Forsaken Albania

By Artan Lame
Tirana, December 1972. For about one year now, Albania had been experiencing a somewhat timid cultural Spring. The “Spring Exhibition” has been officially opened; Enver Hoxha, in person, spoke in French to the school pupils in a meeting he had with them; a few days earlier the 11th Song Festival had been held; and a series of other signs of this Spring had appeared. In these closing weeks of the year, placards appeared on the walls of buildings in the cities (today we would call them posters), bearing wishes of goodwill for a happy New Year. In itself this was a western element, posters pasted up on walls, one after the other, like nowhere else on the planet. Let alone the content of these posters! However, they had almost been totally freed of communist symbols. Although there were the outlines of factories, plants and mines, they were almost invisible and appear like toys. And the characters in the posters were depicted like normal sized human beings, and not heroes who are staring into the distance in the direction of a brilliant socialist future; they are normal to the point where none of them are shown holding the Little Red Book in their hands; there are no sickles or members of the People’s Police Force, even the children depicted, are normal. One of them carries a gift, but not a book of Uncle Enver! All the characters in these designs have been depicted in black and white, with frames full of colour flicked irregularly onto the canvas, a cautious move towards cubism. I remember that in those years, cubism found many admirers, not only amongst the artists. After his arrest, Maks Velo was accused of “manifesting a weakness for cubism” in the design of a bloc of flats. As if that were not enough, the colour red was not predominant, but merely present and the entire figure is plunged into a soft brown hue, which, perhaps for the fault of the printing process, looks very somber. Not a single “PLA,” “Long Live the People’s Republic of Albania,” and all that nonsense. The only ideological symbol present is the red star at the top of the placard, which resembles more a star of the evening skies than the “Star of the Caravan.”
1972 closed and 1973 opened with this poster. In the first days of the new year, Comrade Enver delivers the historical speech on the danger of slipping towards liberal stands in culture and the arts; and within a matter of months, the respective plots was uncovered and exposed. The 11th Song Festival was buried along with all its participants. The Spring Exhibition disappeared off the face of the earth; all the artists receded into the shadows too; the dramas of the playwright Fadil Pacrami and the Public Television of Todi Lubonja became blemishes of shame on the healthy body of our revolutionary art. However, despite all the grotesque charges, the shattered fate of families that had been utterly destroyed, not one of the conspirers ended up in front of the firing squads, as was to happen a few months later with the conspiracies of sabotage in the field of defence and the economy.
The end can be easily grasped: That very timid Spring melted away. Ideology took back its throne, and whoever took up a pen or a paint brush to even draw a dash, had to think very hard first. Then came the years of a very arid art, no experiments, firmly set on the rails of the sound art of socialist realism, which penetrated into every pore of life, to the degree where today, many artistic performances of those times seem so ridiculous. We have all drawn in the drawing books like the one you see here, with the folk motif of a woven carpet on its cover, an expression of the art of the people, sealed by a red star, the pick and the rifle, at the top of the cover. Revolutionary red predominates. Imagine a child about to give wings to his imagination starting with a carpet design, a pick and a rifles, and just think what this child would paint when he became an adult. Absurd artistically, but correct politically.