Erwin Kessler

Stylistic Diversity Unite

The reception of American art in postwar Romania

Abstract

The reception of American art and visual culture in Romania starts with the euphoric,
interwar avant-garde, followed by the caustic socialist-realism, and the cunning,
communist official art of the 1960s-1970s. It goes almost in oblivion throughout the
1980s-1990s, and up until today1. The reception of American art cannot be separated
from its insertion onto the Romanian art scene. After the political changes around 1965,
American art was for the first time intentionally and substantially instilled on the
Romanian art scene, as interventionist aesthetics, via major, ideologically-boosted
exhibitions and catalogues fashioned by American cultural authorities in an autistic
manner, with no local collaborating specialists. All the artistic American implements
from 1965 to 1989 were politically-charged, official endeavors. They were similarly
hosted by politically-charged, official Romanian venues, and their public reception was
also in official publications.2 No American private gallery ever organized an exhibition in
postwar Romania, and no private gallery existed in Romania to host it. No independent,
samizdat reception of American art could be found. The reception of American art was
either induced by the grand narrative distributed by the American authorities, in
exhibitions and publications (immediately internalized and echoed by most Romanian
critics), or it was framed by the competing grand narratives which pre-formatted the
reception discourse of the time. The most prominent remained the Marxist-based
aesthetics privileged by local propaganda, with its insistence on objectivity, scientism,
utopian progress, social engagement, and humanist (but not liberal) views. Another
competing platform was nourished by the concomitant interventions of French cultural
authorities through exhibitions and publications (produced in collaboration with the
Romanian authorities and specialists), boosting a rather traditional modernism rooted in
the late Paris School paradigm. The local reception rhetorics derived from these
platforms. The combination of Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and cybernetics
challenged the interventionist American aesthetics. American authorities always inserted
non-political art, but its reception politicized it, by equating its alleged individualism to
alienation, and rephrasing its pragmaticism into anti-humanism. The underlying political
reception trope hinted at American art as a reflection of a decomposing, capitalist society
(the main Cold War, Soviet propaganda topic). Despite the elated tone of most of the
texts about American art, local criticism scorned its subjectivism or supposed
1
The archive of the American Cultural Center in Bucharest could not provide any information, neither
publications and catalogues, nor registration data on the decades-long activities in visual arts, as today no
art-related projects are run by it in Bucharest, and the whole archive was dismantled.
2
SCIA, the proper art-history review in Romania( issued by the Romanian Academy), only signalled the
opening of some American exhibitions. It never dedicated a research paper to them. Most art criticism on
the American exhibitions was published in the Arta magazine of the Union of Fine Artists, and in the
literary magazines Contemporanul,România literară, and Secolul XX. Short notices on the shows also
appeared in the magazine Săptămîna.

1
decorativism, ignored its aim as a freedom-infusing virus and its nature rooted in the free
market economy, exploring instead its alienated subconscious and praising its
technological innovations. International politics, Cold War and colonial wars of the time
were utterly and amiably ignored both by the inserted art and by its reception. American
art was reduced to an instrumental kit able to upgrade the productive competencies of
Romanian official artists. Paradoxically, the effect of the interventionist American
aesthetics was to extend and buttress the Romanian propaganda art idiom, especially after
the 9th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party (July 1965), when Nicolae Ceaușescu
ousted socialist-realism from the official doctrine, and replaced it with the new ideology
of stylistic diversity, derived and deviated from the decades-long, American political
aesthetics backing freedom of expression. Rich of the new ideology, supposedly able to
transcend the Cold War excessive polarization of art in either realism or abstraction, and
empowered by the newly acquired technological acquisitions from the inserted American
art (photorealism, collage, silkscreens), the newly reshaped Romanian propaganda art
could withstand until 1989, allowing no input for dissent and rebellion in visual arts. As
the process evolved, the deceived American authorities retreated from major
interventionist aesthetics and accepted the co-existence of two parallel aesthetic systems.
Throughout the 1980s, the small American official insertions in visual arts were restricted
to the ghetto-like perimeter of the American Embassy and the American Library, with
punctual shows of ongoing American art, deprived of political stakes.
The most visible and lasting outcome of the American interventionist aesthetics in
postwar Romania was upgrading the theoretical basis of the official aesthetics and
improving the technical assets of propaganda art.

1. The Romanian enthrallment with American culture was late, yet potent.
The first wave of Americanism was linked to the historical avant-garde. The
ground-breaking, first International Exhibition of the magazine
Contimporanul opened in November 1924 with an afro-american jazz
orchestra, loudly playing in complete darkness in the exhibition hall.3 Avant-
garde artists fantasized Americanism as a mix of extreme industrialism and
extravagant entertainment. In the first issue of the constructivist (left-
oriented) magazine Integral, the sketch Supra-americanul (The Super-
American) by Felix Brunea-Fox turned”the American” into a sci-fi-comics,
droll-Übermensch type. His character, Puk Taylor, lived in “Brooklyn,
Building Row… on Halstead Street”, and worked in a “dummies
factory”.Gheorghe Dinu (alias Stephan Roll – the pseudonym itself was a
combination of “step and roll”) published poems like Sporting, with a
thoroughly “Americanized” poetic idiom of brand-like words and names
such as sport-club, boxing, Ford, sportsman, jazz, Einstein, Dempsey, Tom
3
Paul Cernat, p. 40

2
Gibbons, Harry Wills.4 In June 1928, the American icon, Josephine Baker
played in the revue show Negru pe Alb (Black on White) at Eforia Theater in
Bucharest, astonishing the inhabitants of the capital city while strolling
around dressed in trousers.5 The self-styled Americanism of avant-garde art
was focused rather on the fantasized American civilization than on the
American art. Avant-garde magazines such as Contimporanul and Integral
advertized American avant-garde publications like The Little Review, Broom
(New York), Modern Review (Boston), Four (Los Angeles), but they simply
signaled their existence as knots in the worldwide avant-garde magazines
network. No translation, text or image exchanges ever occurred, contrary to
the vivid exchange with German, Belgian, Italian, Czechoslovakian, Polish,
Hungarian or Yugoslav avant-garde magazines.

Hinged to the avant-garde, Americanism embodied a cutting-edge, artificial

paradise, stamping the enthusiastic picturing of America in a series of
articles by future art historian, philosopher and curator Petru Comarnescu,
key-advocate of Americanism in Romania for the decades to come. His
acute perception of the American way is relevant: “For a European, reading
American newspapers is difficult… as they impress through sheer size and
advertisments. The spot is on news, not on opinions and directions…the
news are not selected… everything looks chaotic. All the American
newspapers replicate the same news, same ideas, and the same photos…The
Americans are the most curiosity-driven people.”6 A doctoral scholarship in
1929-1931 brought Comarnescu to California. Back home, he published
Homo americanus (1933, his first book altogether), followed by Zgîrie norii
din New York (The Sky-scrapers of New York, 1933), and America vazută
de un tînăr de azi (America seen by a youth of today, 1934). The successful
books earned prestige for the young writer, who put them together in
Chipurile și priveliștile Americii (Faces and Landscapes of America, 1940).

4
Integral 1, March 1925, pp 8-9 and 13
5
Adevarul, 5 June 1928
6
Petru Comarnescu, America de azi (America Nowadays), in Universul, XLVIII, 230, 22 September 1930,
p. 3.

3
In the aftermath of WW2, the Sovietization of Romania turned America in a
target of capitalist de-legitimization. The first Socialist-realist exhibition in
Romania was mounted by ex-avant-garde pillar M.H. Maxy (founder and
director of Integral), following a ritual, Jdanov-inspired research trip in the
destitute mining area of Jiu Valley, in south-western Romania. Ironic to the
pre-war Americanism, his show in December 1945 was titled Chipuri și
priveliști din Valea Jiului (Faces and Landscapes of Valea Jiului), scornfully
recalling the title of Comarnescu’s famous 1940 book on America. Maxy
contrasted the utopian, American industrial bountifulness to the dystopian,
local poverty, opposing the capitalist, fascinating exoticism to the pretended
critical inquest of socialist-realism. From the Super-American of the mid-
1920s to the Anti-American of the late 1940s the ideological turn was
radical: America, the phantasmatic embodiment of progress in interwar
period, dramatically turned into a cipher of decay after WW2. However, an
editor with the national radio company between 1944 and 1947, Petru
Comarnescu dedicated most of his sendings to American issues. He was also
the agency behind the series of 19 conferences delivered in 1945 at Dalles
Hall by himself and other prominent intellectuals of the time, such as
philosopher Tudor Vianu and literary critic Vladimir Streinu, focusing on
America and American life, including arts, literature and music.7

2. After December 1947 (the abdication of King Mihai I, and the subsequent
proclamation of the Republic), the overt promotion of the American culture
dried off. Translations of American literature continued, but were by far
exceeded by the translations of Russian and Soviet, propaganda literature.
Abstract Expressionism, America’s artistic-political icon was intimated in
the widespread, communist campaign against “formalism”, shown as a
bourgeois remnant of elitist-art alienation. During the 1950s, most aesthetic
theory in Romania was Soviet. The few local books and specialized
magazines translated Russian, political mainstream theory, permeated by
fundamentalist anti-Americanism. A landmark-publication, Probleme de
Artă Plastică (Problems of Plastic Arts), issued by the Romanian Academy,
7
Pioariu, 39

4
maintained Leninism as crucial guide for artists, who were asked to “offer
the just reflection of reality”8. The irreducibly aesthetic experience was
ousted in the propaganda-epistemological turn. Art was supposed to
“truthfully synthesize life, in typical images”, because “the individual is only
interesting when reflecting the general.”9 Art (the “individual”) was justified
only by merely incorporating ideological theses (“the general”). Next to the
supposed individualist formalism of abstraction, guilty of “being born out of
form and ending back into form… with no content” 10 the apparent
alternative to it was also targeted. Reflecting the surging photo-realism in
American art (through pop art employment of photo-realism and silk-
screens), a contesting communist theory emerged against “photographism”,
which seemed “a damaging phenomenon, driving artists to naturalism.” 11
”Naturalism” was precisely what propaganda hated most, because it showed
reality not as it should be (like in socialist-realism), but as it really was,
deprived of the kitschy idealization so vital in communist propaganda. Pop
art was de-legitimated as “bourgeois art wrapped in advertizing
sensationalism”, as criticizable as “the Western abstract art” with which
“erroneously, some of our artists have an imprudent contact.”12

The Socialist-realist theory was both normative and prohibitive, abusively

restricting Western art to the contesting pair naturalism (photo-realism) vs.
abstractionism, whose both terms were equally abhorred: “the naturalist art
on one hand, and the abstractionist art on the other…differ only formally,
but their coldness and absolute lack of sensibility is similar.” 13 While the
internal norms were self-induced, the prohibitions disparagingly mirrored
the developments of Western and American art. Although most of the
theoretical texts lack direct references to actual works of art, an unsigned
editorial, Forța educativă a eroului pozitiv (The Instructive Force of the
Positive Hero) translated from Iskusstvo (no. 12/1959), abruptly vituperated
8
M. Ovseannikov, Lenin si estetica, 1960, 4
9
Idem 5
10
I. Pimenov, Afisul si viata, 67
11
I. Nikolaev, 15
12
Sokolov-Skalia, 23.
13
Pimenov, 67

5
against the “ugly forms and colours of the painting The Cathedral by
Pollock… a kind of art that neither created living, expressive characters, nor
direct representations of the aesthetic ideal”, further condemning
“abstractionism and tachism”, responsible for the “lack of a positive hero in
the contemporary bourgeois art.”14Beside the ritual condemnation of abstract
trends in western art, a striking feature is the paraded, terminological
acquaintance of the censors with the object of their contempt, the names and
representatives of the new trends.

The Soviet direction was minutely followed by local operators of socialist

realism, who particularly discredited subjectivism and individualism in art.
The editorial in the first issue of Arta plastică (Plastic Arts, the main art-
magazine in Romania) posited: "the vicious circle of the aestheticized
intimism and apolitism has thrown the bourgeoisie in the decomposing dead-
end that alienated it from the understanding and the appraisal of the
masses."15 Intimism is another concept hinting at the ever-reiterrated accuse
of subjectivism and individualism of the western (abstract) art. By the end of
the 1950s the rhetoric still thrived, unaltered: "abstractionism, the tendency
of degrading art... through lack of actuality and originality, through the
promoted, dated taste... brings the abstract art on the brink of extinction."16
The thesis of the supposed extinction of abstract art was derived from the
central political thesis of the early Cold War, the allegedly imminent
decomposition of capitalism. The ascribed individualism (subjectivism,
intimism etc.) of abstract art was mechanically superposed onto capitalist
individualism. Thus, the supposed disappearance of the latter implied the
automatic disappearance of the former.

Viewed as mere reflection of political confrontation, the aesthetic standpoint

was conflictually polarized. Jules Perahim, prominent artist and propaganda
14
Pr de arta plastica, 29
15
Cuvint inainte,no. 1, 1954, p. 1 : ”cercul vicios al intimismului si apolitismului estetizant, a impins arta
burgheza in fundatura si descompunerea care a indepartat-o de intelegera si pretuirea maselor…. Toate
genurile si toate ramurile artei plastice se pot dezvolta pe deplin (doar, nn EK) in arta realismului socialist.”
16
Mircea Deac. Din problemele fundamentale ale artei plastice realist-socialsite, Arta plastica, 2.1959, p. 7:
”…abstractionismul, tendinta a degradarii artei…prin lipsa de actualitate si de originalitate, prin gustul
perimat pe care il promoveaza,,,arta abstracta se afla in pragul pieirii, prin propria sa descompunere.”

6
pillar, curator of the Romanian Pavillion at the Venice Biennale, revealed to
the local public that Venice Biennale was nothing but a stage for "the
incessant fight between two conceptions: the one of the realist, humanist art,
which is inherently figurative, and the other one is the abstract art", as they
embodied the "confrontation between the two ideologies and the two
cultures existing nowadays in the world... one is the humanist one, which
demonstrates the engagement of the artist for life and for the socialist
construction, while the other is anti-humanist, preaching ideas of isolation,
of fear, and negating the ethic, aesthetic, social and political values of art." 17
The blatant contempt and superior condemnation of western art by socialist-
realist ideologues was nonetheless permeated by an inferiority complex, as
the changes and the progress visible on the ongoing occidental art scene was
undeniable, whereas the stagnation of the communist propaganda art was
patent. A translated, unsigned editorial taken from Sovetskaia kultura
(74/75, 1960), presented the discussions during the First Congress of the
Plastic Artists of the Sovietic Republic of Russia, and some statements by
V.A. Serov hint to the unavowed crisis, as he insisted that “Contemporaneity
in art means the representation of the contemporaneous life phenomena from
communist standpoints, through contemporary artistic means.” 18 Despite the
apparent truism of Serov, the recurring word “contemporaneity” signaled the
wish of the communist artistic system to link to the new, progressive
developments of the day. But precisely the definition of contemporaneity
was elusive in that system. Who would provide the needed criteria for it?

3. During the early 1960s political changes abound in Romania. Already in

1958, under the pressure of the local communist leadership, the occupation,
Soviet Army, left. Culture took on the lead of differenciation. In 1958, the
International Music Festival George Enescu was founded, a wide-ranging

17
Arta plastică, 4.1956, p. 2, despre Bienala de la Veneția ”lupta crîncenă între două concepții : aceea a
artei realiste, umaniste și în consecință figurative, și aceea a artei abstracte" Jules Perahim, Bienala de la
Veetia, Arta plastica, 7-8, 1958, p. 16 ”ciocnirea dintre cele doua ideologii si cele doua culturi existente azi
in lume”, ”una …umanista, demonstrind angajarea artistului la viata, participarea la construcția socialistă ;
celalată anti-umană, pledînd ideea izolării, a fricii, a negării valorilor etice, estetice, sociale și politice din
cadrul artei.”
18
P. 111

7
event of high-culture prestige, involving soloists such as Yehudi Menuhin or
Claudio Arrau and conductors such as Sir John Barbirolli. In 1960, Cartea
Rusă (The Russian Book) Publishing House closed. In 1963 the teaching of
Russian ceased to be obligatory in schools. In 1963-1964, the Anthology of
American Contemporary Short Story (featuring Salinger, Steinbeck etc.) was
published by the most widely read Romanian editing house, BPT. Again in
1963-1964, a new law freed thousands of political prisoners, under the
auspices of their “social reintegration through work.”19 In 1964, ARLUS 20
(the proper Soviet propaganda agency in Romania) shut. The Romanian
particularism, the paradoxical de-Sovietization and de-Russification
combined with wilful Westernization and nationalist assertion turned critical
in 1964, with the publication in Scînteia (The Sparkle, official newspaper of
the Romanian Communist Party) of a firm statement titled Declarație cu
privire la poziția Partidului Muncitoresc Român în problemele mișcării
comuniste și muncitorești internaționale (Declaration regarding the
Romanian Communist Party’s position in matters related to the international
workers’ and communist movement). The Declaration alienated the local
communist leadership from the Moscow-guided, communist
internationalism, proclaiming its sovereignity, in a menacing context. The
Soviet Union advanced (in Russian press) plans form geo-political re-
structuring of communist countries in the Balkans (including Romania) into
super-statal entities guided by Moscow. The Declaration maintained that
“Giving the lead to some super-statal or extra-statal organizations would
turn sovereignity into a hollow notion”, while “the ongoing divergencies and
the public polemic in the international communist and workers’ movement
impede on the relationships between the socialist countries.”21

The schismatic strategy of the local communist leadership facing Soviet

domination was pursued right after the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1963 and in
1964, vice-prime-minister Gheorghe Gaston-Marin visited USA, and prime-

19
Alexandru Mihalcea, Mirel Stănescu, 50 de ani de la eliberarea deținuților politici anticomuniști, 22,
17.06.2014.
20
ARLUS - The Romanian Association for Strengthening the Relationships with the Soviet Union.
21
Scanteia, 26 April 1964, p. 1

8
minister Ion Gheorghe Maurer visited France in 1964, to pursue talks with
Charles de Gaulle, strengthening the image of Romania as a global power-
broker. The Declaration was acutely perceived by the Soviet Union as a
break-up with prior politics, as “anti-Sovietic… nationalist action.” 22 The
advent of Nicolae Ceausescu as secretary general of the Romanian
Communist Party, in 1965, furthered this political line. Between 1965 and
1970 he did yearly visits and talks with the Soviet leadership, but made his
first overture to the West in June 1970, invited in a state visit by French
president Georges Pompidou, rapidly followed by the ground-breaking USA
visit, in October 1970, invited by president Richard Nixon. Significant
cultural exchanges especially in visual arts accompanied the political efforts.

USA started the interventionist aesthetics on the Romanian artistic/political

scene with astutely conceived and powerfully promoted exhibitions. Art was
branded as a major propaganda device already by President Roosevelt. His
anti-totalitarian speech at MoMA, in 1939, decreed: "What we call liberty in
politics results in freedom in the arts... Crush individuality in the arts and
you crush art as well."23 President Eisenhower reiterated the standpoint in
his anti-communist speech of 1954, at MoMA’s 25th anniversary: "freedom
of the arts is a basic freedom, one of the pillars of liberty in our land... In
tyranny... artists are made the slaves and tools of the State... chief
propagandists of a cause."24 Following this pitch, a first significant USA
propaganda step in Romania was the complex study-trip-cum-exhibition-
plus-practical workshop entitled Artele grafice în SUA (Graphic Arts USA).
Started in Romania25 in 1965, the show went afterwards in Poland and
Yugoslavia. The traveling exhibition was accompanied by American artists
who visited both touristic and industrial areas of Romania. The campaign
had manifold freedom targets: exporting cultural patterns (freedom of
22
Elena Negru, Gh Negru, Cursul deosebit, 2013, pp 14-16.
23
Patricia Hills, in Barnshel, Turner, Catherine. Pressing the Fight, Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War.
Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010 p. 256.
24
Hills 267
25
The show in Bucharest was a short version of the overwhelming Graphic Arts USA exhibition toured in
the Soviet Union in 1963-1964 (Alma Ata, Moscow, Leningrad, Yerevan - 1.6 milion visitors overall, more
than 100 exhibiting artists). The catalogue of the show in Romania had the same iconic cover by Thomas
Geismar made for the show in USSR.

9
consumption) and artistic, technical means (freedom of invention) combined
with exporting understanding and collaboration (freedom as liberty of
consciousness). Artists researched and worked in the visited areas. The
resulting works were exhibited in the ensuing show, alongside specific
instruments and equipment for contemporary graphic arts (a full-fledged
print shop was available in the exhibition). Among the artists who
accompanied the show were John Ross (later on professor of printmaking for
fifty years at New School University, New York, and president of the
Society of American Graphic Artists), who exhibited engravings such as A
Street in Ploiești, and Paul Bruner (at that time enrolled as a MFA student at
Pratt Institute, and a graphic artist-in-residence for USIA, United States
Information Agency - the organizer of the traveling show), who exhibited
linocuts rendering the external frescos of Voroneț monastery in Moldova.

The explicit propaganda stake of the show emanates from the first page of
the (thin, undated and with not-numbered pages) catalogue 26 - a short
address signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, proclaiming that "Graphic
arts are the most universal among all the artistic forms: they really are a
common language of humans, contributing to the understanding of the
peoples. We are happy to have the occasion to show to the Romanian people
the works of some American graphic artists and hope that this exhibition
will contribute to a better understanding between our countries." 27 The
traditional, Roosevelt-Eisenhower confrontational propaganda mix of art and
freedom was pragmatically replaced by stressing a new, though relative,
value, the ”understanding” of peoples and countries. Art switched from an
imperative moral issue (liberty) to a transactional, fuzzy matter. The low-key
26
The Romanian-only catalogue was conceived and printed in the USA,distributed in Romania free of
charged. It was anonymously translated from English by either a Romanian emigre disconnected from the
Romanian culture for at least 40 years, or by a non-native translator of Romanian, who employed faulty
syntax and words such as "romîn" and "Romînia" instead of român and România, acvarela instead of
acuarela, operile instead of operele, contimporane instead of contemporane, alămîie instead of lămîie etc.
The distrust of the American organizers (contrasting the political rhetoric of understading) is visible from
the totally missing collaboration and communication with the Romanian specialists.
27
”Artele grafice sunt cele mai universale din toate formele artistice; sunt un adevarat limbaj comun al
oamenilor, care contribuie la intelegerea dintre popoare. Suntem fericiti ca ni se da prilejul sa aratam
Poporului romin lucrarile citorva artisti grafici americani si speram ca aceasta Expozitie va contribui la o
mai buna intelegere intre tarile noastre."

10
claim of mere "understanding" dodged the radicalism of liberty. It paid
attention to local, sensitive political milieu, more interested in statu quo, in
the cohabitation of two competing systems, than in violent collusion.
Significant for the will-to-understanding, the show included caricatures by
Rockwell Kent, who donated hundreds of his works to the Soviets, and acted
as president of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, from
1957 to 1971. Most exhibited works by more than 40 artists pertained to
visual culture in its larger, innocuous sense, than to highbrow art with
soaring (political) stakes. Although the exhibition was mounted on a
political background of war and violence, no mention of Vietnam was made.
The displayed book illustrations, corporate logos, posters, advertizing
projects, packaging, cartoons and comics ambitioned to outline the diversity,
the impact and normal functioning of graphic arts in the living (but
unquestioned) American culture, as part of the triumphant, consumerist
civilization, foreign to the heavy, indigest idealization of Socialist-realist art,
whose employment was restricted to official propaganda, with no impact on
the daily life and economics. The Supermarket Trolleys, a colorful and joyful
silk-screen by Ben Shahn (its coolness contrasting his visual brand of social
realist portraiture), as well as the exquisite pen-drawing for an "illustrated
American magazine" (probably The New Yorker) by Romanian-born Saul
Steinberg, and the tempera project poster by Saul Mandel for "an insurance
company", or the drawing by Walter Einsel for "a cook book", and the drafts
by Ernie Pintoff for "a TV cartoon series", demonstratively fit into a
functional scheme of smooth, society-embedded art. The benign show
wittingly lacked a decisive political insertion, in the grand, anti-communist
propaganda tradition, and it also prevented any self-criticism of the current,
wars. Its understated feature wa attuned to the state of facts of the Romanian
politics and aesthetics of the time, recovering from the almost 20 years of
Socialist realism, which cut off Romania from the international art scene.

4. The exhibition was blandly reviewed in the only Romanian art-magazine,

Arta, by Petru Comarnescu, the local Americanist en titre, who remarked or
echoed the purported diversity of the exhibits "the variety of visions and

11
expressions, of contemporary styles and idioms, and the different techniques
employed."28 Already an instrument of the official, communist propaganda
(Comarnescu was recently uncovered as a hyper-active informant of
Securitate, the secret police29) he tried to eschew the social and economic
functionality of the exhibited works, by associating the American artists to
local rhetorics of artistic relevance, remarking, in the obligatory newspeak
"their complex interpretation of social and individual realities." 30 Still
reminding the ritual accusations of decomposing subjectivism raised against
American art during the 1950s, he mentions that the exhibited works reflect
"anxious inquiries, existential problems, surreal visions, expressionist
explosions, abstractionist signs... moments of shock and doubt,
contradictions between ideals and daily life... an intellectual and emotional
restlessness."31 With inflated phrasing and minute pin-pointing of each and
every art trend, Comarnescu used the American artists as springboard to
introduce the newly drafted aesthetic concept of local communist
propaganda, replacing the discarded Socialist realism: the "stylistic
diversity", the panacea to artistic stagnation, opposing the multiplicity of
stylistic choices (in rendering the same propaganda content) to the
monochord, Soviet realism.

The concept of stylistic diversity was introduced by the American catalogue,

in the section dedicated to book illustration, characterized by "o mare
varietate de stiluri" ("a great variety of styles"). The resemblance of the new
ideological formula and the American political aesthetics is striking. The
matter and battle of styles was ingrained in American art theory since the
1940s. Alfred Barr maintained already in 1948 that "the public should have
freedom of choice among many styles." 32 Stylistic diversity in art was a
demand reflecting the diversity inherent to the proliferating, market

28
Arta, 1, 1965, Petru Comarnescu, Artele grafice în SUA (expo în Bucureşti) Comarnescu, Artele
grafice in SUA, Arta, 1/1965. ”varietatea de viziuni si expresii, de stiluri si limbaje contemporane, apoi,
diferentierea tenicilor folosite”.32
29
Boia, Comarnescu
30
Comarnescu ”complexa interpretare a realitatilor sociale si individuale” 33
31
P. 33
32
Patricia Hills, in Barnishel, Turner, p. 265.

12
economy, offering to consumers a competition of as many and as various
(symbolic) goods as possible. This contrasted to the propaganda needs of the
communist regimes, where the cultural goods were restricted and controlled,
reflecting the planned, communist economy. Alfred Barr became more
radical in time on the issue of stylistic diversity, as he insisted in 1966 that
"Soviet artists... paint pictures in a popular realistic style preferably with
propaganda content. Other styles are forbidden and other subjects
discouraged."33 The communist ideology internalized the criticism, and
strived to upgrade its propaganda. The Marxist, Soviet-emanated theory of
the 1960 tried to cope with the ideological standstill after Stalin. The
strongly backed idea of "unity in diversity", which tried to keep together
dogmatic propaganda and various cultural practices, as well as the admission
that even in communism there still are some "internal contradictions"
(generally ascribed only to the capitalist world), but in a "non-antagonist" 34
form, contributed to assuming stylistic diversity in reaching ideological
tasks. The overt definition of stylistic diversity as protecting art from
monochord (socialist) realism was never explicit. But it fed most of the
renewal efforts, which rapidly turned to photo-realism, performance, neo-
constructivism, installations and land art. Renewal had to be anti-realist in
order to attain the ideologically required stylistic diversity.

The crucial point in the Romanian theoretical turn to stylistic diversity was
1965. From 19 to 24 July, the 9th Congress of the Romanian Communist
Party took place in Bucharest. Nicolae Ceaușescu was elected secretary
general of the Party, and presented the Report to the Congress. No mention
of socialist realism was made in his or other Party leaders’ interventions.
Instead, he claimed that "it is necessary that the artists create in diverse
forms and styles... permeated by socialist humanism", and further required
the artists to "creatively improve their expressive means, their stylistic
diversity."35 Without naming socialist realism, he continued by condemning
it in veiled formulas such as "any tendency of exclusivism and rigidity in the
33
idem 268
34
Tismăneanu, Vasile, Perfectul acrobat, 363
35
Congress 9, 95

13
field of arts should be dismantled."36 The Congress firmly stated that "arts
and literature are defined by a continous renewal and creative improvement
of the expressive means, by stylistic diversity." 37 The explicit American
connection between stylistic diversity and freedom (of creation and
consumption) was blurred in the Romanian variant. Stylistic diversity was
introduced as a technical landmark of an artist's proficiency and ideological
awareness, instead of a moral and economic mark of total liberty. From Barr
to Greenberg, stylistic diversity amounted in painting to developing from
reflective representation to the self-referential canvas, from figuration to
abstraction, and from interest in the object to interest for the innermost
subjectivity.The America-backed stylistic diversity referred to freely attain
various art targets in diverse ways. Contrariwise, Romanian stylistic
diversity was restricted to rendering the same propaganda task (the values of
"socialist humanism"38, a makeshift slang for dogma), but approached in
various formulas. What connects the two understandings of stylistic
diversity is their heavy normativity - in Alfred Barr's terms, which formatted
President Eisenhower's rhetoric of 1954, the connection between stylistic
diversity and freedom is as patronizing and mandatory as the connection
between stylistic diversity and artistic competency in the documents of the
9th Congress of PCR. The official turn to stylistic diversity of the local
aesthetic system was effective with the huge show dedicated to the marginal-
turned-hero artist Ion Țuculescu (1910-1962). His February-April 1965
retrospective (271 works) at Dalles Hall thrilled the whole artistic scene.
Disconnected from official art, practicing a self-designed, totemic abstract
expressionism, Țuculescu was the perfect embodiment of otherness,
compared to socialist realism and to state-backed propaganda art. Hailing
Țuculescu as a beacon for the art to come will turn into a major cultural
statement for the communist propaganda in the next years. The chain of
exhibitions of his work in USA and Europe, under the aegis of Petru
Comarnescu, was a crucial cultural asset of the regime, in its international
36
Idem, 96
37
Idem congr 9, 846
38
Cristian Vasile, 124 NC ”umanism socialist pentru a inlocui realismul socialist”.

14
campaign of parading stylistic diversity as a token of freedom of
expression.39

5. Immediately after the American Graphic Arts overture of 1965, the

French cultural services started their offensive on the Romanian art scene,
seemingly raising the stakes, but in close connection with the local,
Romanian institutions. In March-April 1966, the exhibition Pictori francezi
contemporani (French Contemporary Painters) organized by the Romanian
State Comittee for Culture and Arts opened at Dalles Hall in Bucharest,
mixing 50 representatives of the late Paris-School and post-war figures of
French artistic milieu, such as Serge Poliakoff, Hans Hartung, Pierre
Soulages or Edouard Pignon. 40 The Romanian Introduction to the catalogue
was due to Academician George Oprescu, director of the Bucharest Institute
of Art History41, who both mentioned Brâncuși as an art connecting piece
between Romania and France, and insisted that in communist Romania”art
is no longer an absolutely individual expression… but it springs out from the
obligations the artist has to his contemporaries, which … to us is not a dated,
far-fetched phase of art.”42 Oprescu’s odd confirmation of communist
aesthetics was buttressed by a subsequent reframing of the earlier, anti-
photorealist thesis of Soviet-based ideology, as he stressed that”reality is not
a colored photographic reproduction.”43 The unsigned French Introduction44
was even more provocative, praising the 1941, Paris art-group Jeune France
and”the true French tradition in art”, while avowing that ”we deliberately
39
1965 was a crucial year in matters of local stylistic diversity. The Țuculescu retrospective (271 works)
opened at Dalles Hall in spring, followed by the retrospective (86 works) of the ex-avant-garde pillar M.H.
Maxy (who switched again, from a tenor of socialist realism to proponent of serialism and neo-avant-
garde), at MNAR, The National Museum of Art (whose director was Maxy himself). ButȚuculescu was
chosen to represent Romania at Venice Biennale 1966. Afterwards his work was shown in Paris and
Copenhagen in1967. Organized by The Smithsonian Institution, his1968 show in the USA traveled to
Washington DC, Columbus, San Francisco, and San Bernardino.Back in Europe, the exhibition was shown
in 1968 in Belgrade and Brusells, in 1969 in Oslo and Stockholm, and in 1970 in Vienna.
40
Expoziția pictori francezi contemporani (The exhibition French contemporary painters) București Martie-
Aprilie1966, The French organizing committee comprised Andre Malraux, Maurice Couve de Murville,
Jean-Louis Pons, and was presided by Jacques Jaujard. The catalogue was issued by Arta Garfică Editions,
Bucharest 1966.
41
Since 1949 until his death in 1969.
42
Idem, Oprescu, no page.
43
ibidem
44
Perhaps by the famous Jacques Jaujard, president of the organization committee of the exhibition.

15
did not select those feeble artists adapted to ephemeral fashions, like neo-
naturalists, pop-art…dead-born movements … searching for their inspiration
in garbage pails, and deserving our ignorance.”45 This regressive (traditional-
modernist) standpoint on contemporary art was soon rephrased by the
French authorities.

In May 1968, another show, Expoziția de pictură contemporană franceză

(The Exhibition of Contemporary French Painting) 46 presented by the newly
devised Romanian Office for Organizing Art Exhibitions, was hosted by the
National Museum of Art in Bucharest, the major art institution nationwide.
Having the same French committee of honour like the 1966 show, lead by
André Malraux, the ambitious exhibition (73 artists) mapped the French
painting scene, ranging from informel, COBRA, and art brut (Asger Jorn,
Hartung, Soulages, Fautrier, Hantai, Riopelle, Mathieu, Dubuffet) to
rigorous, op-art abstraction (Vasarely, Soto) or surrealism (Max Ernst, Lam,
Masson). The show, explicitly dedicated to the ”Paris School” included both
major figures of the historical avant-garde, such as Giacometti, Herbin and
Matta, but also pioneered a striking recuperation of Romanian émigré-artists,
such as Victor Brauner, Horia Damian, Alexandru Istrati and Natalia
Dumitrescu, implying national pride in re-inserting international artists of
Romanian origin onto the local art scene. Next to the displayed
”Romanianness” of the current international art, the idea of ”contemporary”
was endemic for the titles of the shows, precisely to boost the feeling of
relinking to progress and actuality. The translated Introduction, signed by
Maurice Allemand47 embraced (though showing similar artists like in 1966)
rather different values, insisting that the diversity of the art on show relies on
the fact that artists”have chosen to express nothing but their own sensibility,
the most subjective element… the individual temperaments inspiring the
characteristic aesthetic diversity of today.”48 Thus, the French-American
clash of arts on Romanian ground seemed to finally conclude in the name
45
idem
46
Expoziția de pictură franceză contemporană, MNAR Bucharest, May 1968, art commissar Bernard
Anthonioz, catalogue issued by Arta Grafică Editions, Bucharest 1968.
47
”Chief inspector of the Service for Artistic Creation” of France.
48
P. 3-4

16
of”stylistic diversity” and ”individualism”, the main topics of the Western
propaganda-related aesthetics of the past decades.

Still, the competition in defining what is contemporary in art (either the

prolongation of the quality-painting of late, Paris School, or the irreverent,
postwar American art) was ongoing, as it touched the ideological interests
and the aesthetic searches of the communist Romanian regime too.
Arguably, the noisy stance of the 1966 ”traditional-modernist” French show
was propelled by the first, 1965 American exhibition in Romania, a crucial
propaganda agency of pop culture. In its turn, assessing the risks raised by
excessive stylistic diversity and the ensuing, potentially disruptive
experiment in art, the communist regime increasingly rephrased it in
harmless formulas. Few years later, Nicolae Ceaușescu insisted that
"Campaigning for an engaged art, firmly situated on Marxist-Leninist
standpoints, our Party promoted and promotes a large variety of styles and
artistic manners."49 By putting first the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, and
gradually reducing stylistic diversity to a rather caricatural "variety of
artistic manners", the regime preserved the glitter of openness, while
preventing unwanted ideological outgrowths.

6. The waning of the liberating sense of stylistic diversity was at stake both
in the conservative, inoffensive French exhibitions, and in the vacillating re-
phrasing of stylistic diversity by the Romanian political regime. Once again
the American intervention was pivotal.50 As a tacit consequence of Prague
Spring and Romania's support for Czechoslovakia in 1968, and as a reward
from President Richard Nixon to Nicolae Ceaușescu, who invited and
received him as if head of a state, in 1967 (when he was just a presidential
candidate), early in 1969 the most important effort of supporting the

49
141, NC, Cuvintare la Adunarea generala a scriitorilor, 1968, Ed. Politică, p.9 ”Militînd pentru o artă
angajată, situată ferm pe pozițiile Marxist-leniniste, partidul nostru s-a pronunțat și se pronunță pentru o
largă varietate de stiluri și maniere artistice.”
50
"a larger touring show of American art after 1945 entitled The Disappearance and the Reappearance of
the image… traveled to various Eastern European cities(…) These US displays belong to the long and well-
recorded history of attempts to use modern art and design to broadcast 'American values" during the Cold
War", Elsa Coustou, The World goes Pop, 32.

17
Westernization of Eastern art was made, under the title The Disappearance
and Reappearance of the Image: American Painting Since 1945. Organized
by the Smithsonian Institution for the National Collection of Fine Arts
International Art Program, Washington, the unprecedented show was
accompanied by a Romanian-only catalogue51 illustrating 82 works by 19
key-American artists, from Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to
Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, and from Barnett Newman and
Morris Louis52 to Mark Rothko53. The overwhelming show was designed to
astound entire Romania and to preface in a grandiose way the state visit of
by now President Richard Nixon54, in August 1969. The great American
exhibition was mounted at Dalles Hall in Bucharest (17 January-2 February
1969), at Muzeul Banatului in Timișoara (14 February-1 March, 1969), and
at the Cluj Art Gallery (14 March-2 April 1969). It went afterwards to
Czechoslovakia, at the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava (14 April-15
June 1969) and the National Gallery, Wallenstein Palace in Prague (1 July-
15 August 1969). Its last European stop was Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels
(21 October-16 November 1969). With an introduction by John W.
McCoubrey55, an essay by Ruth Kaufmann56 and selected statements by the
artists and other writers, the show remains the most ambitious, post-war
51
The catalogue was produced in the USA. Its first page evoked the success registered one year before with
the exhibition Ion Țuculescu, toured by the same Smithsonian Institution in cities around USA. The
translation from English to Romanian was again made with no contribution by Romanian specialists, and it
was undoubtedly done by the same person involved in translating the catalogue of Graphic Arts USA, in
1965. Similar mistakes occur like in the preceding catalogue: ”aceiași compoziție” instead of ”aceeași
compoziție”, ”înșele” instead of ”însele” (p.15), ”așterne” instead of ”aștearnă” (p. 56), ”conservatist”
instead of ”conservator” etc. At page 40, the translator produces a total nonsense, translating from English
into Romanian a phrase as ”Pollock folosea sinuozitățile și funiile”, which literally means ”Pollock used
sinuosities and ropes”, whereas most probably the wrongly translated English word was ”strings”.

52
On show was one of his last masterpieces, Number 49 (acrylic on canvas, 1962) from the Miriam
Jaegermann Collection, Bethseda, Maryland (sold at Sothebys NY in 2008).
53
On show was one of his crucial works, Red and Brown (oil on canvas, 1958), previously in Charles and
Susan Buckwalter Collection, bought in 1966 by The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

54
”The Romanian Government in 1969 was anxious to have good relations with the US. They felt the
Soviet threat, especially after Ceaușescu spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Czecho-slovakia. They
had been eager for the Nixon visit in August; he had been willing to go to Romania partly for the reason
that it was the only Eastern European country that would receive him while he was out of office from 1961
to 1969.” Leonard C. Meeker, 245
55
John W. McCoubrey, Dean of the Faculty of Art History, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

18
American visual arts implement in the region. The show and its catalogue
offered the official narrative of American art, a manual which will shape its
local reception for the decades to come, especially in the works of the main
Americanist after Petru Comarnescu in the 1970s and 1980s, Dan
Grigorescu57, who assimilated and further developed in his works the main
theses of the show and of the catalogue. The origins of American art were
set after “WW2, when a series of American painters created a new art out of
the European modernist styles of the 20th century, one both international
through its sources and yet distinctive American… bringing in a great
variety of new styles .”58 Besides re-inserting the consecrated theme of
stylistic diversity, the exhibition did a surprising turn by internalizing the
communist, polarized reception of American (Western) art, switching the
polarization from negative to positive. Acknowledging the dialectics of the
pair abstract art (the disappearance of the image) and figurative art (the re-
appearance of the photorealist image) was concomitantly a token of stylistic
diversity and an open, historical scheme of freedom and progress in visual
arts (and in society, by implication). The catalogue paired the exhibition to
the breakthrough, Armory Show of 1913, shown in New York, Chicago and
Boston, when European art ignited American art, despite its bad reception
and scolding of the local authorities (a shrewd hint to the communist
suspicions).59 Abstract art was introduced as a mirror of the liberty-bound,
historical avant-garde, but also of the American, political liberalism, as its
uncensored freedom of expression supposedly reflected ”the stylistic
improvisation, carefully developed as to parallel the ad-hoc, unplanned, but
efficient way things are done in America.”60 Connections were made not
only with American economy and psyche, but also between abstraction, pop
art and puritanism, finally praising the ”changing art market, enabling artists
56
Ruth Kaufmann, Institute of Fine Arts, NY University, NY
57
Starting in 1968, Dan Grigorescu was director of the Visual Arts Department of the State Committee for
Arts and Culture.
58
John W. McCoubrey p. 5 ww2 cind "o serie de pictori americani au creat din stilurile modernismului
european al secolului xx o pictura noua, care era internationalaprin izvoarele sale si totusi distinct
americana"... " a adus pictura americana pe primul plan al midernismului international".... " o gama variata
de stiluri noi"
59
P. 6 ”Pentru marele public expzoitia a reprezentat un crnaval al absurdului”
60
John W. McCoubrey, p. 8.

19
to work in a climate of freedom and social security” 61as if to provocatively
stress those ideological features able to inflame any communist mindset:
freedom, capitalism, religion.
Ruth Kaufmann pleaded for abstraction (the”disparition of the image”),
as”our epoch questions if the external appearances do reflect the inner
reality”62, a statement with anti-realist-socialist and anti-communist
connotations (slightly misplaced in Romania in 1969, few years after the
local demise of socialist-realism). Her canonic view on the American art,
as”assimilation of the discoveries and conclusions of the two main
movements in European art, cubism and surrealism” 63 would be reiterated in
the Romanian reception of the exhibition, as well as her standard views
on”the subjective improvisation of gestural abstraction and its lack of
interest for the structural clarity boosted a dual reaction among younger
artists: pop art and the so-called post-painterly abstraction.” 64 Her Hegelian
reading, espoused also by the exhibition and its title, presented a thesis (the
disappearance of the image under the pressure of gestural abstraction), its
anti-thesis (the resurgence of the image in pop art objectualism), and their
synthesis (the fusion of the two trends into minimalism, which redeemed the
object, while bracketing representation). The underlying, three-movement
Hegelian dialectic/rhetoric of the exhibition was not by chance: it
assimilated and diverted the commonly invoked Marxist dialectics (a
variation on the Hegelian one) in any communist theories of the time. The
American proposal internalized the aesthetic polarity without turning it into
two fatally competing systems, but into a normal expression of historical
dynamics inside one single system, the capitalist one, able to manage its
vitality, and not impose a mechanical finality onto it, like in the case of the
socialist realist dogma. No wonder that the philosophical conclusion
(synthesis) of the art historical survey in the catalogue favored again
individualism, emotional subjectivism (deeply abhorred by communist
aesthetics):”in the elimination of representation… the appearance and the
disappearance of the image were concomitant, as a reaction to the same
emotional atmosphere.”65 Explicit, but also misplaced and retarded attacks
on socialist realism followed, as she echoed Alfred Barr’s view that in
American art it was evident ”the tendency to abandon the image, but never

61
ibidem
62
Ruth Kaufmann, p. 9
63
P. 9
64
P. 12
65
P. 12

20
in a dogmatic manner.”66 The absence in the show of any proper realist,
engaged American artist, like Leon Golub or Ben Shahn proved that the
perfectly codified exhibition was intended as an unchipped aesthetic weapon
directed at the most profound philosophical and ideological foundations of
the communist mindset.But that very mindset was changing in Romania.

7. This delicate positioning could be grasped only by placing the American

exhibition in the context of the hectic artistic moves on the Romanian scene
between1965-1970. Beside the French series of exhibitions, the landscape
was completed by the impressive show of the most influential East-German,
socialist realist painter, Willi Sitte, in September 1969. His works were
hailed to”awaken consciousnesses”, and”support no purely aesthetic
speculations” 67, the last statement being a veiled irony to the great American
exhibition housed by the same hall only few months before. Concomitantly
with the American show, in January 1969, an acclaimed exhibition of Cuban
photography was provocatively installed in the Culture Palace in Pitești, not
far from Bucharest, with works permeated by ”social reflection”, emanating
”the impression of a constructive revolution”.68 In April-August 1969
occurred the most important breakthrough of neo-avant-garde art in
Romania, as artists like 111 Group from Timișoara (active since 1964) and
Pavel Ilie from Bucharest participated in the Constructivist Biennale in
Nuremberg, alongside Max Bill or Josef Albers, and other major avant-garde
figures. The Romanian artistic landscape was far more versatile than the too
tutorial American exhibition and catalogue could assume. Beside the realist-
socialist eulogies, anti-colonialist intimations and neo-constructivist stances,
the local artistic-intellectual milieu was mesmerized by cybernetics and
information theory. Again in 1969, a long, translated essay by René Berger 69
was published, arguing that”mass media turn everything into information…
the world circulation of the works of art is an unprecedented phenomenon…
national and international networks appear”70while the proper models of the
current art were allegedly”linguistics, psychoanalysis, ethnology,
cybernetics.”71 Right after the great American show, prominent art theorist
Titus Mocanu considered that”the current tendency…is the space-optical
arts, which excludes Pop Art”, because art has acquired”a new status,
66
P. 17
67
Sitte exhibited at Dalles Hall in Bucharest 26 paintings and 25 drawings. See Arta, 10/1969, p. 38.
68
Virginia Biolan, Fotografia cubaneza, in Cotemporanul, 5/31 January 1969.
69
Rene Berger, Arta si mutatia mijloacelor de comunicare (Art and the mutation of the means of
communication), in Arta, 12, 1969 p. 10.
70
Berger p. 10.
71
Idem, 12

21
complementary to the one of the science”.72 Pop Art, as well as abstract
expressionism, photorealism and minimalism (in short, all the trends
introduced on the Romanian art scene by the great American show) had little
impact (compared to the political means used, and the geographic extension
of the exhibition) on the Romanian artistic practice. They looked like
traditional modes of art production to the future-oriented, local art theorists.
The new (rather utopian) ultra-rationalism and progressive scientism
towards which local art aspired turned theory into futurologic missionarism
(sometimes working strangley, like in the case of interpreting the serialist
fixation of the ongoing art as relying on”the field of abstract algebras”73).
The influences of the communist ideology were deeply assimilated by local
artists and theorists but mostly ignored by the American aesthetic insertions.
The equation of art and cognition, its proximity to science was a crucial
point in communist aesthetics: “art should be considered a specific form of
knowledge of the objective world.”74Lenin’s thesis of the cognitive
objectivity of art was widely echoed in the fanatic scientism of the 1960s, as
local cultural propaganda rulers posited that”The scientific discoveries are as
many confirmations of the accuracy of the dialectic materialism.” 75
Progressive scientism as part of the communist mata-narrative
simultaneously raised the intellectual stakes of art and lowered its ethic-
emotional, political and rebellious profile, thus perfectly complying
propaganda tasks. This ideological framework makes clear why and how the
local reception of American art (including the great American exhibition of
1969) was hijacked as to lose both its emulating faculties and its political
scope too: no significant developments of abstract expressionism or pop art
occurred in Romania after the massive American aesthetic interventionism
of the late 1960s, and no single rebellion sign was perceived either.
Scientism, applied as hermeneutics on American art (by Camilian
Demetrescu, Titus Mocanu, Iulian Mereuță etc.) succeeded to divest it of
any empathic and stylistic strength, distancing it into an analytical case of
modernist, aesthetic technology, with no vital impact on the ongoing, local
art matters. Pop art and minimalism were targeted by a devastating reception
of Titus Mocanu (a paradoxical thinker who combined scientist arguments,
72
Titus Mocanu, Știință și artă (Science and art), in Arta 11/1970, p. 5
73
Idem p. 9
74
M. Ovseannikov, Lenin si estetica, 1960, 4
75
Leonte Răutu, concluzii la Seminarul cu ativiștii din domeniul propagandei, 6 oct 1962 : ”
Descoperiririle științei sînt tot atîtea confirmări ale justeței materialismului dialectic…” P 422

22
spiritual longings, and propaganda fixations, Mocanu emigrated to West
Germany in 1979) who conjectured that ”pop art… and minimalism imply
somewhat the field of precarity as they outrage the human being”, and
blasted ”against mechanicism in art, which crushes the human condition…
in the name of humanism and eternal spirituality… we should crucify…
commercialism in art… pop art…is exiting the sphere of aesthetic
expression. ”76A case of severe reception is Dan Grigorescu, the local
Americanist en titre after Petru Comarnescu. Despite his larger access to
American art (in the USA), and the generally positive picture he is giving of
it, his views bluntly centered on the USA-provided grand narrative. There is
a huge difference from the avant-garde-like eulogy of Americana and its
energetic, industry-cum-entertainment, flamboyant phantasm in the writings
of Petru Comarnescu, and the disparagement of individualism in the
writings of Dan Grigorescu, who sketches a post-industrial, anti-humanist,
consumerist, doubtful and decaying Americana.

Even the liberating ideology beneath American art was taken by Romanian
artists as a technique too, proper to the creative elite, but not a socially
efficient process. Reduced to an upgraded formalist kit of artistic
competency, elements of abstraction and photorealism penetrated the
language of Romanian propaganda art, like in the late-1960s and early 1970s
works of Diet Sayler, Ion Bitzan, Eugen Popa, Simion Mărculescu, Corneliu
Brudașcu, Florina Lăzărescu, Lia and Dorian Szasz. Rhetoric representations
of industrial mass production (through serialist repetition) as well as
bombastic renditions of agricultural productivity (through photorealist
manipulations) and shining examples of domestic bliss in a mystified, Pop
Art-modeled comfort of the emerging, communist bourgeoisie, flourish
concomitantly with the increasing censorship and deprivation of liberties of
the whole society. A separate case was Ion Grigorescu (and partly his

76
Titus Mocanu, Tendințe fundamentale în arta occidentală (Fundamental trends in occidental art) in
România literară (Literary Romania), II, 36, 9/1969, p. 26.

23
collaborator Matei Lăzărescu) who explored photorealism as an appropriate
device to divert official art into surrepticious criticism. 77 True,”the effect of
these various encounters with spectacular works of pop art on artists from
Eastern Europe is clear. A number of young artists went through a pop
phase."78 Yet the real matter, at least in Romania, is not this purely stylistic
upgrading of the local art scene (the cultural self-colonization and
simulation), but the actually small number of influenced artists, compared to
the means spent. With few exceptions, most Romanian progressive artists re-
loaded after 1965 various versions of Paris School, classical modernism.
European reflections of American art acted stronger as models than the
American originals. Indeed, Robert Rauschenberg was the most pervasive,
hegemonic influence among the artists who revamped socialist realism into
stylistic diversity, but Ion Bitzan was more influenced by Peter Blake than
by Andy Warhol, while Ion Grigorescu took more from Jacques Monory
than from Roy Lichtenstein. Even more significant is the further use given
by some of these artists to the newly acquired and echoed artistic means.
When one contemplates how Pop Art means (from serialism and
photorealism to silkscreens and collages) were hijacked by official
propaganda and engrossed a progressive but totalitarian art, then the
ideological effectiveness of the American aesthetic interventionism in Easter
Europe looks suspicious.

8. The late 1960s were marked by the worldwide offensive of American art
(either official or independent), which caused tensions: in 1968, Documenta
IV in Kassel presented 56 American artists, 1/3 of the total number. To
protest, European artists such as”César, Raysse, Takis, Le Parc, Morellet …
withdrew from the show.”79 The consecration of Robert Rauschenberg as a

77
For more details on the probematic photoreralist outburst in Romanian art, see Erwin Kessler, Picture it
Painted... Reality, Real, and Realisms in Romanian art and theory, 1960-1976, in East of Eden.
Photorealism – Versions of Reality, Nikolett Eross, Editor, Ludwig Museum Budapest, 2012, pp. 95-114.
78
Elsa Coustou, The World goes Pop, 32

79
Catherine Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art,195.

24
paragon of American art in Romania at the time of the great American show
is evident from the essay80 translated from French in the prominent, elite
cultural magazine Secolul XX. Its author was the art critic of L’Express
(from 1966 to 1978), but his views buttressed distrust in capitalism, as the
work of Rauschenberg was brought back to its European sources and neared
to the one of Duchamp, and then singled out as “cultural pessimism”,
because “he does not love our civilization… nor our way of living”.81

Although with lesser ambitions and impact, the early 1970s punctually
brought American art in Romania, mainly in Bucharest. In 1970, lithographs
by Jasper Johns were exhibited in the basement of the Romanian
Athenaeum. His was described as “correct, almost photographic realism with
exacerbated technical elements and psychedelic effects”. 82The ritual,
idiomatic references to realism and technical prowess must not overshadow
the fact that the note on Jasper Johns was published by Săptămîna (The
Week), a magazine covertly patronized by Securitate. Corroborated with the
perplexing use of the word “psychedelic” (a tabu term pertaining to rebel
American culture), it indicates the profound change in the local forma
mentis occurred in less than five years. The intensity of exchanges is proved
by the presentation, in the same magazine, one month later, of the American
Photography exhibition at Brezoianu Galleries of the Romanian Union of
Fine Artists. Conceived by MoMA, the exhibition was predictably praised
for its “objectivity.” 83
But soon, after the 1971state visit of Nicolae Ceaușescu in China and North-
Korea, a dramatic development ignited. In the disquieting context of the
relationships with the Soviet Union (”In 1970 and 1971 rumors circulated
that the Soviets might act: they planned Warsaw Pact manoeuvers in
Bulgaria, Soviet troops would cross Romania to get there… Moscow’s
psychological war-fare against Romania ended in the fall of 1971”) 84, local
leadership turned back to hardline Stalinism. The consequences were
harsh:”The atmosphere of the dictatorship was oppressive. Conditions
worsened markedly after May and June of 1971 when Ceaușescu and other
party leaders made a trip to China and North Viet-nam (North Korea, note
80
Jean-Louis Ferrier, Rauschenberg, amestec de obiecte și iluzii (Rauschenberg, a Mix of Objects and
Delusions), Secolul XX, 3/1969, pp. 171-175.
81
P. 171
82
Săptămîna (The Week), VIII.34, 8/1970.Relief, unsigned column.
83
Săptămîna (The Week), VIII.35, 9/ 1970.Relief, unsigned column.

84
Meeker, 254

25
EK) On turn to Bucharest… announced a 17-point ideological program. It
included an end to foreign books, magazines, films, and music… The public,
already oppressed and deprived of decent food and access to imported
articles, was outraged…”85
Whereas before 1971 high-profile American art was introduced nationwide
in Romania, sometimes profiting of concomitant shows in major museums
and exhibiting halls, from that moment on, its profile gradually lowered and
was confined to the Library of American Embassy in Bucharest, a fortress
where cultural facilities were built for resistence in the years to come. 86 The
resignation of the American authorities conjoined with the local leadership
raising its ideological level in art, which became more and more officially
politicized and nationalistic.The previously interventionist, American
aesthetics regressed rapidly to the status of mostly diplomatic,
frozen”cultural exchanges”. For a while, the Embassy-shows still incited the
attention of the cultural press. In March 1972, Noua sculptură americană
(New American Sculpture - over 30 artists, like Marisol, Louise
Nevelson, Ernest Trova, Richard Shaw, George Ladas, Douglas Holmes,
William Stewart) was briefly introduced in local propaganda-friendly
clichés:”Through the collaboration between artists and industry, research
centers and science, the possibilities of sculpture increase infinitely.” 87 In
June 1972, the American Library presented Forma și procesul de creație
în pictura americană a secolului douăzeci (originally Form and the the
Creative Process: Selections from the Michener Collection88). Accompanied
by a 80-pages catalogue with 35 illustrations, an essay by Donald B.
Goodall, an Introduction by Hunter Ingalls and a text by James Michener 89
the mixed show displayed, among many others, works by Hans Hoffman,

85
Leonard C. Meeker, Experiences, 2007, Xlibris Corporation, Bloomington, Indiana, 260.
86
A new building was designed for the American embassy, which ”ended up having an exhibit space for
paintings and sculpture, a moderate-size auditorium for lectures and films, and a library.”, Meeker 245

87
In Arta 1972, p. 6.
88
Shown before at University Art Museum, University of Texas at Austin, in May 1972. Circulated
afterwards to Amerika Haus, Berlin, and American Embassy Library, Bucharest, Romania
89
Presented in SCIA, 1.1973, p 197.

26
William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, John Marin, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth
Kelly, Sam Francis, Larry Rivers. Its reception by art critic Dan Hăulică 90 is
still based on the consecrated American meta-narrative of 1969, who
enhanced the supposed European complex of American art, while stressing
the political tones of the works, finding in the paintings of Evergood and
Blume ”witnesses of an active participation to social life… and to the protest
movement of the workers… and antifascist pamphlets” that ”annihilate the
boundary between art and life”91 (the major aesthetic concern of the local,
propaganda art, to which the American authorities finally complied).

Concomitantly, The Art in Embassies program initiated in 1960 by Mrs. L.

Corrin Strong was extended to Bucharest embassy too92. The basic idea of
the program was a persuasive adaptation of the interventionist aesthetics of
Barr-Roosevelt-Eisenhower era, as the paintings supposed to hang in the
embassies”reflect the variety in style and medium of modern American art.
The works are borrowed from public collections, including MOMA, from
private collectors and from artists and galleries. The selection is made in
close consultation with the ambassador and/or his wife… each collection
should have something of the character of a small travelling exhibition. Its
standards should be those which prevail in Museum exhibitions and the
works of art should demonstrate a variety of important aspects of American
art. Collections are lent for a period of one year to 18 months, with the
possibility of loan exptension for an additional year. Loans are accompanied
by a presentation album giving background information…”93The Bucharest
embassy show was a perfect fulfillment of the requirements. The 16 artists
selected filed on the minimalist side. From Josef Albers to Morris Louis,
Ellsworth Kelly, Alexander Liberman, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, and
Frank Stella, to Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell, the hard edge and post-
painterly abstraction was the key-word, somewhat applying even to the
90
Dan Hăulică, Forma și procesul de creație (Form and the Creative Process), Arta, 8-9/1972, pp 50-51
91
Idem p. 51
92
The decision was taken already in 1966:”At the Forth Worth meeting, plans will be announced for
sending collections to Lagos, Nigeria, Damascus, Syria, Bucharest, Rumania, and Budapest, Hungary.” See
https://www.moma.org/.../MOMA_1966_Jan-June_0110_54 It seems that there was another
collection/exhibition in the Bucharest embassy prior to 1970, under the previous ambassador” In fact, the
paintings of the Davis era had been returned to MOMA in NY. Our borrowed collection, from the
Woodward Foundation, was also of contemporary American works”, Meeker, p. 258

93
https://www.moma.org/.../MOMA_1966_Jan-June_0110_54...

27
chosen works by Helen Frankenthaler, Jim Dine and Georgia O’Keefe. The
works by Lichtenstein and Rosenquist did not disturb the abstract concert
with their almost uniformous color fields.The catalogue presenting the
works on loan from the Woodward Foundation Collection Washington,
D.C.94 is not dated. Its preface was signed by Henry Geldzahler, then
associate curator with Metropolitan Museum, NY. His effusive words re-
phrase the European birth of American Art (with capital A!), while insisting
on”our native realism…native genius.”95The compromise with the Romanian
regime resides both in the excessive and misplaced use of realism in
introducing abstract art, and in the absence of references to individualism,
subjectivity, or emotion, veiled formulas which previously hinted at a
liberating effect of the American art. Already a triumphal globalist,
Geldzahler resonated with the scientism-prone Romanian theorists:”Like
scientists, artists want and need to know what their confreres are doing”
because”the entire world is becoming a single artistic community. National
differences persist, but through exhibitions and photographs of paintings,
these are being minimized.”96The heavy propaganda tone of earlier
catalogues gives way to a positive renunciation to suspicions or ideological
confrontations. The belief in”one world – two systems” transpires, although
the time and the place (Romania on its way back to Stalinism) made
everything sound wrong. Even the ritual proffering of the key-concept of
stylistic diversity97 is both jubilant and improper, as the perfectly cohesive
exhibition focused on minimalist, hard edge works. The works were sent
back to the USA in 1973, when Watergate-related frictions between
Ambassador Leonard Meeker and President Richard Nixon determined the
former to resign, and take care of ”the borrowed paintings to be carefully
crated under my supervision and sent home.”98
The ideal Embassy exhibition and its all too friendly catalogue were not
mentioned in Romanian publications. In the following years, the exhibitions
in the American Library tended to be less relevant. American artists like
Holley Coulter Chirot, girlfriend of the Romanian-born, Paris artist Nicolae
(Moni) Fleissig, found a way to exhibit at the Galateea Gallery of the
94
Arta americana contemporană, la Ambasada americană, București (Contemporary American Art in the
American Embassy, Bucharest), no year, no publisher mentioned. Despite a much better translation, the
anonymous translator was the same to the one who translated the catalogues from 1965 and 1969. Spellings
like acvarelă instead of acuarelă, canaluri instead of canale etc., and the nonsensical use of the
phrase”deslușiți și serioși pictori” (legible and serious painters) indicate the same hand.
95
Geldzahler, p. 6
96
P. 6
97
”the richness and variety of our painting”, p. 5, and ” there is a great variety of styles and techniques of
painting in America.”, p. 6.
98
Meeker, p. 259

28
Romanian Union of Fine Artists, in October 1974. 99 In 1975, a larger
exhibition of American Posters at the American Library made a nostalgic
Iulian Mereuță to re-affirm his interest in American art, although
deploring the ”minor tonality” of the show. 100In 1976, an exhibition of 50
silk-screens by R.B. Kitaj incites him again to extoll the”technical fidelity
of silkscreens”, and the recourse to ”brutal facts and brutal history… real
existence, in real time, with real objects.” 101Soon after, the only place left
to American art is for obituaries, either for Tobey 102 or for Albers103 (then
Mereuta fled to France, in 1978). It might seem depressing, but it is not.
More depressing are the next 15 years of almost no reference to American
art. Or even worse, the short notice after a USA study trip by Mihai Ispir,
in 1985, about”the neo-classicism of American architecture”,
published104precisely when the totalitarian-classical House of the People
was going to be built in Bucharest, a building which remains the true
landmark of communism.

99
SCIA 1974.
100
Mereuta, Arta 1975
101
Mereuta, Arta,1976
102
Mereuta, Arta, 1976
103
Mereuta, Arta, 1976
104
Ispir, SCIA, 1985

29