ABSTRACT
Dividing twentieth-century art history into two time spans – before and after the Second World War – constitutes a common trait of Eastern and Western European historiography. In Romania, as throughout the entire Eastern Bloc, the split between these two periods was reinforced by the Communist takeover in the aftermath of the war and the imposition of the Soviet model on the cultural field. These two superimposed political events seem to have determined not only an almost perfect temporal separation of the two halves of the past century but also their radical antagonism, which continues to drive many historical approaches and shape the way they are addressed even today. Socialist Realism – imported from the USSR and adjusted to the Romanian context – claimed a radical break with the modernist past and was subsequently considered to be fundamentally anti-modern and alien to the supposedly natural evolution of the local artistic sphere. With the advent of the ‘Thaw’, modernism was allowed to re-enter the discourse of art, while Socialist Realism was gradually pushed to the margins. Through discussion of various art historical accounts of the 1950s and 1960s, ranging from commemorative publications and survey books to artists’ monographs, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that the time spans allotted to both Socialist Realism and modernism were far from being clear-cut, while the subsequent reassessments of the distinctions between them were strongly inflected by ideology and cultural politics.
