Nr. 2 (19) anul VI / aprilie-iunie 2008 - ROMDIDAC

may sound surrealistic, “aestheticism” was an inadmissible crime at that time.
To deliberately avoid writing or painting about the patriotic and social topics
was an offence against the working class, which could not identify its ideals
with the gratuity expressed in the formalist artworks. Since the foremost aim
of the social realistic art was to educate people, artworks, which ignored or did
not emphasize enough the importance of the new era, the construction of the
new individual, and the gratitude to the communist party, were dismissed. In
this paper I will analyze how two Romanian visual artists tried to cope with the
ideologically loaded requirements of the Communist Party and yet preserved
their artistic identity under these difficult circumstances. Ion Popescu Gopo
chose, as many Romanian writers and artists did, the so-called aesthetic
escape, which meant to wrap his topics into an artistic expression with
apparently no obvious reference to his ideological context, but close enough
to the official recommendations regarding the content of art. In contrast, the
younger caricaturist, Mihai Stanescu, preferred to confront the communist
ideology with its own caricature and suffered from being mostly censored in
Romania, but published abroad. Neither the aesthetic defeatism of Gopo, nor
the ideological engagement of Stanescu has survived. A possible explanation
of them being forgotten by the public is the fact that the ideology of their time
is no longer with us and its corresponding aesthetic programs are obsolete.
Ex Ponto nr.2, 2008
Ion Popescu-Gopo
The world of animation reflected the same ideology, and even worse,
it had to face scarcity of specific means of production and to overcome the
preconceived idea that another artistic expression should add something
distinctively different in the chorus of arts worshiping the party and the progress
it generated.
Before 1950 the first Romanian cartoons adapted Ion Creanga’s stories
very rudimentarily to the new medium. After 1950 their subjects came from
the excessively moralizing literature of Socialist Realism which transformed
them into a series of schematic drawings. Ion Popescu Gopo paid the price to
ideology in order to see his cartoons distributed. Cartoons such as: following
the Albina si porumbelul [The Bee and the Dove], Ratoiul neascultator [The
Nasty Duck], Cei doi iepurasi [Two Little Rabbits], Marinica, Surubul lui Marinica
[Marinica’s Screw], and Fetita mincinoasa [The Lying Little Girl] replaced the
former characters identified as Romanian with allegorical representations
of the Marxist dialectics. From this ideologically successful but artistically
defective experience, Gopo seemed to learn both how to meet the ideological
standards and how to avoid being too explicit. Looking back at Gopo’s cartoons
in the context of the times, one may see that he did not submissively obey the
Soviet aesthetic program, although he had gotten acquainted with it during
his studies in Moscow, but there were coincidences between the themes of
his cartoons and the party documents.
In 1957, Gopo’s The Short History was awarded the Palme d’Or at
Cannes, France. On the one hand, this international success was to protect
him against any potential inconveniences from Romanian institutions, on the
other, it encouraged him to continue the series of the Little Man. His character
may be considered a modern image of the medieval Everyman, who crossed
the ages spiritually unchanged. He only changed clothes, technologies, and
symbols, remaining the representation of popular masses who had overcome
any of the aggressive exterior factors such as natural disasters and wild beasts
162