Towards New Frameworks for Albanian Art History? Ermir Hoxha’s Socialist Realism in the Albanian Style
Ermir Hoxha, Socialist Realism in the Albanian Style: The Liberalization Period and the Communist Legacy in Contemporary Albanian Art. Tirana: West Print, 2023. 180 pp.
Ermir Hoxha’s Socialist Realism in the Albanian Style suggests an intriguing question: are there productive art historical connections between the so-called “liberalization period” (the late 1960s through 1973) in Albanian art and the ways that contemporary artists have looked back on Albanian Socialist Realism in the decades following the end of state socialism in the country in 1991? Hoxha, a professor at the University of Arts in Tirana, has made an undeniable contribution to art history in the Albanian context through his authorship of several substantial survey texts—including Albanian Architecture of the 20th Century: A Short History; History of Albanian Art 1858–2000; and History of Albanian Photography 1865–2000—that establish a helpful groundwork for understanding the development of the visual arts in the country, and beyond.(As of writing, these books, like volume under review here, are only available in the Albanian language, though some of them contain short summary sections in English—as is the case with Socialist Realism in the Albanian Style.) The tighter focus proposed by this recent contribution promises to move away from the sweeping scope of his earlier publications and chart the historical specificities of and relationships between two periods in Albanian history. While the book does not quite fulfill this promise, it nonetheless succeeds in presenting new analyses of both Cold War and post-socialist Albanian art, and enables scholars to ask new questions about the ways contemporary art engages (or fails to engage) with the history of socialist visual culture.(Parts of this review were written for a longer essay on recent publications on Albanian art history, to be published in the forthcoming issue of Art Studies/Studime për Artin. That review had a different focus and scope, but portions of the text devoted to Hoxha’s book appear here.)
For a long time, Albanian socialist-era art history was treated—by both national and global narratives—as a monolith, roughly 45 years of the harsh imposition of Socialist Realism. It is only in the last decade or so that scholars have begun to seriously unravel this characterization with attention to how certain artists, exhibitions, or critical writings complicate prevailing understandings of visual art or artistic freedom. The “liberalization period” in Albania—during which arts and culture began to explicitly engage with new transnational socialist approaches, and also with cultural trends and histories associated with the capitalist West and the legacy of bourgeois modernism—represents a particularly fruitful object of study. Above all, the developments of the “liberalization period” demonstrate—in a concrete and succinct manner—that Albanian visual art of the socialist era was not an insular or isolated phenomenon, but was in fact importantly engaged with global transformations in the arts, in the socialist sphere and beyond. This period of relative openness came to a rather abrupt end in the wake of the Fourth Plenum in 1973, when Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha delivered his famous speech attacking foreign influences in Albanian society. Nonetheless, the 1960s and 70s show Albanian artists seeking to redefine what Socialist Realism could mean, while also ideologically aligning themselves more directly with the decolonizing world and the socialist nations of East Asia.
Hoxha’s book is divided—as its subtitle suggests—into two long chapters, one on the late 60s and early 70s and one on the post-socialist period. However, even in the book’s introduction, the relation between these two halves is not fully explained—a fault that undermines the book’s potential contribution. The introduction is more of a simple statement of scope: it explains how Hoxha came to be interested in the topic of Socialist Realism, and it lays out the book’s dual structure, but without positing a strong connection between one particular period of Albania’s socialist-era history and the three decades of post-socialist cultural production covered by the latter half.
Hoxha’s first chapter—“Albanian Socialist Realism and the Labyrinths of Modernism,” which constitutes essentially the first half of the book—is divided into several sections. After providing a summary definition of Socialist Realism according to the Soviet model (the fourfold union of popular or proletarian character, typicality, realistic form, and party-mindedness), Hoxha proceeds to note the importance of various types (the urban industrial worker, the rural agricultural worker, the soldier in the popular army), as well as clearly gendered divisions or variants, in Socialist Realist art. He then proceeds to outline the distinction between “modernism” as an aesthetic term and “modernity” as a historical and socioeconomic phenomenon (associated with the adjective “modern”). (pp. 27–38) The distinction between these two is important for the Albanian context, since “modernist” art was often construed as the primary threat to Socialist Realism from the side of bourgeois, capitalist society, while socialist-era Albanian art often sought to be “modern” (as opposed to traditional). Furthermore, in some fields (such as architecture), the broad use of the term “modern” to describe buildings that were both “modernist” (aesthetically developed out of tendencies towards abstraction and formalism) and “modern” in the sense of utilizing now materials, modes of production, etc.) led to challenges to the critical vocabulary of Socialist Realism, which hoped that it could reject modernism while still advancing a qualitatively new kind of culture. Hoxha also introduces the debates over the term “formalism” that took place in the 1960s and early 70s in Albania. These debates help illustrate the two-fronted battle that Socialist Realist critics were waging: against “formalists” understood as modernist artists with abstract or expressionist tendencies, but also against naturalists whose works merely imitated the external appearance of reality without presenting any interpretation of it (and thus lacking an ideological position). (p. 39)
Having laid this conceptual groundwork, Hoxha continues with a section on the “‘Modern’ Tendencies of the Period from 1969–73.” This section introduces a number of important historical phenomena, such as the series of lectures on modernist art (including ones focused on Van Gogh, Expressionism, and Cubism) held at the High Institute of Arts in 1970–72, and the proliferation of works (by artists like Maks Velo, Ali Oseku, Edison Gjergo, and Edi Hila) that were exhibited during this period and widely debated in the press of the time—and in meetings of the Union of Writers and Artists. (pp. 43–47) However, rather than delving into these debates in depth,(I have tried to track the critical positions and import of these debates in Raino Isto, “‘This Exhibition Will Go Down in Our History’: Art Exhibitions in Albania around 1972 and the Promise of Spring,” Art Studies/ Studime për Artin 21 (2023): pp. 89–135.) or outlining the content of the lectures at the art academy, Hoxha instead proceeds to a series of three case studies. The first is Edison Gjergo, known and criticized by the press at the time for his painting Epic of the Morning Stars (1971), which came to symbolize the dangerous influences of modernist art. The second is Edi Hila, whose painting Planting of the Trees (1971) was first praised and later condemned by critics, and who later spent 1974–77 working at a chicken farm as part of mandated rehabilitation. The last is Janaq Paço, who was forced to destroy his own nude sculptures in 1977.(Hoxha also includes a complete transcript of a 1973 article from The Star entitled “Characteristics of the Liberal Person,” which—alongside the three case studies—helps clarify the official position on the ideological threat posed to Albanian society by the bourgeois liberal.)
These case studies are helpful, but uneven: for example, Hoxha first narrates Gjergo’s career, including the creation of Epic of the Morning Stars, as well as his subsequent surveillance by the state secret police (the Sigurimi). Along the way, Hoxha reproduces a complete interview with Gjergo published in the monthly glossy magazine The Star in 1972, as well as large portions of the police dossier on Gjergo (the contents of which are on view in the House of Leaves, the Albanian Museum of Secret Surveillance). It is certainly helpful to have language from these primary documents (the interview and the dossier) reproduced at such length, since they give the reader a feel for both the way that Gjergo characterized his work when challenged about its modernist tendencies, as well as the discourses utilized by the state and informants to characterize the danger he supposedly presented to socialist society. However, there is relatively little analysis of these documents, and even after the narratives of Hila and Paço are presented, the reader is still not sure whether Hoxha sees these three artists as representing different (conflicting) models of the artist-as-class enemy, or as examples that demonstrate a shared model of state administrative violence applied to three different people.
In short, while all the artists Hoxha explores in these more detailed case study chapters are important, the author does not utilize them as much as he might to build a stronger argument about the historical significance of either “modern” or “modernist” art created during the liberalization period. Instead he moves on to a section discussing the Fourth Plenum of the Party’s Central Committee, held in June of 1973. At that plenum, dictator Enver Hoxha delivered his speech “To deepen the ideological struggle against foreign manifestations, and against liberal attitudes towards them,” which brought together a number of different developing strands in socialist Albanian political ideology.(Enver Hoxha, “To deepen the ideological struggle against foreign manifestations, and against liberal attitudes towards them,” in Hoxha, On Literature and Art (Tirana: 8 Nëntori, 1977), pp. 375–443.) Most significantly, it presented modernist culture (including in the visual arts, as well as—more famously—radio and television) as an important threat to socialist stability, and resulted in the denunciation of works by artists like Gjergo and Hila.
After discussing the Fourth Plenum, Hoxha wraps up the first chapter of the book with an epilogue that aims to sum up Albanian socialist art. This summary is, unfortunately, one of the places where the book is most frustrating and self-contradictory. Having shown that Socialist Realism in Albania developed through early engagements with historical modernism as well as modern realism (the experiences of the earliest generation of modern painters in the country, such as Abdurrahim Buza, being paradigmatic in this respect), as well as the adaptation of Soviet Socialist Realism and the socialist modernism of Central European academies (like Krakow), Hoxha concludes the first half of the book with the declaration: “In its totality, Albanian art of the period between 1945 and 1990 remained a product of itself, developed within the borders set by the regime’s isolation.” (p. 91) Even acknowledging that open cultural exchange between Albanian artists and artists in either the rest of the socialist world or in the capitalist world was often made difficult (or impossible)—and acknowledging that limitations on such cultural exchanges generally tended to become more extreme over the course of the postwar period, until 1991—this statement is proven untrue by the very premises of the preceding section. The uniqueness of the “liberalization period” was precisely that it showed how much Albania was still connected to broader discourses about both modernism and socialist militant art from beyond its borders.
This chapter could have forthrightly addressed, for example, the interactions between Albanian artists and Chinese artists as part of the Ideological and Cultural Revolution, and Albania’s increased emphasis on building connections to the decolonizing world in the same period. It could have explored the significance of the fact that the 1950s—the last decade during which Albanian artists were still studying in the USSR—was not the decade when the Soviet Thaw rejected Socialist Realism, but rather the decade when Socialist Realism was reimagined through the lens of debates about the “severe” or “contemporary” styles. This chapter could have compared the new modes of figuration developed by artists in Albania in this period with the work of painters (for example) from Hungary or Central Asia, or with the trajectories of Chinese socialist art (from “revolutionary realism” to later, critical realisms and “Scar Art”). It is not that the book necessarily needed to present in-depth research into comparable cases of the conflict between Socialist Realism and competing modernisms, but simply that it is not clear how the book could set out from the premise of presenting the eponymous “Albanian Style” of Socialist Realism without engaging in at least some critical comparison.
This perplexing reiteration of the rhetoric of isolation and totalitarian culture has unfortunate implications for the second half of the book, which explores contemporary artistic responses to the state socialist past. In this chapter—titled “Reflections of Communist Heritage in Albanian Contemporary Art”—Hoxha begins with a short summary of the early 1990s before proceeding through three chronological sections: the late 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2010s. These are followed by a section on the institutionalization of engagements with the state socialist past, which is strangely presented separate from the chronology of the preceding sections, as if the chronology of institutions were to be kept separate from the chronology of artworks. This makes it hard to extrapolate, for example, how certain exhibitions might have caused artists to realize the possibilities of (or demand for) engaging with communist history, and then acted upon that awareness.
The apparent chronology of artworks that explicitly address the state socialist past also breaks down because the second chapter of the book is really more of an extended list of artists. Those artists are sometimes connected to each other through their engagement with a similar theme (regardless of the decade they worked on that theme). For example: in the section on the 2000s, Hoxha brings up artworks that feature Albania’s concrete bunkers as symbols of the socialist past, beginning with a jump back in time to Edi Rama’s works from the 1990s before discussing 2000s works featuring the bunkers, such as Greta Dhaskali Lami’s photograph The Bunker, or Shelter, or Security, included in the 2006 Onufri exhibition (the annual exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art starting in 1993). Then, Hoxha deviates from both the bunker theme and the chronology to mention Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei’s collaboration with photographer Marco Mazzi documenting Albania’s lapidars (or socialist monuments)—which was published in 2015. (p. 106)
At other times, Hoxha adheres to the chronological framing, mentioning the same artist more than once, and this yields clearer results—as in the case of Gentian Shkurti, whom Hoxha first mentions in connection to his 1997 video work Alice in Wonderland (in the section on the 90s). Later, in the 2010s section, he discusses Shkurti’s series of paintings Back to the Future, which reimagine images from the socialist-era children’s magazine The Horizon each showing different imagined futures for socialist Albania—painted now in the year they were then supposed to depict. (pp. 100, 118–119)
After the three chronological sections and the section on institutionalization, Hoxha wraps up with a concluding section that identifies four themes or aspects of the various artworks and events that he has chronicled in the second half of the book: nostalgia; the exoticization of the experience of communism; political instrumentalization; and the impossibility of breaking away from the past. (pp. 142–145) While these themes all clearly relate to the art discussed, Hoxha does not actually discuss particular works in this final section, and it is up to the reader to return to the previous sections to try to determine how these play out in the case of various individual works. It would have been more illuminating, perhaps, if the entire second chapter of the book was mostly structured by these four categories, or at least if they were organically integrated into the chronological sections, rather than being tacked on as a concluding typology.
As a survey of many artists and their works, the second half of Hoxha’s book is useful for historians and curators. What it does not do, unfortunately, is connect directly to the first half of the book, which focused on the “liberalization period.” In the post-socialist chapter, Hoxha steadfastly treats the socialist past as a sort of general font of potential subjects for recent artists, as opposed to a historical period that influenced the art that came after it. In fact, one major question the reader is left with is: are there any contemporary artists who have meaningfully engaged with socialist-era art in Albania while paying attention to the historical differences across that period? In other words, have any artists made work that addressed—in a nuanced way—the specificity of certain periods of Socialist Realism and their uniqueness?
Another question that readers might reasonably raise is: what happened to the artists whose experimentations defined the “liberalization period” after the end of state socialism? Surely it matters, for example, that Edi Hila went on to become an influential professor in the University of Arts (formerly the High Academy of Arts)? Or that Ksenofon Dilo and Alush Shima—both artists whose work was characterized by engagement with historical modernisms—both went on to become directors of the National Gallery of Arts in the late 1980s and 90s? For that matter, what does it mean that Edi Rama—Albania’s current prime minister—is both an artist and the son of Kristaq Rama, a sculptor whose career was consolidated precisely by the work he produced in the late 60s and early 70s (and the administrative roles he occupied)?
In the current landscape of Albanian-language book-length publishing on art history, there are essentially two kinds of publications: lavishly illustrated monographic studies on individual artists, of the kind expertly produced by Suzana Varvarica Kuka,(See Varvarica’s recent monographs on Simon Rrota (Tirana: Gent Grafik, 2019) or Fatmir Haxhiu 1927–2002 (Tirana: Mali Pleshti, 2024), or Eleni Laperi’s monograph on Kolë Idromeno (Tirana: Mediaprint, 2022), for examples of this approach.) and survey texts of the type produced by Hoxha (mentioned above). Both types of books assuredly play an important role in disseminating knowledge about Albanian art, helping future researchers to learn about the lives and careers of particular artists while also situating that information within the broader framework established by the survey text. However, there is still a substantial gap between these approaches, a gap wherein authors might engage with the historical, political, and artistic questions raised by particular exhibitions, by the collaborations of particular groups of artists, by the historical role of certain arts publications, or by the responses of artists to quite specific historical phenomena (to name just a few possible avenues). In its subtitle, at least—“The Liberalization Period and the Communist Legacy in Contemporary Albanian Art”—Hoxha’s recent book promised to be a necessary third paradigm: a study focused on how the art of a particular past period has shaped more artistic phenomena.
There are questions that can be asked through the juxtaposition Hoxha’s book sets up: Can the experimentations with historical modernist styles during the liberalization period serve as a productive ground for arguing that post-socialist art in Albania does in fact respond to a local, ‘modernist’ history? Are the internationalist tendencies of that period meaningfully reflected in post-socialist artistic projects? Can the discursive investigations of postmodernism that occurred in the art of the 1990s and early 2000s be re-read as responses to a local modernist history, as opposed to being interpreted solely as efforts to join a global (or at least Euro-American) artistic narrative? Do the late 1970s and 80s really constitute such a definitively different art historical paradigm that they have no meaningful relationship to post-socialist art? (This is at least one potential implication of the book’s decision to leave out this period, skipping from 1973 to the 1990s.) Unfortunately, Hoxha himself does not pose these questions explicitly, and the book does not explore the potential answers that could be given. Nonetheless, the author’s juxtaposition of these two time periods at least enables us to ask them. As a survey text, Hoxha’s book is an invaluable addition to knowledge about both socialist-era and contemporary art in Albania, but it cannot provide detailed explanations of causal or conceptual relationships or the reasons for the emergence and impact of particular artistic phenomena. This work remains the purview of future histories of Albanian art.
