The sunny side
Thursday Jan 26, the Athenee Palace Hilton***** in Bucharest hosted an auction The Golden Age of 70 items belonging to the Ceausescu family. [in English] Official gifts from Japan, China, Iran, pens, leopard skins, commissioned paintings, propaganda posters - price range: 25 to 3.800 euros. Highest bid: Scânteia (the Spark), a painting by “forgotten painter” Constantin Artachino, a not so subtle Realist Postimpressionist portrait still life of the national newspaper Scanteia. Fairly straightforward - the peasant woman reader has set aside the cabbage for the news. Point of focus is rather the paper than the act of reading…illiteracy? A social class pushed forth absentmindedly? Artmark (the auction house) quotes it as a deliberate attempt on the side of the painter to get himself into the annual Realist-Bolshevik national annual art show. It’s one of those examples of surface propaganda, in your face sort of thing. Perhaps the most cutting of all critical /or submissive acts. It goes both ways.
And Ceausescu was a man who appreciated straight-forward things, despite his flamboyant eclecticism. He was a true collector in that sense. Both him and Elena - the wife, were. A large part of their estate was auctioned off by a government commission (I think) soon after the Fall. I remember images of their homes and belongings; people kept saying: Gold gold! All that gold they had all over! Most of the objects in this auction though come from private collections, purchased amongst those early bids. The auction house says foreigners are very interested in the dictator’s goodies. Seems like there’s a market … could easily fit into Treasures of the Dictators - special exhibition. The museums in Romania haven’t really put much effort into preserving this stuff, or the tons of art made for Ceausescu, in homage. (More on that in the Times) The discourse is so inconclusive - I mean whatever you decide to do with it is going to inevitably lead to controversy, added confusion, etc. So throwing it into the pit of the international art market seems like a deal. A deal with the ghosts.
People won’t get over this anytime soon. The last piece on Ceausescu and his memory was Andrei Ujica’s 2010 film “The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu”, which I very strongly recommend. The whole film is a cut+paste of archival footage from the national TV archives and Ceausescu family tapes. And where it succeeds for me, is precisely in using collage rather than linear perspective. Ujica’s homage is sarcastic, and funny, and I can see why many find that a problem. Because yes Ceausescu’s straight-forwardness, his linear mind, was a killer. And I’m not being sarcastic.
But I won’t end with the ghosts. I’ll end in Disney’s land, that mythical realm where he too go to go. Ceausescu world traveler, mega ruler, collector, one of those very few who smiled as they actually lived Communism a la Capitalisme.
The pictures: Baloo or Yogi the Bear (?) (we, or at least I, didn’t know who Yogi was until after the Revolution), Nicolae, his daughter Zoia, secret police man and in color Elena, Zoia and Nicolae with Mickey Mouse and his court at back (MM was just as common then - 89- as hello kitty and hannah montana are today, you can’t shake that kind of thing, even with the help of the Secret Police)
