| Delia-Ioana SIMION (LEIZERIUC)1
Abstract. The paper examines the metamorphoses of artistic institutions and visual discourse in communist Romania between 1950 and 1989, through an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates art history, cultural sociology, ideological aesthetics, and visual anthropology. The study argues that Romanian art under communism cannot be reduced to mere political propaganda, but must be understood as a complex symbolic system in which the aesthetic, the ideological, and the moral coexisted in a constant relationship of tension and negotiation. By applying the theoretical frameworks of Pierre Bourdieu (the artistic field), Michel Foucault (symbolic discipline), Boris Groys (the total art of Stalinism), and Jacques Rancière (the distribution of the visible), the essay demonstrates how Romanian art functioned as a space of aesthetic and moral resistance within a totalitarian regime that instrumentalized the image as a tool of control. The analysis focuses on institutional transformations—such as the Union of Fine Artists, the Combinatul Fondului Plastic (State Art Production Enterprise), and official exhibitions—while also addressing the symbolic survival strategies practiced by artists, with particular attention to Southern Bukovina (Romania), where local identity filtered ideology into an aesthetics of discretion and inner integrity. The research reveals the existence of an “aesthetics of ambiguity”, characteristic of Romanian art during the communist era: a subtle balance between obedience and freedom, between control and poetry. In conclusion, the visual legacy of communism is interpreted as a cultural memory in transformation, requiring an ethical, lucid, and non-ideological reading, in the spirit of a visual anthropology of twentieth-century Romania. Keywords: Romanian art; socialist realism; visual ideology; artistic field; aesthetics of power; cultural memory; Southern Bukovina; symbolic resistance; Bourdieu; Groys; Rancière; art and ideology DOI 10.56082/annalsarscihist.2026.1.80 1 Doctoral Researcher, Doctoral School of Social and Human Sciences, Field of History, “Ștefan cel Mare” University of Suceava, Romania, 2025. |
PUBLISHED in Annals ISSN ONLINE 2067 – 5682
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PUBLISHED in Annals of the Academy of Romanian Scientists Annals Series on History and Archaeology, Volume 18, No1