Art and politics

CEAUsescu

February 13, 2009 by cpreda 78 Comments

I bought today an album which could have served me well while writing my Phd but I guess I will now be able to use it for the volume I will publish. The album entitled Ceau consists of the collection of images inherited from the ex Museum of the Romanian Communist Party that are deposited inside the Museum of Contemporary art (MNAC) of Bucharest. It was realized by the Swiss artist Cristoph Buchel and the Italian curator Giovanni Carmine. The album is printed in excellent conditions and is organized around several of the grand themes of the iconography of the Ceausescus (as the Romanian leader appears together with his family): Ceausescu in his youth, him and his wife receiving flowers from pioneers, the two of them hunting., etc The album is an excellent resource, as it shows – by the way the reproductions are displayed – not only the rudimentary visual rhetoric of these representations but also the inter-exchangeable figures and poses. The same contours of the Ceausescu couple are applied in two different contexts as some kind of passe-partout figures.

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