Tablouri de epocă (VI)
Old Paintings (VI)

Summary/Abstract: The author describes how political governance influenced artistic expression in Romania. Statues are the case study. Communist governance has ideologically influenced this kind of art. Statues located in public spaces are, in most cases, national and political symbols, thus the Soviet occupant began to be represented in plastic art since 1950 in more and more places in Bucharest and across the country. Instead of the statues of King Carol I or the political man Ion C. Bratianu, for example, emblematic statues for Communist ideology began to emerge: the monument of the Liberator Soviet soldier, Lenin, Stalin and others. Great Romanian artists have been forced to make artistic compromises. In the mid-1950s, the most obscure era in the history of Romanian plastic art came to an end, a time saturated with ridiculous works executed according to the canons of Soviet socialist realism. The only consecrated painter who did not make any concessions until his death (1957) was Theodor Pallady who even expressed in public his contempt for the ineptitudes of socialist realism.

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