Ceausescu kitsch
Theodore Dalrymple on a grisly exhibition in Bucharest that reveals the megalomaniacal mediocrity of the late dictator You can tell how much Romania has changed even at London airport. There, middle-aged Romanians dressed as European bourgeois wait to get on the aeroplane; I saw a young female executive type, wearing spectacles that cost a peasant’s annual income, absorbed in an article about telepathy in a Romanian magazine called Psihologie. Later that day I saw her whizzing down the streets of Bucharest in a snazzy bright metallic-blue open-topped car. And then there were other young Romanian women dressed in the cheap, tight finery of British sluts — their slightly pudgy midriffs, butterfly tattoos and pierced navels showing — who were returning to their native land to further Britain’s cultural influence. Our principal cultural export is, of course, bad taste.
Stuck in a traffic jam from Otopeni airport, with compulsory pop music being pumped into the car like poisoned gas, I even began to long for the old days. The communists had, of course, solved the traffic problem. There was no traffic. And at least the microphones installed by the Securitate in every vehicle (or so everyone believed) were silent. Even the grinding of engines constructed under the communists was much preferable to pop music. Come to think of it, Romania was a paradise for those who valued silence. It was as if the entire country had been smothered in a thick blanket.
There are far more slogans now in Bucharest than ever there used to be, but they proclaim the triumph of lipstick, shampoo and mobile telephones rather than of the latest potato harvest, up 27 per cent from last year (but still no potatoes to be had). Giant hoardings are now draped over apartment blocks, irrespective of the need for light of those who live in the apartments behind them. The parsimonious yellowing gloom of communist electric light has been replaced by darkness punctuated by bright multicoloured neon. The flags of Nato and the European Union fly everywhere beside the Romanian tricolour. All is right with the world.
Any incipient temptation to nostalgia for the days when the Conducator, Nicolae, and his wife, the world-famous organic chemist Elena, were in charge of things was swiftly overcome by a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art, housed in the notorious and vast neo-pharaonic pile the Casa Poporului, now known as the Palatul Parlamentului. It was showing an exhibition of paintings from the Ceausescu era and the theme, not surprisingly, was that of the happy couple themselves.
At first, one’s inclination was merely to laugh. The level of technical accomplishment was low, nothing like that displayed in the giant canvases of Stalin’s Russia, for example. But the pictures were just as preposterous, just as ridiculously mendacious. There was a whole series of Ceausescu the hunter, in which the various painters had obviously vied for the number of shot bears they could paint around the great hunter’s feet. The bears did not look so much dead as submissive to the great man: their paws spread out before them, they were like a row of ursine Muslims at prayer. In one picture, a rank of about 15 slaughtered creatures were bears, and a second rank wild boar. In another, Nicolae is pictured with Elena at night in the forest, the husband proving his prowess to his wife by shining a light on the dead creatures he has shot earlier in the day. ‘I did it all for you,’ he seems to be saying to his admiring muse.
There were two still lifes — both of the President’s desk. Books by Ceausescu, the so-called ‘Danube of Thought’, are prominently displayed on his desk, the implication being that the President had only to return to his own writings to obtain further inspiration. One of the still lifes was entitled ‘One Country — One Masterpiece’, as if an entire nation were but raw material to be fashioned into a work of art by its supreme genius. To emphasise this point, an architect’s drawing was draped over the desk. Ceausescu as creator and onlie begetter was a constant theme of his artistic flatterers, even those who used an unusual medium, such as seeds of various shapes, sizes and colours, to portray him. In the background, ethereal dams, factories, tractors and combine harvesters, cranes and trucks float in the sky. They are Ceausescu’s ideas and dreams that await their realisation.
Preposterous and terrible as the pictures were, they managed, despite themselves, to convey something true and genuine: the profound mediocrity of the Ceausescus in all but ambition and ruthlessness. Although he never aged in the eyes of his painters, Ceausescu always appeared physically weak and soft, without a firm muscle in his body, not even in his face. His most prominent feature was his mouth, with smooth, dark pink lips that looked as if they would always be moist with spittle, the lips of a feeble sensualist on the prowl for an adult bookshop.
Elena, despite attempts at flattery, never appears other than utterly cold and cruel. One portrait of her — one of the innumerable ‘Homages’ painted by the artists of the Epoca de Aur, the Epoca Luminoasa, the Epoca Ceausescu — has her holding a cornflower, her face sharply lined against a relentlessly cornflower-blue background. Even her eyes are cornflower blue, not so much windows on her soul as searchlights for victims. Another has her dressed in an all-white costume with her arms held triumphantly in the air, a white cloth in one hand streaming in the wind, her face pale and marmoreal. Even if you knew nothing of her history, these pictures would chill you. They are pictures of the undead, of a woman who had been turned into a vampire by the bite of her Dracula.
One would like to think that the painters captured these truths about the Ceausescus with subversive intent (no doubt those who painted them would like to think so too), the contrast between the Ceausescus’ personal insignificance and the grandeur of what was claimed on their behalf being so enormous as to be unmistakably bathetic. But I am not sure: more likely, the artists were not skilful enough to eliminate all truth from their paintings.
One would like also to think that these paintings have no warning for us, because we have nothing whatever in our history or culture that renders them relevant to us. And yet when I think of the government’s increasing assumption of total responsibility for every aspect of our wellbeing, from the economy as a whole to the minutiae of our diet, and at the same time of the mediocrity of the people who have arrogated these responsibilities to themselves, I cannot help but think (with all due and appropriate distinctions, of course, for we must always hold things in perspective) of our own Epoca de Aur, Epoca Luminoasa: in short, of our Epoca de New Labour, which manages to combine the corporatist commercialism of the new Romania with the megalomaniacal mediocrity of the old.
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