Zagora municipal gallery collection (2007) – about 200 pages with nice outlines of the artists (including a short English summary)

·       Bulgarian artists and Munich (City Gallery 2009) – German and Bulgarian

·       The Association of New Artists 1931-1944 (Sofia City Gallery 2012) – with short (bilingual) summaries of the artists

·      City Art Gallery's Catalogue (2003) - 500 pages of postage-size black and white reproductions and brief bilingual blurbs about the artists

Those who read Bulgarian can access a large Dictionary of Bulgarian artists which was produced some decades ago but there does not seem to be a introduction to Bulgarian art for the generalist (even Bulgarian) who wants to know something about the life of the artists – including how they dealt with communism.

The question, of course, is what exactly does information about an artists’s life add to our appreciation of his/her actual output – be it a novel, painting or piece of music? 

Most people would argue for a separation of the works from the life. One can (like Brecht or Dali) be a bit obnoxious as a person but still admirable as an artist. But I certainly enjoy biographies such as the recent one by Hilary Spurling of Matisse for the light they throw on the choices artists make or the influence of family and friends. The book on Matisse, for example, helped me understand his use of bright colours – they were the surroundings of his daily life as he grew up in a Belgian silk town! And I particularly value the black and white photographs of the artists – whether in streets or in their studios…..  

I have been accumulating a little library (most in the Bulgarian language) of detailed studies of such individual artists as 

·     Ilyia Beshkov (1983) – 500 pages of comprehensive coverage of most items with extensive diary-type text (ed by Bogomil Rainov) which makes me regret not being able to read Bulgarian

·     Marco Behar (Bulgarian Publishing House 1987) – 200 pages of great (black and white) repros and substantial text - by Ivan Mazarov

·     Alexander Bozhinov edited by Ruza Marinska (National Gallery 1999) – most beautiful and detailed 125 page treatment with an English intro and some annotations

·     Boris Angeloushev - by Atanas Stoikov (2003) – a very extensive 450 page coverage with a lot of text and what looks an almost comprehensive treatment of his works

·     Marin Ustagenov (2005) – good selections and a lot of (Bulgarian) text

·     Nikola Tanev 1890-1962 (National Gallery 2010) – two books, one (2000) by the famous art critic Ruzha Marinska, the other (2010) produced by the National Gallery to go with the special exhibition they held then for Tanev.

·     Nikola Petrov (Sofia City Gallery 2011) – small but attractive booklet

·     Vladimir Dmitrov-Maistora – the flower and the universe (National Gallery 2012) – wonderful 200 page bilingual publication!

·     Boris Denev (2013) – a superb 200 page collection of text and full-page reproductions of one of Bulgaria’s best artists. A nice feature is the black and white photos of him in his studio and with friends (such as Nikola Tanev)  

·     Jules Pascin (City Gallery 2013) – typically professional and extensive treatment by the City Gallery staff

Most – except for last five - are out of print. In the 1950s and 1960s a lot of short monographs were produced on artists such as Stoian Venev, Jaroslav Veshin and Tanko Lavrenov 

Banned artists in Bulgaria

I visited three exhibitions last week here in Sofia as the snow threatened and then arrived at the weekend – first at the National Art Academy which was showing some of their collection accompanied by a superb 200 page catalogue called Painting Collection (1896–1940) (Museum Collection of the National Academy of Art); then the excellent City Gallery which was showing a rather disappointing exhibition of Sirak Skitnik; and finally, the refurbished National Gallery which is at last showing beautiful work from its collection – at least on the second floor (and if you ignore the temporary exhibition of an artist who doesn’t even figure in the updated version of my booklet on Introducing the Bulgarian Realists – how to get to know the Bulgarians through their paintings). 

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This updated version (not yet online) includes the details of another 40 artists I've been able to add over the past year – as well as the links I discovered today to two of the books in my extensive collection of books on Bulgarian painters – the terrific production on the Art Collection of the National Bank of Bulgaria and also a link to an old book I found a year or so ago in the antique bookshops here - Socialist construction in the work of Bulgarian artists (Sofia 1954). This gives reproductions of more than 30 typical paintings of the period – glorifying the life of the worker.  

I find it remarkable how little reference I find – particularly in the art books here – to the problems artists experienced in Bulgaria both in the immediate aftermath of the communist takeover in September 1944 or in the two decades which followed. Famous artists such as Boris Denev and Nicolae Boiadjiev suffered from bans. And I stumbled today on two more examples - Konstantin Shtarkelov (1881-1961) was the most famous of a clutch of outstanding Bulgarian watercolour painters (including Pavel Francalijski; Yordan Geshev and Kriskaretz). Shtarkelov came from a very poor family and lived in poverty in Odessa and Moscow as a youth and met the key Russian artists of the time before returning in 1909 to Bulgaria. He did portraits but preferred to draw landscapes from Rila and Pirin Mountains, Sofia and Tarnovo regions (see pp 39-42 of the Bulgarian Bank book for 4 examples).  He was also a war artist in 1912–1913 and 1917. His works were exhibited in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Venice, Germany and Hungary.

But, after September 9 1944, his work was banned and forgotten because of "his ties with the Palace". They call him the "official artist of the bourgeois regime and royal favorite " ... Konstantin Shtarkelov was expelled from the artists’ union and spent five months in the Central Prison before living a life of destitution. According to an extensive article I found about him on the Artprice website he did eventually manage to hold a much visited exhibition of his works in 1960. It attracted mixed reviews and he died less than a year later.

I was also very pleased to come across today this little story about Vasil Barakov (1902-1991) - one of the first Bulgarian artists to show industrial landscapes 

in 1948-1949 a group of artists, including Vasil Barakovo, Zlatyu Boyadziev (one of Bulgaria’s best) and Zdravko Alexandrov were sent to paint three months in Romania, mainly in the area of ​​Baia Mare (Transylvania) and around Ploesti. Barakov returned to Bulgaria with many landscapes, portraits and sketches, which captures features of Romania. In early 1949 the group made a joint exhibition. Only three days later it unexpectedly closed. Critics accuse the authors of formalism. They do not reflect reality in brotherly Romania.
"My father - says son of Vasil Barakov - Dr. Miroslav Barakov - was mortified. He knew that the paintings were good – as did his colleagues but did not show his external feelings, did not react emotionally. But, after these serious charges in those dangerous and difficult years, something snapped in him and he almost ceased to paint… well, from time to time, he did a still life but focused instead on on film posters, book design. Often our salary saved my mother a teacher of mathematics.This went on for 10-12 years. "In 1967, however, the ice around the great master of the brush crushed. He was awarded the title of Honored Artist. In 1973, the maestro made a commemorative exhibition in gallery "Rakovski" 125 in the capital. When he went in the morning in the exhibition hall, the artist finds there the other great master of the brush - Ilia Petrov.  

Bulgaria has had a museum of socialism for a year or so which I;ve not so far been tempted to visit. But this rather superficial assessment  suggests that I should give it the once-over. Certainly "leftists" such as Ilyia Beshkov and Marko Behar had no problems flourishing in the new regime but quite a few others suffered greatly....

Outsiders

The weather remains amazingly mild here – registering 14 on the short motorway over the Balkans on Sunday as I drove down to Sofia although the city itself was 9 at 14.00.

For the past week I have been gripped by powerful descriptions of Europe in the first part of the century through the eyes of two writers who, in very different ways, brought the freshness of an outsider’s perspective to the various worlds they found themselves in

First the amazing Viktor Serge, born in Brussels at the end of the 19th century, knew grinding poverty as an unschooled (and imprisoned) anarchist and was allowed to join the Bolsheviks in 1917 and paints a memorable picture in Memoirs of a Revolutionary of life in those years. As one of the few individuals with western networks he played an important administrative role in the organisation of the various Communist International Conferences in the early 1920s but was too critical ever to be accepted and experienced various imprisonments and exiles.

With his literary gifts, psychological insight and proximity to key players, Serge is one of the greatest chroniclers of Europe’s socialist revolutions, and he offers a unique perspective. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he combined political conviction with a willingness to face the contradictions and failures of the Russian Revolution. Of the mid-1920s, he writes, “None of us had, in the bourgeois sense of the word, any personal existence: we changed our names, our postings, and our work at the Party’s need…we were not interested in making money, or following a career, or producing a literary heritage, or leaving a name behind us; we were interested solely in the difficult business of reaching Socialism.” But he also writes of his horror when, having escaped to Belgium in 1936 and seen the shop windows full of ham, chocolate and fresh fruit, he understood that socialism had failed to provide for the most basic material needs of the people. When his hopes were disappointed, he didn’t deny reality; he described it.Though Serge believed that individual existences were of interest only as part of the “great ensemble of life,” he placed considerable importance on personality, observing that “the character, and even in certain cases the direction, of historical facts depends to a very large extent on the calibre of individual human beings.” His memoirs are full of incisive sketches of important figures. Of Trotsky in the early 1920s, for instance, Serge wrote, “No one ever wore a great destiny with more style.” The people Serge describes are not bronze icons, but flesh and blood.

His writings are only now coming available - eg here and here; and his role in the wider anarchist movement set out here; and here.

The second, completely different, author is Christabel Bielenberg who came from a very privileged Anglo-Irish family but found herself as a young woman married to a German living in Nazi Germany for almost 15 years. The Past is Myself gives a very unusual outsider’s take on Germany of that time.

And then, by way of contrast, a third book on contemporary Siberia - Silverland; a journey beyond the Urals by the remarkable traveller Dervla Murphy. Vastly underrated as a writer, this 2007 book gives us great vignettes of people met on her train and bus journeys in freezing Siberia in the early 2000s – and the sort of life people lead in this remote region. Also good historical background – and strong opinions about the policy nonsenses of western systems. A unique blend this octogenarian gives us -  and there is a nice interview with her here.

All three books are examples of the insights good prose written by thoughtful outsiders can give us. 

The perversities of modern power

Over the past year or so, I have been coming back to some questions I first posed a decade ago – namely how people of my age (disgusted as we are by the behaviour of our corporate and political elites) might best focus our energies and resources to help nudge the systems of which we are part to a more hopeful future - and who were the people we could support in that venture . 
My initial - if rather tentative - answers were contained in a 30 page paper Draft Guide for the Perplexed. (The link gives the pdf file of the Guide which, unfortunately, doesn't allow the access to the links in the body of the text (the footnote links are OK), You can find a word version linked at the end of the post Draft Guide for the Perplexed – its about 20 titles up from the end of the list which that website link gives)

Breaking Out from an Insane World was one important recent post in that series.

The last post in the series had a summary of my recent reflections about the subject which I’ve now amended to read -

• The “mixed economy” which existed from 1950-1990 was a healthy and effective system for us in the West (The UK, as always, is an exception)  
• It worked because power was diffused. Each type of power – economic (companies/banks etc), political (citizens and workers) and legal/admin/military (the state) – balanced the other. None was dominant.
• Economic globalisation has, however, now undermined the power which working class people were able to exercise in that period through  votes and unions
• Privatisation is a disaster – inflicting costs on the public and transferring wealth to the few
• Neo-liberalism has supplied a thought system which justifies corporate greed and the privileging       (through tax breaks and favourable legislation) of the large international company
• All political parties and most media have been captured by that thought system which now rules the world
• People have, as a result, become cynical and apathetic
• Two elements of the “balanced system” (Political and legal power) are therefore now supine before the third (corporate and media power). The balance is broken and the dominant power ruthless in its exploitation of its new freedom
• It is very difficult to see a “countervailing power” which would make these corporate elites pull back from the disasters they are inflicting on us
• Social protest is marginalised
• Not least by the combination of the media and an Orwellian “security state” ready to act against “dissidence”
• But the beliefs which lie at the dark heart of the neo-liberal project do need more detailed exposure
• as well as its continued efforts to undermine what little is left of state power
• We need to be willing to express more vehemently the arguments against privatisation - existing and proposed)
• to feel less ashamed about arguing for “the commons” and for things like cooperatives and social enterprise (inasmuch as such endeavours are allowed)

But how do we go about re-establishing some sort of balance of power?

How can social forces be strengthened; and political and state systems of power reformed - so that the wings of corporate power can be properly clipped??

I’ve been encouraged to return to this theme by the summary of and papers from this very recent Conference on the Restructuring of the Corporation 

The papers are certainly fascinating – but suggest (with the exception of Henry Mintzberg) that change will come from within the system. Most people involved in these arguments about social and economic change focus on one or other of the three parts – political, legal or commercial ie stronger, more focussed protest; or different voting systems; or more social enterprise; or more corporate social responsibility; or stronger legislation against lobbying for example. Few so far seem to see Mintzberg’s point that we need a mixed cocktail!  

The illustration is a woodcut by the marvellous Hans Masserel

Dealing with the Past - Encountering Romania Part 9

The countries on which the Iron Curtain fell have had a difficult time since 1989 dealing with the record of repression, imprisonment, flight and death inflicted on millions of their citizens during that almost 50 year period. A few countries passed laws banning those holding power at that time from any future positions of authority but most countries, including Romania, had a reluctant and confused response to such questions of responsibility and justice.  25 years on from the end of the Ceaucescu regime, for example, there are still almost 100 serving Romanian MPs who held senior positions in that regime – and it was only in 2006 that the various archives were made (more or less) fully accessible to allow the researchers of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Communist Dictatorship in Romania to do their work. 
Coming to terms with the communist past in Romania is a 2011 article which analyses the highly politicised way the Commission report was treated by politicians and the media. 
Romanian communism between commemoration, nostalgia and scientific debate (2011) widens the analysis.

Transitional Justice in post-communist Romania (2012) is a recent book which assesses how such issues as property restitution and the rewriting of history books have been handled.

In Western European countries we turn to social history for insights into the recent past (particularly the last 50 years or so). I did a blogpost not so long ago about the extensive work which is available on post-war Britain. 
But in central and eastern European countries history of any sort is a highly contested field; and it is to anthropology and ethnography that we need to turn to get a deeply textured feel for the past as lived by the mass of people.

Katherine Verdery is an American Professor who has written extensively about Romanian cultural patterns from the research she was allowed to do here from the 1970s. 
Another recent book which deals with a key but strangely neglected subject is Heroes and Victims – remembering war in 20th century Romania by Maria Bucur (2010)

New Wave on the Black Sea

A few months back I viewed a tough portrayal of contemporary Romania - Child’s Pose which received the top award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival but which we found a bit too close for comfort. 

One cold evening in March, Barbu is tearing down the streets 50 kilometres per hour over the speed limit when he knocks down a child. The boy dies shortly after the accident. A prison sentence of between three and fifteen years awaits. High time for his mother, Cornelia, to intervene. A trained architect and member of Romania’s upper class, who graces her bookshelves with unread Herta Müller novels and is fond of flashing her purse full of credit cards, she commences her campaign to save her lethargic, languishing son. Bribes, she hopes, will persuade the witnesses to give false statements. Even the parents of the dead child might be appeased by some cash.
Călin Peter Netzer, the fil’s director, portrays a mother consumed by self-love in her struggle to save her lost son and her own, long since riven family. In quasi-documentary style, the film meticulously reconstructs the events of one night and the days that follow, providing insights into the moral malaise of Romania’s bourgeoisie and throwing into sharp relief the state of societal institutions such as the police and the judiciary.

A detailed review of the film can be read here. The film represents the new wave of Romanian films which have been coming out in the past 5-6 years and have attracted a lot of attention eg this recent New York Times' piece  

The emptiness of authority is an unmistakable theme in the work of nearly all the younger Romanian filmmakers. Doctors, grandiose television hosts, swaggering bureaucrats - all display a self-importance that is both absurd and malignant. Their hold on power is mitigated sometimes by their own clumsiness but more often by unheralded, stubborn acts of ordinary decency. An ambulance technician decides to help out a suffering old man who is neither kin nor especially kind; a student stands stoically by her irresponsible friend; a militia officer, in the middle of a revolution, goes out of his way to find and protect an errant, idealistic young man under his command.There is almost no didacticism or point-making in these films, none of whose characters are easily sorted into good guys and bad guys. Instead, there is an almost palpable impulse to tell the truth, to present choices, conflicts and accidents without exaggeration or omission.
This is a form of realism, of course, but its motivation seems to be as much ethical as aesthetic, less a matter of verisimilitude than of honesty.

There is an unmistakable political dimension to this kind of storytelling, even when the stories themselves seem to have no overt political content. During the Ceausescu era, which ended abruptly, violently and somewhat ambiguously in December 1989 — in the last and least velvety of the revolutions of that year — Romanian public life was dominated by fantasies, delusions and lies.

 And the filmmakers who were able to work in such conditions resorted, like artists in other communist countries, to various forms of allegory and indirection. Both Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu describe this earlier mode of Romanian cinema as “metaphorical,” and both utter the word with a heavy inflection of disgust.................. I can say, though, that every conversation I had in Bucharest, even the most casual, circled back to the old days, so that I sometimes felt that they ended much more recently than 18 years ago.

And the physical aspect of Bucharest confirms this impression. The busy shopping streets have the usual storefronts — Sephora, Hugo Boss, various cellphone carriers and European grocery chains — and the main north-south road out of town is jammed with Land Rovers and lined with big-box discount stores. Turn a corner, though, or glance behind one of the billboards mounted on the walls of old buildings, and you are thrown backward, from the shiny new age of the European Union into the rustiest days of the Iron Curtain.
The architecture is a jumble of late-19th-century Hapsburg-style villas and gray socialist apartment blocks, some showing signs of renovation, others looking as if they had fallen under the protection of some mad Warsaw Pact preservation society. .....

“There is no Romanian film industry.” This is not another one of Cristi Puiu’s counterintuitive provocations but rather a statement I was to hear again and again in Bucharest as I visited the offices of film schools and production companies, a studio back lot and the headquarters of the National Center for Cinematography (C.N.C.). There was no shortage of industriousness, but Romania lacks the basic infrastructure that makes the cycle of production, distribution and exhibition viable in other countries. What is missing, above all, is movie theatres: there are around 80 cinemas serving a country of 22 million people, and 7 of the 42 largest municipalities have no movie screens at all. (In the United States there are almost 40,000 screens and millions of movie fans who still complain that there is nothing to see).
 What Romania does have, in addition to a backlog of stories crying out to be told on screen, are traditions and institutions that give filmmakers at least some of the tools required to tell them. The “dinosaurs” at U.N.A.T.C. take their pupils through a rigorous program of instruction that includes courses in aesthetics and art history and requires them to make two 35-millimeter short films before graduating, one of them in black and white. This kind of old-school technical training, which extends to acting as well, surely accounts for some of the sophistication and self-assurance that Mungiu, Porumboiu and their colleagues display. Not that anything comes easily. The shortage of screens means that the potential for domestic commercial returns is small, and therefore it is hard to attract substantial private investment, either from within Romania or from outside the country.

And the scarcity of theaters makes exhibition quotas — which other countries use to protect their film industries from being overwhelmed by Hollywood — untenable. But if there is no film industry, there is at least a Law of Cinematography (modeled on a French statute) that establishes a mechanism by which the state helps finance movie production. Taxes collected on television advertising revenue, DVD sales and other media-related transactions go into a fund, money from which is distributed in a twice-yearly competition. Winning projects are ranked, with the top selections receiving as much as 50 percent of their production costs from the fund. Film costs tend to be modest — the budget of “4 Months” was around 700,000 euros — and the filmmakers have 10 years to pay back the state’s investment, at which point they own the film outright.Many of the filmmakers I spoke to complained about the system. Corneliu Porumboiu, impatient with its slow pace and bureaucratic obstacles, financed “12:08” himself. Shortly before Cannes last year, Cristian Mungiu was involved in a public spat with the C.N.C. that made headlines in the local press. After a dispute with the centre, Puiu circulated a letter pledging never to participate in the system again.

 A useful little book on the Romanian cinema is A Short History of Romanian Cinema by Marian Tutui

And this article gives some background (in Romanian) on the relevant films. 

Images of Bucharest in the 20th century - Encountering Romania part VII

Encouraged by the images from an impressive book issued last month - Demolished Bucharest 1985 - unofficial archive images edited by Serban Bonciocat et al - we took a stroll on Friday in the area on the edge of the ginormous People’s Palace where there are still, amazingly, buildings which survived the megolomaiac onslaught on this central area. We even lunched in one of them – a new fish restaurant, Le Chef Calcan, on the long straight Regina Marie Boulevard. We were impressed that the chef welcomed us and advised on the meal which took in a very nice bottle of white wine (for only 11 euros) – the guys are from Constanta and the fish menu is large and fresh.

While trying (unsuccessfully) to find a reference for the new book, I came across a couple of very interesting websites which document the destruction Ceaucescu inflicted on the city in the 1980s 

- Bucharestian is an ambitious site which offers not only images but other goodies such as these crisp comments on Romanian mores 

- The Only Romania website has a collection of wonderful black and white photographs of Bucharest - including these of the 1970s before the demolitions – and some equally rare photos of the bustle of the cityin 1985 and shots from a Swedish visitor in the mid 1970s 

The images encouraged me to buy the 2012 book Bucharest’s Photographer  - Carol Popp de Szathmari (2012). De Szathmari was born in 1812 (died in 1887) and was one of the world’s first photographers. They are a great addition to the library I am slowly developing of images of both Bucharest and of Romania eg The Discreet charm of Bucharest by Dan Dinescu (2008) by Dan Dinescu  and Bucharest Architecture and Modernity – an annotated guide (2009) by Mariana Celac et al 

Romanian Painting - Encountering Romania part VI

There are two superb guidebooks on cultural Romania – The Pallas Guide to Romania (2009) edited by John Villiers who worked for the British Council here for 3 years; and Caroline Juler’s Blue Guide Romania  (2000) – curiously out of print already. (Her blogsite Carpathian Sheep Walk  gives a good sense of the life of one of the many sections of people still trying to life off the land here).

Villier’s book has chapters on the country’s history; the painted monasteries; the wooden churches and fortified churches of Transylvania; art and architecture; and Bucharest. But its section on art only lists about 10 painters in a couple of lines – very curious treatment for a book which purports to be about culture!

Having been so bowled over in recent years ago by Bulgarian realist painting of the first part of the 20th Century that I produced a booklet about it, events seemed to conspire against a similar appreciation of Romanian painters of the same period. Bulgarian galleries and books, somehow, were more evident and accessible in Sofia than their equivalents in Bucharest

I have, however, made some effort in the past year to track down the full beauty of the Romanian painting which were in such evidence a hundred years ago (it’s amazing how many superb Romanian painters were born around 1880!). Not easy since so many were secreted in private collections during the Communist period – some even before then eg the Zambaccian collection. 
And quite a few of the nouveaux riches after 1989 have developed their own private collections - which have been captured in a huge book in 2012 by painter Vasile Parizescu. One of the collectors is "businessman" Tiberiu Posteinica who was so brazen as to produce a sizeable book to glorify his ill-gotten collection. I was lucky enough to find a copy in a second-hand bookshop here.

The national art galleries here (and various publishing houses) have, of course, published various books on Romanian painters but making no concessions in recent years to those without the Romanian language and focussing on a favoured few such as Nicolae Grigorescu, Theodor Amman, Camil Ressu and Theodor Pallady. 

Things were actually better in the 1960s when the Meridian publishing house produced a great series of affordable booklets on Romanian painters (with attractive pasted prints). From the second-hand bookshops here I have slowly acquired many of these – eg Nicolae Darescu, StefanPopescu, JeanSteriadi and Josef Iser.

And last year I came across two great websites which have allowed me to access the Romanian painting tradition – a personal one ; and ArtIndex – a Romanian Art Review. So I now have a list of 75 classic Romanian painters (compares with a list of 150 Bulgarian for a country one quarter of Romania's size). 
My initial selections have been posted here 

Encountering Romania - part V Memoirs

Amidst the huge groups of people who have suffered from war, starvation and murder over the past century, the inhabitants of Central-East Europe occupy their own particular niche which has been well documented by over the decades by people such as Arthur Koestler, Aleksander Wat, Czeslaw Milosz  and, more recently, by academics such as Norman Davies, Ann Applebaum and Timothy Snyder 

Gregor von Rezzori is one of the most neglected of writers from lands which have been variously part of Austro-Hungary, CzechoSlovakia, Hungary, Romania and now Ukraine. Over thirty years he wrote marvellous prose about his early years in the town of Czernowitz when it lay in the northern redoubts of Romania eg  

• Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (1979); 
• Snows of Yesteryear (1989)

Mihai Sebastian was a Jewish journalist in Romania whose Journal 1935-1944 TheFascist Years caused quite a stir when they were eventually produced after 1989 – the English version in 2000.

Norman Manea is Romania’s most translated author and still writes in Romanian although he left the country almost 30 years ago. The Hooligan’s Return (2005) is a powerful and bitter memoir.

The education of a political animal IIB – Book III A Diary of Nine Months in the Peoples’ Democracies 1959-60  by Arthur D Kahn (2009) gives us almost a hundred pages of fascinating insights from one political writer’s three- week visit to Romania in 1959. It was entirely by accident I came across it on the internet yesterday. It does not figure on any list I have seen but deserves its place on this list

Jessica Douglas-Home was one of a small group who spent a lot of time in the 1980s supporting dissidents in central europe (Timothy Garten Ash is the most famous) and wrote it up in Once Upon another Time; (2000)

The Eighties in Bucharest is a powerful record of life in Romania in that decade published by Martor (Anthropological Review of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant) - Number 7 (2002). The link seems to give the entire text - structured alphabetically eg starting with "abortion". The Review (and the Museum) is to be congratulated for its website which allows access to the entire run of this worthwhile journal!

The title of Carmen Bugan’s Burying the Typewriter; childhood under the eyes of thesecret police (2013)  says it all.

Since the 1990s there has been an explosion of diaries (in Romanian) about life under communism. An English-language  Sibiu cultural magazine has an article about the artefacts which figured in old households which lists the titles of some of these

Surrealism and Survival in Romania - part IV of Encountering Romania

One of the chapters of Inner Lives of Cultures, mentioned in the last post, is “Surrealism and Survival in Romania” by Carmen Fimen (at pp 177-193) and is worth quoting at length -

The symbol of Romania is the peasant. Looking old and wise, or just tired, dressed in a long fur coat, a shepherd scrutinizing the horizon, or just searching for his magical ewe or lamb, he represented the essence of this place – agrarian by excellence, resilient over time, the iconic image of stability and persistence. One of the dramatic consequences of the Communist ideology in Romania was the destruction of the villages along with their traditions and customs, and the humiliation of the peasant torn from his natural surroundings, forced to leave his land, his church and his belief and to move to the outskirts of the big cities, in order to work in socialist mammoth factories, where he lost his ancestral identity, where he felt depersonalised and estranged from his native environment........Romania can be described as a country rich in ethnic diversity striving to preserve its uniqueness at the crossroads between the East and the West, between the Balkans and the Orient, with a people that displays a Mediterranean temper in the South combined with Balkan customs, a Slavic pace in the Northeast, or a rigorous diligence in Transylvania.  

The inter-bellum period - The period of glory for Romania is considered by many to be the era between the two World Wars.After the unification of all its territories in 1918, Romania looked like a fairly large and prosperous state, going through a time of important reforms, a time of economic and cultural flourishing, development of its industrial sector, and it became one of the most important exporters of oil and wheat. Bucharest, nicknamed ‘little Paris’, as rumours have it, could stand next to any major European metropolis. .....A new artistic movement emerged, the Romanian avant-garde, which eventually conquered Europe and contributed to the birth of surrealism in visual art, literature and cinema.......Between the two World Wars, Romanian culture was for the first time in sync with the latest Western trends in Paris or London, becoming a strong participant in the international dialogue of values. Remarkable avant-garde and surrealist talents emerged in Romania, featuring a cosmopolitan cultural attitude. In 1916, Tristan Tzara, a Romanian émigré to Zurich, invented Dadaism. There were three distinctive groups of artists: modernist – focused on Western, urban and intellectual culture; traditionalist – oriented towards the religious orthodoxy of the rural world; and the third, proclaiming the birth of the national character, situated at the crossroads between tradition and modernity. But even this time of prosperity had its paradoxes: except for a few big cities and the wealthy elite, the rest of the country was still impoverished and illiterate and there was no time left for profound changes.

 Fifty Years of Isolation - Romania entered the harshest dictatorship in Europe, weakened and humiliated by the Fascist regime and the Iron Guard that compromised the country’s prestige during the Second World War. Years of terror followed. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Communist gulag continued the Fascist horrors. For almost 50 years, Romania experienced isolation and was cut off from the West.The local Communist leaders annihilated any trace of intellectual opposition.

Between 1948 and 1964, one Romanian out of nine (meaning about two million people) was sent into a Communist concentration camp. The official literature, or so-called socialist realism, glorified Stalin, his politics and the new proletarian class. 

Despite all the official oppression, intellectuals gathered in informal discussion groups to keep their sanity and, slowly, a counterculture was born. Several groups of artists rejected the aggressive intrusion of the Communist propaganda, bringing along a fresh, nonconformist subversive voice, opposed to the official ideology. Although Romania didn’t have an organised Samizdat, individual voices of courage made themselves heard, like the political dissident Paul Goma in 1977 or, later, the ‘Blue Jeans generation of writers’. Over the years, Romanians were perceived through various stereotypes, more or less warranted: a people hesitating between excessive praise and self-disparagement, between laments or victimisation and an ostentatious superiority; coming up with dark plots and conspiracies to explain historical events, but also with an interesting, rich culture and a lively artistic life, with sophisticated intellectuals; xenophobic, nationalistic, but still tolerant in many respects; hospitable, enthusiastic, genuine and warm; inclined towards constant ridicule, with a predisposition to mock everything. 

Ways of Coping....We lived under one of the toughest dictatorships in Europe, watched by the secret police, and isolated from the rest of the world. We did our best to survive within a closed society. One way was to get together in groups selected on the basis of affinities which had to do with art, literature, philosophy or simply a few common tastes.
 Our lives were simple. We didn’t care about cholesterol, pollution or the negative effects of smoking; nor did we worry about the dangers of obesity, drug addiction or violence. We didn’t need anti-depressants, although we had good reasons to take Prozac. No one sought psychoanalysis, therapists or shrinks, although we had good reason to be depressed. When you live in a cave, with few choices, all sorts of self-defence mechanisms spring into action. One is interpersonal communication. In a society like ours, communication involved sincerity and spontaneity. People talked loudly, gesticulated profusely and even cursed often; they lived and hated passionately. They used to make grandiose plans in the evening, over many glasses of alcohol, only to discard them as impossible to achieve the next morning. And yet these people were authentic in their despair and passionate in their fantasies.

Paradoxically, in such an abnormal and repressive society, they were anything but alienated. In fact, they practiced a type of group therapy, unorganised and without clear goals. In that Balkan atmosphere, their conversations in the shadow of ruined ‘little Paris’ were delightful, a never-ending chatter, spectacular and useless, over full ashtrays and cheap alcohol, all-night-long discussions and hung-over mornings. They weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere. They had no place to go.In the opaque world of Communism, time meant nothing. The dictatorship seemed permanent. To keep our sanity, we had only the refuge of books and an inner language of freedom, parallel to the official one. Words had no power to change our destiny, but they could keep us sane. And our soul? Nobody mentioned it, but it was there all along, in the arabesques of our lamentations, in the last cigarette butts crushed at sunrise against the background of a hideous smoking factory at the outskirts of the city.

 People learned not to trust the official language in the press, in schools, and at work. Most of them doubted any official political speech and cultivated disbelief and irony as part of their self-defence mechanism.Everybody was aware of living in a ‘make-believe’ world, fully aware of its duplicity.As writers, the metaphor was our main weapon to evade political censorship.

Although biographies and memoirs were almost impossible to squeeze through the tight net of censorship, poetry and prose could be enveloped in a protective shell of metaphor and allegory, esoteric enough to get the forbidden truth out regardless of whether it was about political or social reality. Communism disregarded metaphors. It identified the soul as its main enemy. Demolishing churches and synagogues was not enough. That merely eliminated places of worship, but they also got to destroy the metaphors of spirituality, making them appear weak and misleading.

Another source of refuge was humour, carelessness or frivolity. In spite of our bad times, we managed to maintain our sense of humour. There was no shortage of jokes in those days, which acted like some sort of a safety valve. We seemed to be a surreal people who could not stop laughing, even while we were slowly dying! We were like patients in a militarised hospital, subjected to a utopian treatment for an imaginary disease, feeling both guilt and absolution. Guilt, because of the cowardice each one of us had to practice; absolution, because the collective farce so perfectly played on us. 

After Communism.......After the fall of Communism, other clichés became associated with Romania, describing a country still haunted by the ghosts of the Communist nomenclature which was soon back in power, by stray dogs, orphans, AIDS victims infected by contaminated blood which they had received in hospitals, human traffic, impoverished Roma population, pickpockets and thieves making headlines in the Western media. I’m not fighting against clichés. They are based, after all, on reality, however exaggerated or generalised it might be. But Romania, despite all its problems, continued to produce an intense cultural life. Even during the totalitarian era, culture had symbolised resistance within the Communist censorship, defence from the absurdity of the system and an underground form of freedom. In the late 1980s, a visitor from England remarked in awe: ‘This country looks surreal to me. You have nothing to eat but wait in line for hours to buy theatre tickets and books…’ It was our form of survival, sanity and refusal to submit to alienation.

Getting under the skin

Let me explore more this question of how outsiders can hope to understand a foreign country. My strength as a school pupil was French and German basically because my parents took me to these countries in the 1950s - when such travel was very rare.

And I continued my studies of things French and German until my second year of University (after which I switched to politics and economics) although never losing my fascination with these two countries. It was, frankly, my love life which gave me a chance to develop my French language skills (in the 1980s); and writers such as Richard Cobb, Theodor Zeldin and Julian Barnes have helped sustain that interest.

But I have had more reasons actually to learn about Germany – with a brief but important 2 weeks in 1961 at a course at Gottingen University (which introduced me to the immediate post-war novels of Heinrich Boll); then a couple of months living in Berlin in 1964 and working in a Germany company (Robert Bosch Elektronik no less). This Berlin stay introduced me to the works of people such as Bertold Brecht, Kathe Kollwitz and the German Realist painters in the Berlin galleries.

And then there various visits to Berlin in the years immediately before and after 1989 – the latter thanks to a project in Prague with German company (which rather spoiled my perceptions of Germany – although the company was actually Prussian!

Things went further downhill in 2010 when I resigned from a project in China managed by the Germans – mainly because I felt so claustrophobic in the anthill which is Beijing but also because the German bureaucracy was so intensive.   

My readings of, and experiences with, German history, literature and society have been complemented recently with two major books – Peter Watson’s German Genius of 2010 (which righly criticises the contemporary fixation of Brits with the Nazi period) and Simon Winder’s Germania of the same year.  

But perhaps the best single text for understanding Germany is Germany – unravelling an enigma

I came across recently a fascinating collection of essays about this issue of understanding other cultures - Inner Lives of Cultures (2011) ed Eva Hoffman which had this to say -

We live in a world in which various kinds of cross-national movement – migrations, travel, various kinds of both enforced and voluntary nomadism – are ever on the rise; and in which flows of fast communication are multidirectional and constant. If we are to meet with each other on the basis of trust rather than tension or insidious indifference, we need to have ways of getting acquainted with each other which are more than cursory, or purely instrumental. But how can this be accomplished? What kind of knowledge is needed to feed meaningful cross-cultural contacts? To enter into the subjective life of another culture – its symbolic codes, its overt beliefs and implicit assumptions – requires, as any immigrant or nomad can tell you, a considerable effort of consciousness and imagination; a kind of stretching of self towards the other, and a gradual grasp of differences which are sometimes imperceptible and subtle.Of course, cultures are neither static nor monolithic organisms – they are complex, changeable and internally diverse. What is considered healthily assertive in one culture may be seen as aggressive or hostile in another; certain kinds of personal disclosure which may seem quite unproblematic in one society may be seen as embarrassing or entirely unacceptable elsewhere.

Finally some nice photographs celebrating Romania's landscape here