“Pessimistic, Superficial, Lacking Enthusiasm” : The Guiding Commissions of the Union of Romanian Artists and the Building of a National and Socialist Art during the 1950s (original) (raw)

2017

Abstract

This paper investigates the contribution of the Romanian Union of Artists to the development of an art “national in form, socialist in content”, but also of a professional and politically engaged group of artists during the 1950s. On an institutional level, this purpose was expected to be largely accomplished through the activity of guiding commissions (“comisii de îndrumare”) established in various art fields. As the name suggests, these commissions were in charge with the political, technical and esthetical guidance of artists, at a national scale. They were especially concerned with artists that were commissioned for the Annual State Exhibition, but their members were permanently looking for artists with socialist realist views and for those prone to “formalism” or “cosmopolitism”. Many archive documents attest the intense and challenging activity of these commissions, whether it concerned their own lack of rigorous methods of work, the conflicts with Party’s bureaucrats or the difficulties of maintaining a connection with the provinces. The guiding commission’s reports register very often the difficulties artists encountered in adopting the socialist realist method, despite all the instructions received. The paper focuses especially on the activity of the guiding commission in the field of painting, one of the most important arts in the hierarchy established within the Union. In order to examine its efforts in introducing a new understanding of art, special attention will be paid to the organisation and functioning of the commission within the Union of Artists and its discursive practices of guidance.

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