Dealing with a twisted past, the Ceausescu collection on display
This NYT article briefly touching on the fate of the Nicolae Ceausescu collection of propaganda paintings was an inspiration. Part of this collection of oils, dating from the 1970s onward, are on display at the Romanian National Museum of Contemporary Art, where the curator hung these propaganda works upside-down and crooked to clearly note that this was not an homage to the personality cult of the Romanian dictator and his wife Elena. They were Communist Romania’s quintessential propaganda duo, and faced a dramatic ending in 1989, when the two were executed by firing squad after the Romanian revolution.
Not to draw conclusions about the similarities of the regimes (similarities notwithstanding) but I really liked the exhibition method of these crooked paintings. Nearly twenty years after the revolution, the decision to display these works is one step in coming to terms with a past, healing wounds and moving on––something that would obviously benefit China and the fragmented trajectory of contemporary Chinese art history. While this chapter in history is not completely suppressed, it still emerges as an underbelly of coded references in contemporary art, or as campy, consumer culture. The official art channels of “modern China” still turn a blind eye to the historical value of such works. Similar treatment of China’s propaganda art would be a step forward.
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