On the Growing Distance Between the Two Sides of the River Elbe: Ana Lupaș Exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum and the Western Nostalgia for the Eastern Myth
In the summer of 2014, a (presumably) retrospective exhibition of the artist Ana Lupaș was organized in Cluj, in the spaces of a new building, The Office, destined to become a business hub. It was an exhibition behind closed doors, installed on the ground floor in rooms with glass walls, which had been completely covered with opaque curtains. I remember how I knelt on the sidewalk by those huge windows and put my head to the ground, trying to see something under the cloth curtain that didn’t quite reach the bottom. That exhibition had been organized for the Tate London’s acquisition board for Eastern Europe, who were on a visit to this part of the world, and no one else was allowed to visit. The event was the closest encounter between the new art scene in Romania and the oeuvre of Ana Lupaș, and it managed to synthesize very suggestively the complex, even paradoxical relationship between the two. Physically located in Romania and legitimizing itself as belonging to local culture, the exhibition exclusively addressed a narrow and elitist foreign audience, which brought with it the potential of the museification in the West of Lupaș, a representative of local art who hid her works behind an impenetrable curtain made of cloth, not iron, precisely from the artistic scene she would have represented. In the same building, there was another exhibition, also organized on the occasion of the Tate’s visit. It presented to the public—which in this case was allowed to visit it—the vibrant artistic scene in Cluj, with works by artists from several generations.
Ana Lupaș’s exhibition for the Tate board was an unofficial, even “underground” exhibition, i.e. precisely the type of exhibition that Ana Lupaș had not practiced before 1989, in socialist Romania. Before 1989 unofficial exhibitions were justified (if they could happen at all) by the need for spaces of artistic expression unrestrained by political ideology, but what could have motivated an “underground” exhibition in 2014, in a cultural and social context that apparently in no way threatened to limit the freedom of the artist? What did Ana Lupaș have to show exclusively to the Western gaze, and what should not be disclosed—not only not to the general public, but also not to art professionals in Romania? How and why did an artist of such legendary status within the Romanian art scene and the scene itself arrive at such a separation, even a rupture? None of these questions has a direct and simple answer, just as the narratives of art history from 1950 onwards, from Romania and the Eastern European region do not have (only) negative and (only) positive heroes, and cannot be summed up in binary portrayals without profoundly distorting them. In this article, I will discuss some of the background, contradictions, and questions that intertwine in the myth of Ana Lupaș from the perspective of local art history, juxtaposed with the retrospective image of the artist projected by her recent exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The main perplexities that hover over this confrontation of perspectives leave way for questions of an existential nature: what is, or can still be, the role and place of a local art history in Eastern Europe? To whom is it addressed, what types of identity projections does it serve, and, above all, what chances does it have of telling its version of the story in an always-unequal confrontation with the Western canonization apparatus of art history? The aim is to deconstruct the biased (self-)historicization that fuels the Western fantasy of Lupaș as a dissident, and to address some of the conundrums entangled in her myth.
Ana Lupaș, Solemn Process (1964–2008), exhibition view from On This Side of the River Elbe, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
The Western Gaze
The retrospective exhibition of Ana Lupaș, On This Side of the River Elbe, which was on view at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam between May 9 and September 15, 2024, and was curated by Leontine Coelewij, could be seen either as a re-iteration of the 2014 “underground” exhibition in Cluj, or as a consequence of it. The exhibition route at the Stedelijk ended, significantly, with the installation The Solemn Process (1964–2008), which entered the Tate London collection in 2016, and opened the door to the myth-making around Lupaș, after the infamous “underground” exhibition in Cluj. Composed of twenty-one metal objects of various sizes and shapes and a vast series of sepia documentary photographs, the installation reproduces multiple stages of creation, subsequent restoration, and preservation of straw objects that the artist made in collaboration with villagers from a rural area in Transylvania, between 1964 and 1976. The cylindrical or circular wreaths were originally created from the traditional materials used in rural architecture, straw and clay, but without having a practical function in this case. The photographs documented these wreaths placed in various arrangements in the rural environment, in nature, or in the yards or on the porches of the villagers, who sometimes posed next to them on the instruction of the artist or by their own initiative, we cannot tell. Degrading over time and being difficult to restore and preserve in their original form, the straw objects were later encapsulated by Lupaș in metal forms that precisely replicated the dimension and shape of each individual wreath, a process of conservation and, at the same time, a transformation and reevaluation of the original work.
The other installations in the exhibition reflected the diversity of material experiments and relational contexts which converge in the artist’s work. Romania Arrested (1989) consisted of a series of textile objects, made by Lupaș and hung on the wall, and a series of drawings on paper, placed on the ground, made by the sculptor Mircea Spătaru (1937–2011), her artistic and private life partner for several decades. With outlines that somehow evoke the jagged edges of Romania’s borders, the textile objects, made of two layers, are crossed by sewn lines arranged in a grid. This cartographic allusion resonated with other unconventional maps, drawn by Spătaru on rectangular papers.
The installation EAST (1996), itself bearing a collective aspect, brought together eight wall labels from the exhibition Europa, Europa: The Century of the Avant-Garde in Central and Eastern Europe, 1994, at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, relating to works by Constantin Brâncuși, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Marina Abramović, Marcel Janco, Christo and Ana Lupaș. Found by the artist during the dismantling of that exhibition, the labels seem to be selected to highlight themes such as the cultural and ethnic diversity of Eastern Europe, its pre-war and recent history, national affinities, some gender balance, and self-historicization.
Ana Lupaș, The Humid Installation (1970), documentary photographs, On This Side of the River Elbe, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Two rooms of the exhibition were dedicated to The Humid Installation and its various restagings or reformulations. The first Humid Installation (1966) was made on a small scale in the Grigorescu neighborhood in Cluj, only to be remade four years later in the village Mărgău in Transylvania, on a monumental scale. On the hills near the village, with the participation of around a hundred villagers and volunteers, the vast majority of them women, The Humid Installation (1970) unfolded its long rows of white, wet cloths, hung to dry on parallel ropes, both as a process and as an ephemeral monument dedicated to work as a force binding together multiple generations. The daily repetitive gesture of washing and drying the rolls of handmade fabric in the sun to bleach them acquired for Lupaș, in this new form as a work of art, “an eternal and universal meaning that is equally deeply ethical. This meaning highlights the permanence of the human act of work in the succession of generations, each of which recognizes it in the proposed symbol of work. The high purpose of work is fulfilled as an aesthetic act by each individual who feels integrated into the human community through this symbol.”(Ana Lupaș in a handwritten text from an offset poster featuring The Humid Installation, dated 1970, originally in French, translated in Ana Lupas, ed. Gwen Perry, Masha van Vliet, and Carlos Zepeda Aguilar (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2024), p. 31.)
The earliest work in the exhibition and the one that gives it its title, On This Side of the River Elbe (1963), is composed of two overlapping layers of materials with graphic and textile interventions. A few sketchy figures can be seen on the layer below, covered by a plastic net in which threads are woven in a disparate and discontinuous arrangement of broken lines and knots. An imprecise, deliberately chaotic mapping of the natural boundary that separated West from East during the Cold War, the work gives no clues to identify and locate “this side” in what can be seen through the plastic net, leaving the viewer suspended in a perpetual oscillation, in a tangle of political geography and subjective cartography.
The series Identity Shirts (1969–1990) reinterprets the traditional rural vest (cojoc) in the form of textile collages displayed on walls, composed of varied, rustic and industrial raw fabrics meshed by stitching or pencil and ink interventions that “draw” various patterns of lines. The Identity Shirts series are grouped by “generations”—with the first and second generation dating from 1969 and the “penultimate generation” from 1980–1990. Closed and flattened in transparent boxes, like textile relics in an ethnographic museum, these “shirts” speak of an elusive identity that has almost lost its immediate referent, and thus they try to delimit it without being able to fix it within the multiple contours drawn again and again on the surface of the textile material.
Closely related to the Identity Shirts series, but this time with concrete referents, is Coats to Borrow (1989), which was acquired by the Stedelijk Museum in 2022 and constituted the centerpiece of this exhibition. A series of nine coats made from various fragments of materials, with name tags attached to their inner lining, were arranged on coat stands or hangers, all painted orange. Coats to Borrow was apparently made by Ana Lupaș in collaboration with artists from the youth organization of the Romanian Union of Visual Artists (U.A.P.), Atelier 35, which was established with the active involvement of Lupaș in the 1980s. (I will return to the significance of this below). The coats were allegedly put into circulation among its members, who intervened on them through a gesture of appropriation. As Leontine Coelewij, the curator of the exhibition, explains: “she asked people to sew a hidden label with their own name in there. That was a way to form a group. To form a network of people who were opposed to the regime.”(Leontine Coelewij in the video accompanying the exhibition in Stedelijk, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbIA4hpOU6E .) Or, in the words of Lupaș: “[Coats to Borrow] materializes in a collective participation in an action inspired by me as the author and aimed at the fall of a dictatorial regime.”(Ana Lupaș in the video accompanying the exhibition in Stedelijk, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbIA4hpOU6E .) Therefore, this work embodied some of the central ideas of the Stedelijk exhibition: the experimental nature of Lupaș’s work with textiles, the collaborative character of her practice, and the subversive quality of her works, their “hidden resistance” to the totalitarian regime in which she lived and worked for most of her life.
Ana Lupaș, Coats to Borrow (1989), exhibition view from On This Side of the River Elbe, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
In the first room, the visual discourse of the exhibition juxtaposed this faceless artistic collectivity, the silent clothes of dissent—tailored to bodies now absent—with an enlarged black-and-white photograph of the young Ana Lupaș drawing a nude study in 1959 when she was a student in Cluj. After a route that did not follow the chronology of Lupaș’s career, the exhibition’s trajectory ended with an act of “eternalization” manifested in The Solemn Process, created through a collaborative artistic process but then transformed, museified, and today preserved in the Tate collection.
In the verbal discourse of the exhibition, Lupaș is portrayed as a heroic figure who resisted the restrictions imposed on arts and culture by the doctrine of socialist realism, as well as against “dehumanization” and all the “evils” that devastated Romania through the “communist repression.” The most familiar narratives and stereotypes about Eastern Europe during the Cold War were mobilized once again, to explain to the Western public, without too many question marks, the importance of the “discovery” that the curator of the Stedelijk Museum had made in Romania where, almost forty years after the fall of the communist government, they had found a forgotten dissident. As Leontine Coelewij explains: “What I think is special about her oeuvre is that she used to work in a situation of tremendous oppression. She lived in Romania during Ceaușescu’s communist dictatorship there, and at the time it was quite impossible to really experiment with the visual art, because all art forms had to serve the ideology. But she didn’t want that. She wanted to create her own work. So, she kept going against social standards.”(Coelewij in the video accompanying the exhibition.) Lupaș’s own discourse did not contradict this interpretation; on the contrary, it complemented and fueled it.
A Look Back from a Local Point of View
For a more critical reading of her oeuvre, one can only compare Lupaș’s self-historicization with local history. Lupaș graduated in 1962 from the Ion Andreescu Institute of Fine Arts in Cluj, where she specialized in textile arts. She debuted at a time when a cultural “thaw” loosened the constraints of socialist realism in Romania as well. In 1965, the National Conference of the Union of Visual Artists was held, where a position against socialist realism was formulated, leading to a campaign in favor of autonomous aesthetics that took shape through articles published by art critics and cultural commentators.(“Chronology: Visual Arts,” in Alexandra Titu (coord.), Magda Cârneci (ed.), Irina Cios (ed.) Experiment in Romanian Art since 1960 (Bucharest: Soros Center for Contemporary Art, 1997), pp. 210–25.) Immediately after graduation, Lupaș was employed as a pedagogue at the Cluj High School of Art, and then at the Fine Arts Institute, where together with Mircea Spătaru she led the training of two generations of students in the specialization ceramics between 1970 and 1979. She resigned from her faculty position in 1979 allegedly because she was repeatedly denied due promotions and because the political secret police (Securitate) pressured her students to gather information on her—a practice that, as a matter of fact, affected a good part of the population.(Marina Lupaș, “Chronology,” in Ana Lupas, pp. 131–45, information cited from p. 136.)
In the same period, Lupaș became a member of the Romanian Union of Visual Artists and thus had the privilege of using one of the sixteen newly built Union studios in Cluj.(Lupaș, “Chronology,” p. 136.) Her works from this period experimented with tapestry techniques and three-dimensional textile objects, exploring spatiality and the theme of flight, in series bearing names such as “flying carpets,” “kites,” and “flying machines.”(Lupaș, p. 136.) Since the mid-1960s she exhibited frequently at collective events dedicated to the renewal of visual language in Romania. By the end of this decade, she began exhibiting abroad, especially in large international exhibitions of decorative arts in which she represented Romania.(She participated in the International Tapestry Biennale in Laussane (1969, 1970), the International Triennial in Stuttgart (1969, where she was awarded the golden medal), the Quadrennial of Decorative Arts in Erfurt (1970), the International Biennial of Young Artists in Paris (1973), the Triennial of Decorative Arts in Milan (1973), the International Biennial in Sao Paolo (1985), to mention just a few. Cf.: “Chronology: Visual Arts”, pp. 210–225; Daria Ghiu, “Twice Peripheral: Romania at the Decorative Art Triennale in Milan during Communism (1957–1973),” in Cristian Nae (ed.), (In)visible frames. Rhetorics and experimental exhibition practices in Romanian art between 1965-1989 (Cluj: Idea Design & Print, 2016), pp. 77–82; and Lupaș, “Chronology,” p. 138.)
In 1973, Lupaș was the commissioner of Romania’s participation at the Triennale of Decorative Arts in Milan, where she exhibited alongside other artists from the country. Her officially assigned function involved the selection of artists and works to be presented, as well as writing the introductory text for the exhibition. Concerning her artistic contribution, Lupaș exhibited her spatial textiles, along with other pieces made in collaboration with Mircea Spătaru, works that met the demand for traditionalism and modernism at the same time.(The spatial textiles Lupaș showed then were: Flying Carpet, Flying Machine on Holiday and Flying Machine Takes off from My Village. Ghiu, “Twice Peripheral,” pp. 78–79.) Romania’s entire participation was centered around the discourse of the ancient folk and peasant traditions of the Romanian people and their close connection to nature, which inspired contemporary artists and thus created a continuity within the spirit of the place. Similar ideas were expressed by Lupaș, also in 1973, in an interview, in which she spoke about her love for folk art, and the need for decorative (i.e. textile) arts to return to the archaic materials and methods, to restore the original functions of tapestry.(Radu Mareș, “Poate fi tapiseria un seismograf al lumii moderne?,” Tribuna, no. 33 (August 16, 1973): pp. 5, 12–13; Daria Ghiu, “Twice Peripheral,” p. 80.)
We are in the period after the “Thaw,” and at the beginning of the “Cultural Revolution” initiated by Ceaușescu through the infamous “July Theses” in 1971, which imposed stricter control over cultural production and directed it in the service of political propaganda. This propaganda, like the new ideological orientation of Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in the second half of the 1970s and the 1980s, had a strongly nationalist vein. All international representations of Romania after the late 1960s would orient themselves more and more around the rural tradition, the Romanian peasant, the spiritual continuity and uniqueness of the local people, just as the cultural landscape in the country would be suffocated by the same type of political discourse. At the same time, the rural tradition was a source of inspiration for numerous other artists, from Ana Lupaș’s generation and later ones, some of whom were also experimenting with the renewal of visual language in the spirit of the autonomy of art. This makes it all the more difficult to discern today how much was conscious ideological “alignment” in their work, and how much was genuine interest in folk art that happened to intersect with official ideology.(A compelling study on this topic, Veda Popovici, “Tradition and National Specificity: The Curatorial Discourse in the Exhibitions Studiul (The Study), Locul – faptă și metaforă (The Place – Fact and Mataphor) and Vatra (the Hearth),” in Nae, (In)visible frames, pp. 133–56.)
Thanks to her fervent international exhibition activity from the 1970s, Lupaș became, implicitly, an export product of the Romanian socialist state and of its nationalist dictatorship. By representing Romania at international events, Lupaș inevitably contributed to the promotion of the country’s image abroad, and she did so by means of an ethnocentric discourse that did not radically differ from that of local political propaganda. Could it have been expected, from a dissident, to delimit herself more clearly from such intersections? Did she indirectly contribute to the international (and, by ricochet, national) legitimacy of Ceaușescu’s dictatorship? Where do we draw the lines between disagreement, compromise, opportunism, and servility in such a context? Does the image of heroic resistance fit here, and upon what arguments can it be based?
Back home, Ana Lupaș continued to strengthen her institutional involvement, and was elected as the chair of the Cluj branch of the Union of Visual Artists in 1973, only to take charge of the youth section of the Union of Visual Artists at the national level in the 1980s. During this decade she became actively involved in the organization of Atelier 35, circles for artists under the age of 35 that were established in every county capital of the country, at the initiative of the Union. At a time when the party decided not to admit new members to the Union of Visual Artists, and when without being a member one could not exist as an artist in an exclusively state-controlled cultural system, the cenacles Atelier 35 constituted oases for an entire artistic generation. It was a gesture of non-alignment on the part of the Union to allow this organization to be established and Lupaș took credit for coordinating its implementation.
Lupaș’s commitment to experimental art, which imprinted on her artistic pedagogy, was shared by numerous other artists from various generations in Romania. This commitment was particularly opposed to the conservative vein of local culture and not directly to the political regime. Cultural conservativism predated the advent of socialism and the new government merely preserved it, occasionally overlaying it with socialist or nationalist propaganda, depending on the fluctuations of ideology. It should also be noted that at the time textile as decorative art enjoyed much greater freedom than “fine art,” because artists working in this medium did not operate in the representational domain, which explains why the explorations for the renewal of visual language came particularly from this direction within the local and regional scene.
Lupaș held a position of power in the context of a totalitarian regime, just as she fulfilled a function in national representation that was not without contradictions. Her aura as a prominent artist was fueled as much by the international visibility she enjoyed, the quality and artistic consistency of her work, as by the apparent skill with which she navigated the official spheres of culture and politics. As can be drawn from oral history, for some of the artists in Atelier 35 she was a controversial or even feared figure, and for others, a role model. Immediately after the fall of the Ceaușescu regime in December 1989, the Cluj branch of the Union voted to remove her from the presidency. That meeting was allegedly recorded on video by Lupaș for posterity, but the recording was never available to researchers.
Lupaș actually entered the underground of the local art scene, as a self-imposed decision, after the fall of the totalitarian regime. Until the late 1990s she still participated in some events and exhibitions dedicated to experimental art in Romania, especially under the auspices of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art, as well as in some international exhibitions that were in a hurry to “recover” Eastern European art and “place” it on the already canonical map of Western art, such as the already mentioned 1994 Bonn exhibition Europa, Europa. After this short period, the artist did not create new works, but withdrew from artistic life, isolating herself more and more from the entire local cultural context. She fiercely resisted several attempts of art historians or fellow artists from the new generations to get to know her and to study her work and refused to open her personal archive for research. At the same time, she spent the last decades revisiting her old ideas and works, in order to restore and preserve them, as well as to reinterpret them and sanitize her past, as we can learn now through the exhibition at Stedelijk.
The Encounter and Its Consequences
The “chronology” signed by Marina Lupaș, the artist’s sister, and published in the catalogue of the exhibition can be a useful tool to understand how this sanitation was put into practice, by omission. Written in a celebratory tone that is disturbingly reminiscent of the propaganda discourse of the totalitarian regime, this chronology goes back to the artist’s grandparents, to show the family’s belonging to the social, intellectual, and political elite of pre- and interwar Romania. It relates that with the establishment of the communist regime in 1945, when all the family’s property was nationalized, and several members of the artist’s family were politically persecuted and arrested, some tragically died in prison. This was a historical period deeply marked by atrocities, suffering, and injustices that left countless individual and collective traumas on the whole society.
We also learn that, although admission to the Cluj Institute of Fine Arts was strictly regulated by the Communist Party, privileging students with non-bourgeois socio-political backgrounds, Ana Lupaș was admitted in 1956 despite her family history, because of her artistic talent.(Lupaș, “Chronology,” p. 134.) The image of the totalitarian system of the 1950s conducting purges in all levels of education, especially in universities to eliminate the reactionary elements, still bowing to an artistic talent of bourgeois origins—at the cost of violating its own ideology—simply defies the sense of reality. Referring to artistic talent as the sole argument, the chronology further explains her resounding international recognition that would have put pressure on the local authorities to allow her to travel abroad, even if she sometimes had difficulties obtaining a passport and was traveling in precarious conditions. There is no mention of her official representations of Romania, nor of her role as commissioner in Milan in 1973. The chronology mentions the election of Lupaș as president of the Cluj branch of the Union, but omits her removal by vote in 1989, and states that, as the “driving force” of Atelier 35, “she found exhibition spaces that evaded the surveillance of the political power.”(Lupaș, “Chronology,” p. 138.) There were no exhibition spaces in Romania under state socialism that could escape the regime’s vigilant supervision, with the exception of a few artists’ homes that occasionally hosted closed events, completely independent of Lupaș’s involvement. There were, instead, multiple visual and discursive strategies for negotiating meanings, mediations, translations, and adaptations through which the artists created crevices in the supervised institutional and social space. These negotiations are crucial for understanding the art of the last decades of state socialism, but all become invisible if that past is viewed through the lens of binary stereotypes—just as they became silenced in the very truncated and highly elusive account of Atelier 35 in the exhibition catalogue.
All the challenges and dilemmas regarding the methodology and ethics of conducting research on recent Eastern European art were completely ignored by the Western professionals who curated Ana Lupaș’s exhibition and catalogue. Our recent history has only become a foggy background filled with clichés from the Western imagination about communism, over which a partial, highly selective, and cosmeticized image of Ana Lupaș has been projected. But Lupaș’s right to her own self-historicization, however legitimate it may be, intersects with our collective right to know our own recent history, all the more so as we find ourselves in a present where multiple avatars of the past show signs of coming back to life, in the alarming rise of right-wing extremism and anti-Europeanism in this part of the world. The uncritical demonization of the entire socialist past and promotion of dissident narratives that defy common sense feed this tendency, as does the disinterest of the West in understanding the complexity of cultures and histories of Eastern Europe. However far-fetched or misleading the version of history reverberating from the Stedelijk exhibition may sound, it has a canonical force that the sum of the narratives produced by local researchers cannot counter and Lupaș apparently relies on this very mechanism. Through her voluntary isolation from the local cultural scene and avoiding collaboration with the local researchers, Lupaș found, with the Western canonization apparatus at her side, a renewed position of power and imposes on us her version of our common past.
Ana Lupaș, Solemn Process (1964–2008), original documentary photo, On This Side of the River Elbe, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
There are many questions of a political nature that can be formulated regarding the work and activity of Lupaș. We can ask about the intersections between individuality and collectivity in the artist’s work, where the collectivity appears either as serving the artist (as in Solemn Process or The Humid Installation), or as a faceless entity that dissolves in the melting pot of Lupas’s artistic self (as in Coats to Borrow or even Identity Shirts). What were the working relationships during the realization of her two processual works, Solemn Process and The Humid Installation? How were the local people motivated to work on them—was it a task assigned to them by the Agricultural Cooperatives (C.A.P.) at the request of the Union of Artists or through other official channels? Was it a call for volunteers facilitated by old social hierarchies that made it unthinkable for the villagers to refuse the request of the lady from the city? Or, did the villagers also recognize Lupaș’s talent? Who, exactly, are the artists who contributed to Coats to Borrow? Shouldn’t they at least be mentioned in an enumeration, with first and last names, out of symbolic respect for the collective authorship? There are further questions about how to understand Lupaș’s recourse to folk art, which was happening at a time when Romanian villages were destroyed by the often-forced urbanization of the rural population in order to serve the construction of socialism in factories and plants, while the regime simultaneously established the eternalized projection of the Romanian village as a discursive abstraction on which its nationalist turn was based. In the same way, questions can be asked about the contortions, adaptations, concessions, victories, and subtleties that marked the creative, exhibiting, and institutional activity of Ana Lupaș within the complicated power structures of state socialism. If so far Western curators have not found arguments other than dissent to explain the importance of Lupaș’s work, this does not mean that such arguments do not exist or that their persuasive power might be insufficient. If we were to abandon clichés and magnifications, perhaps the most urgent and hardest question to start with would be: how and what can be salvaged from Lupaș’s work and artistic biography? What would stand the test of an unbiased interpretation and how is such an interpretation to be made?
Ana Lupaș, The Humid Installation (1970), documentary photographs, On This Side of the River Elbe, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
In the introductory passage of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera describes a scene from 1948, when communist leader Klement Gottwald, flanked by his comrades, appeared on a balcony to address hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Prague’s Old Town Square. It was cold, Gottwald was bareheaded, and one of his comrades, Vladimír Clementis, took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head, a moment recorded in a photograph that was later frantically reproduced by the propaganda section. Four years later, Clementis was accused of treason, hanged, and erased from all photographs and history by the same propaganda section, and all that remained of him was the fur hat on Gottwald’s head, who would henceforth stand alone in the balcony.(Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Aaron Asher (London: Feber and Faber Ltd., 2000), pp. 3–4.) By withdrawing from the attempts to reconstruct the collective memory of our recent history, complicated as it is, Ana Lupaș chose to remain alone on the balcony, but she wears a fur hat about which there is still so much to learn.
