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ART & POLITICS
UNDER MODERN
DICTATORSHIPS
A Comparison of
Chile and Romania
CATERINA PREDA
Art and Politics under Modern Dictatorships
Caterina Preda
Art and Politics under

Modern Dictatorships
A Comparison of Chile and Romania
Caterina Preda
University of Bucharest
Bucharest, Romania
ISBN 978-3-319-57269-7 ISBN 978-3-319-57270-3 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57270-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939331
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover Image: Courtesy of the artists of C.A.D.A. Photograph by Jorge Brantmayer.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To my mother Elisabeta
Contents
1 Art and Politics Under Modern Dictatorships:

An Introduction 1
2 The Two Modern Dictatorships in Romania

and Chile 1970s–1989 47
3 Art Should Be Apolitical: Official Art in Chile 83
4 Art Must Be Politicized: Official Art in Romania 141
5 Alternative Art in Chile: Politicized Art 211
6 Alternative Art in Romania: Aesthetic Resistance 253
7 A Model for Comparative Analysis of Art

and Politics in Dictatorships 303
Index
319
vii
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Ion Grigorescu, Dialogue with Nicolae Ceauşescu

(1978). Source Courtesy of the artist 2
Fig. 2.1 Nicolae Ceauşescu, general secretary of the PCR, president
of the RSR with Elena Ceauşescu participated in the festivities
for the 400 years of the anniversary of Scorniceşti and visited
economic and cultural units of the commune. During their
visit to the museum of history of the commune of Scorniceşti
(22 September 1979). Source Fototeca online a comunismului
românesc (Online photoarchive of Romanian communism),
Photo L162/1979. Reference 162/1979 50
Fig. 2.2 Kena Lorenzini, Pinochet, posición firme, Aniversario de la
Constitución Edificio Diego Portales Santiago/Pinochet
firm stand, Anniversary of the Constitution Diego Portales
building in Santiago (1986). Source Courtesy
of the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos 65
Fig. 3.1 Patricia Alfaro, Manifestación/Demonstration (no year).
Source Courtesy of the Museo de la Memoria y los
Derechos Humanos 85
Fig. 4.1 Aspect from the show dedicated to the Centenary
of the State Independence of Romania that took place
on the stadium 23 August of the capital (May 9, 1977).
Source Online photoarchive of Romanian communism,
Photo LA45 Reference 72/1977 147
ix
x List of Figures
Fig. 5.1 Lotty Rosenfeld, Acción de arte Palacio Presidencial

La Moneda (Santiago de Chile, 1985). Source Courtesy
of the artist 223
Fig. 5.2 Carlos Leppe, Sala de espera/Waiting room (1980).
Source Carlos Leppe 226
Fig. 5.3 Elias Adasme, A Chile (To Chile, 1979–1980).
Source Courtesy of the artist 227
Fig. 5.4 Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, La Conquista de America/
The conquest of America (1989). Source Yeguas del
Apocalipsis. Photo by Paz Errázuriz 230
Fig. 6.1 Rudolf Bone, Self-Portrait Chestnut (1983).
Fig. 6.2 Amalia Perjovschi, Annulment (1989).
Fig. 6.3 Ütö Gusztáv, Wake Up (1987). Source Courtesy
of the artist 269
Fig. 6.4 Iulian Mereuţă, Captured/Transportable body (1970).
Fig. 6.5 Dan Perjovschi, Untitled Action (1987/1988).
Fig. 6.6 Ütö Gusztáv, Help (1987). Source Courtesy of the artist 273
Fig. 6.7 Constantin Flondor’s, Anniversary-26 January
(Ani-vărsare, 1983). Source Courtesy of the artist 277
Fig. 6.8 Decebal Scriba, The Gift, Public Action (1974).
Fig. 6.9 Miklos Onucsan, Self-Portrait Along the Way (1982–1992).
Fig. 6.10 Ion Grigorescu, Electoral Meeting (1975).
CHAPTER 1
Art and Politics Under Modern

Dictatorships: An Introduction
Nicolae Ceaușescu began the building of the House of the Republic

(House of the People) in Bucharest in 1984, an edifice which would
become the most important “artistic” legacy of his regime. Three years
later, in 1987, Augusto Pinochet began implementing his plan to move
the Congress of Chile to the harbor city of Valparaiso. The two parallel
projects epitomize the artistic legacies of the two dictators, and the two
buildings convey the same dictatorial aesthetic. During the same period,
in 1978, the artist Ion Grigorescu secretly portrayed Nicolae Ceaușescu
in Dialogue with Comrade Ceaușescu and criticized the regime. A piece
of mail art exchanged by two artists from Oradea, Ferenczi Karolyi
and Karolyi Elekes, was intercepted by the Securitate, the Romanian
secret police. The work featured a caricature of Ceaușescu as a vampire.
Augusto Pinochet’s portrait appeared in several artworks of Chilean
artists, such as the videos of Juan Downey (The Motherland, 1987 and
Return to the Motherland, 1989) (Fig. 1.1).
How can these contradictory images stemming from quite different
dictatorial regimes help us to better understand the relationship estab-
lished during modern dictatorships between art and politics? On the face
of it we are dealing with two different regimes that had distinct purposes,
and which have been examined by political science analyses as totalitar-
ian versus authoritarian. Scrutinized in more detail, however, we discover
that they had the same purpose: to alter art ideologically. This book will
firstly look at how regimes imagine the arts and how they use them, and
© The Author(s) 2017 1

C. Preda, Art and Politics under Modern Dictatorships,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57270-3_1
2 C. PREDA
Fig. 1.1 Ion Grigorescu, Dialogue with Nicolae Ceaușescu (1978). Source
Courtesy of the artist
then discuss the ways in which art remains autonomous and can criticize,
or offer a truthful version of reality.
This volume presents a comparative analysis of the relationship
between art and politics in modern dictatorships by discussing two
opposing cases: the regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973–1989)
and that of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania (1965–1989). This is a quali-
tative study in comparative political science with a focus on art and poli-
tics. This interdisciplinary, multilayered investigation of art and politics
under modern dictatorships includes both a neo-institutionalist approach
to autocracies, with specific attention given to the comparative cultural
policies of dictatorships—an understudied field—and to the artworks
themselves.1 My approach was inspired by Donatella Della Porta’s meth-
odological pluralism: that is, the need to combine a theoretical approach
with an actor-inspired approach—in the case of this study, the perspec-
tive provided by artworks. The research links the macro perspective of
ART AND POLITICS UNDER MODERN DICTATORSHIPS: AN INTRODUCTION 3
the regime, seen in the articulation of cultural policies, and the micro
perspective the artists offer on reality through their artworks.2 This
trans-regional comparison does away with the temptation to essential-
ize and exceptionalize and simultaneously provides elements of analysis
for a better understanding of the way art is both conceived by mod-
ern dictatorships, and imagined by artists in response to living under
dictatorships.
The questions this investigation asks are: How is art imagined and
affected by a modern dictatorship? What are the strategies imagined by
the regimes and how are they built? How does the artistic space react,
and how does it affect the political regime? Politically relevant artistic
discourses are tackled by asking such questions as: What does a dictato-
rial state do in relation to the arts? What are the most important artistic
manifestations in relation to the political? What do the artists do? What
kind of art do they create? This book will show that, in fact, dictator-
ships resort to common strategies. By using the extreme examples of the
Chilean and Romanian regimes, these can be placed in a framework of
analysis of dictatorships’ approach of the arts.
These two cases were chosen because of their specific role in explain-
ing the relationship between art and politics in dictatorships. Chile is
considered in political science literature to be an example of a military
regime: an authoritarian experience led by General Pinochet, with a
strong repressive character and no interest in the arts, and which thus did
not see an official art developing. I argue that the Pinochet regime had a
project for the arts, and, while this was not applied perfectly, it achieved
its goal of altering the artistic world by imposing the requirement that
art be apolitical. Conversely, Romania is considered to be an example of
totalitarianism or even of a sultanist regime (Linz), in which Ceaușescu
held perfect control, not allowing any artistic expression to flourish that
did not follow the official line, and which thus demanded that art be
politicized. In this book, I deconstruct these two considerations by argu-
ing that the Ceaușescu regime saw alternatives to the official art, and in
fact the artistic space safeguarded a degree of autonomy, which allowed
it to stay free of total control. I also argue that the Pinochet regime
imposed an official art, and institutionally altered the artistic panorama
through the projects it put forward. I argue, therefore, that dictatorships
always impose an official art, but because artistic expressions have the
power to criticize they are able to safeguard a degree of autonomy, which
allows them to be critical of their environment.
4 C. PREDA
This book furthermore argues that a modern dictatorship entails

a varying process of centralization and control upon society, milder or
stronger depending on the distance it displays from the authoritarian or
totalitarian poles. Cultural activities are also affected when artistic free-
dom disappears and the political power imposes an exclusive, mandatory
discourse. A modern dictatorship imposes an official art, or an offi-
cial stance on art. To ensure its predominance, this entails a process of
monopolization of all cultural activities, both ideologically through the
control of discourses that emanate from the political power personified
by the dictator, and institutionally. This process also includes the dissemi-
nation of this official version to which artists must comply. To enforce
it, regulations and norms are imagined, institutions are set in place, and
mass communication means are activated. To express this view, dictator-
ships use artistic education to create and disseminate the new ideology
on art. Negative policies are also used to eliminate anyone who does not
comply with the new articulation. Equally, a system of recompense is put
in place and granted to artists who support the regime.
The regimes in Chile and Romania represent the extremes of a range
of governments that could include other contemporary examples in
Eastern Europe and South America3 during the Cold War, when oppos-
ing ideologies confronted one another with the help of cultural artifacts.
They also function as theoretical landmarks that could be further tested
in the same regions, or across other regions.
Their dissimilarity is ideological: communism or state socialism in
Romania versus the “Doctrine of National Security” in Chile. It also dif-
fers with regard to the role assumed in the artistic field—by the state in
the case of Romania, and by the market in Chile. We are confronted with
two dissimilar regimes that adopted opposing strategies. These differ-
ent strategies had the same purpose: to control and alter artistic mani-
festations. However, the effects they produce on the artistic sphere are
similar; unavoidably, art is created in relation to the political. The two
regimes are alike inasmuch as they imagine political projects with a totali-
tarian bent, but the strategies they impose on the actors differ.
The first striking difference between Chile and Romania concerns the
dissimilar historical trajectories of both countries. Secondly, the estab-
lishment of the regimes was also different, as was the range of policies
imposed. The third difference concerns the length of the regime, and the
fact that the comparison deals with regimes that are in their first stages
(Chile), as opposed to the later stages (Romania). The two regimes
are outliers of their respective regional groups of regimes, and the per-
sonalization of power by the two dictators brings them together in the
analysis. If we look at the broader regional panorama we can see further
similarities between the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay
(1954–1989) and the regime of Ceaușescu in Romania; except for their
opposed ideological references, the regimes function in a similar way.
However, choosing a dissimilar case such as the Chilean dictatorship
underlines the lesser importance of ideology in articulating a dictatorial
policy for the arts.
The two regimes also differ in that the Chilean dictatorship was a
military regime that used the military aesthetic in its control of society,
whereas the Romanian dictatorship was a party-state dictatorship con-
trolled by civilians. A further distinct element to take into considera-
tion is the role played by the Soviet Union in the case of the Eastern
European dictatorships, but the Ceaușescu regime saw the strengthen-
ing of its nationalist project in trying to separate itself from Moscow.
In fact, one element that unites the two dissimilar dictatorships is the
strengthening of the nationalist project artistically. On the other side,
Chile under Pinochet was supported by the United States in its over-
throw of the Allende regime, but then lost this support in light of its
crimes against human rights. The nature of the repression unleashed by
the two regimes differed both in view of the different moments in which
the dictators took power, and the state’s need for open, mass repression
in Chile compared to the more routinized terror exerted by the secret
police (Securitate) in Romania.
So different at first glance, Chile and Romania may seem like atypical
choices for a comparative study: a South American country marked by a
harsh military dictatorship and an Eastern European country with a long
communist past. Yet the countries have many features in common: they
both experienced dictatorships that completely transformed their socie-
ties, and altered the way in which citizens related to the state, the mar-
ket, and the type of socialization achieved through art. In both cases,
the privileged official model of art is a direct reflection of the political
model: apolitical art in Chile and overtly politicized art in Romania. The
two versions combined national art and an aversion for contemporary
art with an emphasis on mass culture, although through different means
and with different contents. Both regimes tried to impose a political pro-
ject on the art world and somewhat failed, accomplishing each other’s
purpose: that is, most of the art considered valid by local observers in
6 C. PREDA
Romania came to be apolitical, following only aesthetic dimensions and

not the political program the authorities desired it to have, whereas in
Chile artists did not respect the desire of the regime to create only apo-
litical art, and their works expressed an explicit political commitment.
Given the scope of existing comparative studies, I consider it impor-
tant to vary the choice of countries for comparison, even if this means
taking further methodological risks. Without falling into the trap of over-
simplifying nationally specific situations, the comparison of the Chilean
and Romanian cases has the potential to offer new insights into, and
perspectives on, the processes of modern dictatorships. Comparing such
different case studies helps to untangle the relationship that develops
between political power and artistic expression in dictatorial settings,
and which cuts across the left/right and the authoritarian/totalitarian
categories. These two regimes embody the extremes of possible studies
concerning the subtle relations connecting art and politics in modern dic-
tatorships. Therefore, no sign of equivalence is placed between the two.
This type of trans-regional comparison has its limits with regard to
the different economic and political conditions, as well as disparate cul-
tural and historical legacies. The truth of this argument is beyond dis-
pute. However, as some observers have noted, Eastern Europe and Latin
America are not homogenous regions; there is huge diversity within
these regions, which allows for this kind of diachronic comparison.4
Comparisons between Eastern Europe and Latin America are rare and
mainly concern the third wave of democratization.5 Art history has pre-
viously addressed the comparison of East European communist regimes
and authoritarian regimes in South America. The exhibition Subversive
Practices: Art Under Conditions of Political Repression 60s–80s/South
America/Europe, which also published a catalogue edited by Iris
Dressler and Hans D. Christ6 shows how, in both regions, the artists’
“subversive potency and political relevance were expressed in very dif-
ferent ways, yet they indeed coincided in one common point: the crea-
tion of free spaces of thinking and agency, in smaller or larger collectives
respectively.”7 Although the artists were opposing different regimes with
contrasting mechanisms, they reached the same endpoint: that is, they
showed how political power can be subverted, and how the stranglehold
on power has its limits and margins of possibility. Furthermore, in 2015,
the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized an exhibition called
Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and South America, 1960–1980,
comparing the South American art scenes to those of Eastern Europe
and seeking parallels, and connections between the two places.
1.1 Methodologically Speaking

Anchored in qualitative, comparative political science, this volume uses
the interdisciplinary resources of the study of art and politics with a dou-
ble focus, on the one hand on the institutional—the understudied field
of the cultural policies of dictatorships—and on the other hand on the
role of artists and their artworks.
This book has both exploratory and explanatory aims and to this end
it combines a case study approach with the grounded theory method.
It does so by taking multiple cases—a small number of cases or “small
‘n’ study”—that present evidence on the mechanisms used by a modern
dictatorial regime in the artistic sphere. The choice of the cases fits the
“most different with same outcome” approach, including the assumption
made of extreme cases that “if it can work there it will work anywhere.”8
Using “qualitative comparative research,” we test the professed hypoth-
esis by applying it to the “most dissimilar case studies” in the broader
arc of modern dictatorships. The case studies are chosen both because
of their “intrinsic character” as extreme cases where the relationship
between art and politics may be studied, as well as for their “instrumen-
tal interest” in order to show how this relationship functions in modern
dictatorships.9 Grounded theory allows for the constant comparison of
data analysis, and “the theory is grounded in the sense of being derived
from the study itself.”10
The methods of collecting the data included field research, allowing,
through grounded theory, the altering of preliminary hypotheses once
confronted with the real data; interviews/discussions used to gather
information or reconcile contradictory data (for example events or deci-
sions for which different dates or forms have been given); and documen-
tary research of scientific literature, artworks, music, and film, as well as
the use of secondary sources such as memoirs. The sources used were
of two types: direct, primary sources in the form of artistic artifacts and
official documents, and secondary sources such as scientific literature.
The official documents of the two regimes include government programs
and party congresses’ programs (in the Romanian case), laws and offi-
cial decrees, oral and written discourses of the two leaders, books they
are supposed to have written, and their official biographies. In parallel,
the artistic works themselves represent another set of primary sources:
paintings, but also the artists’ statements, literary texts, theatrical perfor-
mances (scripts), music, and movies.
8 C. PREDA
The artworks considered here are very diverse, originating from

the festivals promoted by the regimes: the Song to Romania festival
in Romania, and the Viña del Mar Festival in Chile. The official art in
Romania included homage art depicting the Ceaușescus, socialist com-
edies, and the House of the People in Bucharest. The types of art pro-
moted by the Pinochet regime comprised classical music and academic
painting, along with traditional folklore and other nationalistic expres-
sions of being Chilean, as well as mass culture products such as tel-
evised culture. Alternatives to these official cultural products included
neo-vanguard expressions in both countries, such as the works of Ion
Grigorescu, Rudolf Bone, or the Sigma group in Romania, and in Chile
the Escena de Avanzada, testimonial theater, the poetry of Raúl Zurita,
and independent dance groups. The artistic examples discussed here
represent the most important illustrations in each context, and do not
constitute an exhaustive examination of all art produced under the two
regimes. Because of the focus of most of the literature dealing with art
and politics, which largely deals with fine art, visual arts are given par-
ticular prominence. One of the important limits of the book is not taking
into consideration art produced in exile; especially for the Chilean case
this is an important absence. The reason for this choice is the need to
discuss art produced in the context of stringent limitations imposed by
the dictatorships.
Despite the plethora of terms to discuss art that does not follow the
official line, including anticommunist, anti-regime, clandestine, critical,
dissident, experimental, invisible, parallel, nonconformist, opposition,
resistance, subversive, unaffiliated, unconventional, underground, unof-
ficial, etc., I chose to speak of “alternative art.” “Alternative art” refers
to those artistic expressions realized during the dictatorships that do not
follow the official line: either confronting the regime, directly or indi-
rectly; choosing to ignore it completely and to create art for art’s sake;
or, on the contrary, establishing a new language or a new understanding
of the world.
1.2 Studying Modern Dictatorships

The contemporary study of nondemocratic regimes registers the use of
several terms: authoritarian or totalitarian regimes; dictatorship; tyranny;
autocracy; and, after the third wave of democratization, hybrid regimes
and different adjectives are added to authoritarian forms.11 A new
interest in autocracies has emerged, but the general approach of political

science is one based on large data sets that, while useful, are not help-
ful in providing an understanding of the true nature of the regimes.12
The type of comparison I propose here provides material that substanti-
ates the nature of the dissimilar regimes and helps to better advance our
qualitative comparative understanding. The so-called “new institutional-
ism of autocracies” has looked at formal institutions, but not at the type
of institutions dealing with art that I look at in my comparative approach
to the Romanian and Chilean regimes.13
The analysis of the Pinochet and Ceaușescu regimes as examples
of modern dictatorships is done in line with the studies that, depart-
ing from a comparison of the totalitarian regimes, tried to establish a
common ground for analysis of postwar nondemocratic modern forms
of government. Stemming from regime theory, the concept takes into
account the theorization of Juan Linz, which introduced authoritarian
forms in between the twin formula of democracy-totalitarianism, advanc-
ing a tripartite framework of analysis (democracy-authoritarianism-
totalitarianism).14 As Franz Neumann observed, we still do not have a
systematic study of dictatorship. “Modern dictatorship” was a term used
in the interwar period to describe the new types of autocratic rule, but
was later abandoned by the literature, which primarily privileged the
analysis of “democracy versus totalitarianism.” Besides, as Linz observed,
“the effort of conceptualization and comprehension of the range of
authoritarian regimes” was forestalled by the “tendency to study politi-
cal systems inside cultural or geographic areas,” or by the propensity to
“regroup countries such as the communist regimes of Eastern Europe”
while ignoring their comparison with other (noncommunist) authoritar-
ian regimes.15 The purpose of this approach, using “modern dictator-
ship” instead of authoritarian versus totalitarian regimes, supports the
theorization of nondemocratic regimes in terms of different degrees of
control of power and not as fundamentally different forms of govern-
ment, i.e., the separation in authoritarian, totalitarian regimes. This is
done by showing, contrary to the general opinion, that the Pinochet
regime had an explicit program for controlling the arts, and that even
more so, the free market policies it applied to the artistic space altered
its functioning in similar ways to the communist, state-centered model.
Therefore, it is a difference in the degree of control exerted by the
respective dictators, rather than a fundamental difference in the inten-
tions of the two programs they enforced.
10 C. PREDA
From tyranny through despotism, “the selfish rule by a single individ-

ual” (Aristotle) or a group of individuals entered the modern era under
the highly permeable concept of dictatorship.16 The term “dictatorship”
was used in the first theorizations of the interwar period to describe the
National Socialist and Bolshevik regimes. One such example is offered
by Hermann Kantorowicz (1935), who defined modern dictatorship as a
government “which is autocratic; works through dictation; and in which
the governed still remember a less autocratic or less illiberal former sys-
tem.”17 The dictator was either “an individual or a group: in the first
case we speak of personal, in the second of collective dictatorship” and
modern dictatorships were of three types: military, party, and adminis-
trative dictatorship.18 “The clearest case of a collective party dictator-
ship is the rule of the Bolshevik Party in Soviet Russia” and “the fascist
dictatorship is a personal party dictatorship, more precisely: the rule of
an autocratic Fuhrer over an armed party which autocratically rules the
nation.”19 Gradually the novel character of these regimes was delimited
by the term “totalitarian.” First used as an adjective (“totalitarian dicta-
torship”), it became a noun: “totalitarianism,” designating a new form of
state.20
Hannah Arendt established the idea of the similarity of the Nazi and
Soviet systems as forms of totalitarianism that represented a new form
of government, differing from other kinds of dictatorial, despotic, or
tyrannical rule in the new role placed on ideology and terror.21 Arendt
condensed her vision of totalitarianism in 1954 “by defining it through
the method of Montesquieu, as a historical phenomenon of which ide-
ology constitutes the founding principle and terror its instrument.”22
Arendt’s view, although thereafter criticized and amended, remains a
milestone insofar as it established totalitarianism as a break in the line
of previous taxonomies of political regimes, underlining its unique
nature. Following the Arendtian conception of totalitarianism, two direc-
tions of study developed. On one side, those studies which elaborated
a political typology of totalitarian power and of the functioning of the
regime (Carl Friedrich & Zbigniew Brzezinski, Raymond Aron, Leonard
Shapiro), and on the other a more theoretical perspective interested pri-
marily in seizing the novelty of totalitarianism at the ideological level
(Leo Strauss, Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek).23 Aron advanced an alter-
native typology of regimes based on a different criterion, but still follow-
ing the line imposed by Montesquieu;24 for him, the variable is not the
number of those that govern, but the number of parties in the political
system. Aron differentiates between pluralist-constitutional regimes and

those with a monopolistic party.25 Totalitarianism is encountered where
five conditions are present: a monopolistic party, an ideology with an
absolute value, a state monopoly on force and persuasion, state control
of economic and professional activities, and police and ideological ter-
ror. Aron’s preconditions are similar to those of Friedrich and Brzezinski,
who identified six conditions defining “totalitarian dictatorships”: an
elaborate ideology, a unique mass party, a system of physical or psychic
terror under the control of the party and the secret police, an almost
absolute monopoly of all mass communications and of all arms, and
finally a central control and direction of the economy.26
At the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold
War, democracy and totalitarianism were the two firmly established forms
of government that seemed to cover all possible forms, or as Linz puts
it “the extremes poles.”27 However, the distinction between authoritar-
ian and totalitarian regimes remained a problematic question, as did the
interrogation of whether they defined two different forms of political
thought or whether they expressed different degrees of a unique modal-
ity.28 As Simona Forti notes, it seemed that the central dichotomy in the
last decades of the twentieth century was no longer that between democ-
racy and totalitarianism but a new one, between authoritarianism and
totalitarianism.
Two different lines of study were followed concerning authoritarian-
ism. A first series of studies—those of Juan Linz, inspired by the analy-
sis of the regime of Francisco Franco in Spain—introduced the concept
of authoritarianism, and were based on a different understanding of the
political articulation. A second series of studies continued to consider
the evolution of authoritarian regimes together with that of totalitarian
regimes: their dynamics from a totalitarian regime toward an authoritar-
ian regime, or the reverse. Furthermore, totalitarianism still dominated
the conceptualizations of Eastern European regimes in the aftermath of
Stalinism, especially among Eastern European dissidents’ analyses and in
particular after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviets.29
Juan Linz considered authoritarianism to be characterized by the
absence of a utopian project. Linz’s classification is based on both the
different degrees of pluralism to which authoritarian regimes consent,
and on their mentalities, which are distinct from ideology.30 The fun-
damental difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes is
that the first does not seek (and does not accomplish) the total control
12 C. PREDA
of society, and is not the bearer of a utopian ideology intended to alter

human characteristics. Authoritarian regimes are defined by two ele-
ments: a certain degree of limited pluralism, and the tendency to
construct themselves on apathy and demobilization, or controlled mobi-
lization.31 In addition, in Linz’s judgment it is more useful to add adjec-
tives to the different types and subtypes of authoritarianism than to talk
about different types of limited democracies. His typology follows this
logic, and thus five main types are identified, providing for the advance-
ment of a number of subtypes: (1) bureaucratic-military-technocratic
elite32 (the paradigmatic type), (2) organic statism often ideologically
described as corporatism, (3) racial democracies, (4) mobilizational
authoritarian regimes with two subtypes,33 and (5) post-totalitarian
authoritarian regimes. Linz also theorizes other forms of regimes, which
do not fall in his post-totalitarian category, for example communist
regimes in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of Stalinism. Such is the case
in Ceaușescu’s Romania, which Linz considers to be a case of totalitari-
anism-sultanism.34
Along with the theoretical evolution concerning totalitarianism, the
concept of modern dictatorship—which for Linz “designates non-dem-
ocratic modern governments”—continued to be used and misused. Even
though he uses it when introducing his conceptualization of totalitarian
regimes, Linz refutes it, stating that it should only be used for the “cri-
sis temporary governments” as it represents “most often, but a bridge
to other forms of autocracies.”35 This temporary character of dictatorial
regimes is also observed by Salvo Mastellone who, following Bobbio,
affirms that it is important to clarify what dictatorship stands for in the
modern age, as it has been associated with all of the authoritarian politi-
cal systems, on the one hand because of Schmitt’s interpretation, and on
the other because of the polemic of the 1930s against totalitarian sys-
tems. The author considers dictatorship to be an inherently transitory
form of government: there are long-term dictatorships and short-term
dictatorships, legitimate and illegitimate dictatorships.36 However, as can
be seen in the case of the Pinochet regime, a dictatorship that announces
itself as transitory, en route to the reestablishment of another type of
regime, can be transformed and thus become a “permanent dictator-
ship.”
Giovanni Sartori does not agree that the temporary character of dicta-
torships is a fundamental trait of these regimes, though this is the meet-
ing point of both its critics and its defenders.37 Sartori is one of the few
theoreticians to delineate a succinct theory of modern dictatorship,38

considering that the attention given to the variety of totalitarian dictator-
ships has obscured the general framework of dictatorship (the genre).39
In his intent to outline what particularizes dictatorship, Sartori opposes
the term against two sets of concepts. First, he delimits it from Roman
dictatorship, saying that “the Roman dictatorship was an extraordi-
nary organ, whereas the Greek tyranny and thereafter the Renaissance
one, were a form of government.”40 Tyranny and absolutism would
apply only to monarchies, while dictatorship can only be thought of in
a republic.41 Secondly, dictatorship is to be thought of in opposition to
democracy and constitutional government. Considering that dictator-
ship is a form of state, or at least of government, its differences from
other forms of government must also be clarified. Dictatorships could be
defined using “a contrario definitions”: a nondemocratic, nonconstitu-
tional government of violence and force.42 Sartori invalidates these three
sets of oppositions. First, the nondemocratic character is considered
“too simplistic” as the regimes “in between” are obscured; second, the
nonconstitutional government could be understood in two ways—that
the regime is unconstitutional when it seizes power and that this is true
for all new governments, and secondly the dictator “exerts a power …
unconstrained by constitutional limits.”43 But, “it mustn’t be said that
… dictatorships are necessarily terrorist systems where there is no law.
Rather there are systems in which the dictator makes the law.”44 Sartori’s
acknowledgment of the types of analysis dedicated to the study of dicta-
torships leads him to accentuate the importance of the personalization of
power in this type of regime.45 In sum, what best defines dictatorships
for Sartori is the personalization of power leading to the making of the
law by the dictator.
Ian Kershaw considers that the distinction lies fundamentally between
the two forms of totalitarianism (Nazism and Stalinism) and other forms
of modern dictatorship. These modern dictatorships, which include
“post-Stalinist regimes as well as more conventional right authoritarian-
ism,” are different from the totalitarian forms of dictatorship in that the
latter attempts, though unfruitfully, to gain not only the body but also
the soul.46 “A modern dictatorship can become a totalitarian regime and
then cease to be one.”47 This observation on the “totalitarian tempta-
tion” (Linz) or the temporary totalitarian character (Aron) is common
to most analyses of modern dictatorships. Kershaw acknowledges that
“whatever the forms of modern dictatorships their power techniques are
14 C. PREDA
not that different”: their methods of control do not differ; what varies
is their “stranglehold on civil society and it is largely determined by the
ideological dynamic of the regime.”48 This observation is useful in our
analysis of two artistic spaces under dictatorships because it affirms the
similarity of the approaches dictatorships have, stating there is a differ-
ence in the degree of control.
For Franz Neumann, “by dictatorship we understand the rule of a
person or a group of persons who arrogate to themselves and monopo-
lize power in the state without restraint.”49 There would be three types
of dictatorship: a simple dictatorship designates the absolute control of
traditional means of coercion—the army, police, bureaucracy, and magis-
tracy;50 a Caesarean dictatorship implies the dictator needs popular sup-
port to gain or to exercise power, or both; and a totalitarian dictatorship
represents the culmination of the first two types, complementing them
with a supplementary need to control education, the means of commu-
nication, and the economic institutions, so as to force the private lives of
citizens and the entire society to conform to the political system of dom-
ination.51 Totalitarian dictatorship is characterized, in Neumann’s opin-
ion, by the accumulation of five factors: first, there is the transition from
a Rechtsstaat to a police state; secondly, power is concentrated with the
totalitarian regime, in opposition to the diffusion found in liberal states;
thirdly, and most importantly, the existence of a monopolistic party-state;
fourthly the fusion between State and society; and lastly, the resort to
terror—the unlimited use of violence as a permanent threat against the
individual.52 The concept of totalitarian dictatorship is used by Neumann
to discuss the nature of the National Socialist state.
The concept of people’s dictatorships can also be taken into account
in this trans-regional comparison of dictatorships in South America and
Eastern Europe. In the case of Eastern Europe, the participation of
citizens in the system was paramount: “they are not people’s democra-
cies, but people’s dictatorships, based on a shared or forced identification
between the rulers and the ruled.”53
Only a cultural approach that examines how the state created entire sys-
tems of meaning and indeed how reality was constructed within the regime
as a whole will allow scholars to comprehend the deeper levels of consen-
sus in socialist ‘consensus dictatorships.’ Cooperation, and understanding
between above, and below, between the avant-garde, and the masses, the
leaders, and the led, the party, and the people marked this type of rule.
The acceptance of dictatorship was created, in large part, by this kind of

consensus building—by conviction, repression, and (self-) deception, in
short by the creation of a particular form of historical and social reality.54
The analysis of the relationship between art and politics in the dictator-
ships of Ceaușescu and Pinochet can be placed in the series of studies,
such as that of Sandrine Kott, which focus on the “place of society in a
dictatorial regime,” “the relationship between the social and the political
analyzing the limits of the dictatorship,” and more precisely the dysfunc-
tion of the system of domination.55 As Kott observed, it is of paramount
importance to “analyze political domination as a social practice because
it is necessary to take into account the internal contradictions of the
state apparatus.” This is also important because “domination must be
analyzed as a relation of exchange even unbalanced between those that
exercise the power and hold the means of repression and propaganda,
and those that are subjected to it, but who are not without resources”:
the idea of a possible autonomy of individuals or groups.56 At the same
time, the limits of domination are fragmentary, and must not be exag-
gerated. “Playing with limits” is one of the main characteristics of the
East German societal arrangements.57 Individuals, as well as groups,
“express themselves in the structures and the language of power,” and
the opposition to power is, to a certain degree, provided by it. Daniel
Barbu takes the same position when he says that there was no “resistance
through culture” in the Romanian regime, which was the broadly agreed
conclusion concerning the type of art produced during the 1980s, but
rather “assents through culture.” In fact, art could provide an alterna-
tive, a shared coded language, which is not granted by the regime, and
this alternative discourse can create another type of socialization.
In conclusion, Neumann’s definition of dictatorship can be useful
as a minimal definition. Modern dictatorship is the rule of a person or a
group of persons that assumes power in a given state and exerts it with-
out control by the ruled. There is continuity between modern dictator-
ships, between authoritarian and totalitarian forms, with varying degrees
and stages. They are closer to one another than they are to democracy.
The term “modern dictatorship” designates the varieties of modern non-
democratic regimes from authoritarian to traditional personal forms
of government, in Linz’s typology, of which both the Ceauşescu and
Pinochet regimes represent possible examples. Modern dictatorship is
a concept that describes those nondemocratic regimes dominated by a
16 C. PREDA
powerful central figure: the dictator or a small group of people, as in the

case of government juntas. Drawing on Sartori’s theory of dictatorship,
the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian forms is as impor-
tant a defining element as the personalization of power. The “totalitarian
temptation” identified by Linz helps to discuss the evolutions of the two
regimes over time. The more wide-ranging formula of modern dictator-
ship underlines their similarities along with their obvious differences. What
varies between them is the degree of control the two leaders and their
regimes have and exert, as well as their capacities to alter their societies.
Taking into account the specificities of the two regimes analyzed, we
can amend this first minimal definition using Neumann’s classification.
Mary Fulbrook’s concept of “participatory dictatorship” and Martin
Sabrow’s concept of “people’s dictatorships,” introduced for the German
Democratic Republic (GDR), can be useful in the establishment of a
dichotomy between the Romanian and Chilean dictatorships. If Romania
could be a case of “participatory dictatorship,” in the Chilean case we
could speak of an “exclusionary dictatorship,” or demobilizational in
Linz’s terms. Fulbrook uses the notion of “participatory dictatorship”
to emphasize how “the undoubtedly dictatorial political system was
‘carried’ by the active participation of many of its subjects … The East
German dictatorship was one that managed to involve large numbers of
its citizens in its political structures and processes.”58 A different logic
ruled under Pinochet, as the declared aim of the regime was to purge
Chilean society of all political influence, and especially of the communist
ideology. By means of exclusion and interdictions, the Pinochet regime
tried to consolidate an apolitical dictatorship, paradoxically transforming
any act into a politically articulated one. The analysis consequently deals
with two forms of modern dictatorships: two authoritarian forms with
totalitarian phases, and elements, more or less pronounced, that could
also be characterized, employing Fulbrook’s formula, as a “participatory
dictatorship” versus an “exclusionary dictatorship.”
1.3 The Study of Art and Politics

of Modern Dictatorships
Dictatorships have been studied from several perspectives, including their

establishment (Kantorowicz, Neumann, Sartori, etc.), their demise, and
the subsequent transitions to democracy (Linz and Stepan, O’Donnell
and Schmitter, Munck & Shalnik Leff, Garretón, Stan, Tismaneanu,
etc.), but less attention has been given to how they function. The focus
on art and politics shows us the similarities between nondemocratic gov-
ernments despite their ideological differences, as well as the importance
of the symbolic capital of artists to the political power. The interdisci-
plinary theoretical literature on art and politics has studied art dur-
ing autocracies with a particular focus on totalitarian regimes, while
less attention has been granted to national case studies of authoritarian
regimes. There is no broad, comparative study of art during modern dic-
tatorships, so we will tackle the issue by looking at how the art of non-
democratic regimes has been studied, and how a study that includes the
role played by artworks and artists could be considered in light of the
two case studies of the regimes of Ceauşescu in Romania and Pinochet in
Chile.
Studying art under modern dictatorships is relevant because in dic-
tatorial contexts artistic practices gain new meanings. Aesthetic render-
ings of these experiences, along with an examination of the regimes’
functioning, their inbuilt inconsistencies, and their modes of conceiving
art, help us to better understand how such regimes functioned. As Piotr
Piotrowski noted, art played an important role in Eastern Europe. “Due
to the restrictions imposed on the freedom of the political institutions,
it was culture that afforded the opportunity for expression of political
ambitions and dissident ideas, generally in a more or less (usually more
than less) covert form.”59 This same consideration has been addressed
by observers of the Chilean dictatorship who argue that because the
Pinochet regime forbade politics, the art world became an articulator
of political meanings. Examining artistic expressions created during dic-
tatorships is also helpful for our understanding of how people feel liv-
ing under a repressive regime, as artists are often able to transmit these
shared feelings through a figurative language.
Although dictatorships use different arguments when they attempt to
politicize every artistic gesture, art is only political in an aesthetic sense.
This argument is advanced by several theoreticians, including Theodor
Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jacques Rancière. Boris Groys underlines
“the ability of art to resist external pressure” because of its autonomy,60
although it was Adorno who first observed “the double character of art,
at the same time autonomous and a social fact,”61 and this dual role of
art supports our analysis here.
Art has always been important to the political,62 but it appears that
in modern times this relationship is most easily seen in non-democratic
18 C. PREDA
regimes, and most specifically in the case of totalitarian regimes, which

have been studied extensively. Aside from the examples of the Nazi dic-
tatorship, the Soviet Union, and the fascist dictatorship of Mussolini,
there are other modern dictatorships that use art in their consolidation of
power, or at least impose a mandatory program for the arts. Besides the
aestheticization of the political practiced by the fascists and the politiciza-
tion of the arts imagined by the communists in response, there are, as
Walter Benjamin observed, other regimes that used different strategies.
My study investigates these other examples, as everything is politicized
under a dictatorship and artists are among the first to react to this real-
ity and to try to give form to broader feelings, while the regimes seek to
subdue artists precisely because of their power.
There is a growing literature on art and politics stemming from very
diverse disciplines, from cultural studies and sociology to philosophy and
art history. These studies include the francophone approach, either insti-
tutional, following the sociological method of Pierre Bourdieu,63 or the
eclectic Marxist-inspired analyses coordinated by, for example, Jean Marc
Lachaud or Eric Van Essche.64 In the Anglo-Saxon space we see other
types of approach, linking democracy and artistic expressions.65 Art his-
tory also discusses political art or revolutionary art, which uses political
references, political quotation, and direct interventions in the status quo
so as to alter it.66 These studies document several types of relationship
that appear between artistic forms and the political, but there is no vis-
ible coherent theorization that can be used in other studies such as this
one. Therefore, a mix of approaches and theoretical viewpoints guides
the analysis of Chile and Romania.
If political science has not yet developed a particular approach for the
study of the arts, there are several authors and concepts that are useful
to our understanding as the focus on “art and politics/politics and the
arts” progresses. While no full-fledged theory exists in this eclectic sub-
field, several approaches and foci can be identified in recent literature.
An attempt to establish a specific method under the heading of “poli-
tics and the arts” has been developing, especially since the 1980s in the
United States, where attention was given to artistic practices in democra-
cies as a new space for enriching political theory. (The American Political
Science Association has organized sections on literature and film, and
the Social Theory, Politics and the Arts conferences have convened since
1974.) Literary works were privileged by this focus as “the narrative
turn” shows, only recently including visual arts practices. In Europe, the
subfield has developed with the support of the Polarts standing group
inside the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), since
1995. Forming a fluid group with a focus on art and politics, the Polarts
framework includes those authors inspired by the philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, or Roland Barthes, and
who relate these ideas to visual arts or literary illustrations.67
These approaches essentially deal with democratic regimes in North
America and Western Europe, and scarcely take non-democratic experi-
ences into account. My book tries to do just that, to integrate the types
of analyses developed to study art in relation to the political through
the investigation of modern dictatorships. This kind of focus can help to
enrich our understanding of the role that art can, and does play in poli-
tics.
Although Karl Marx did not advance an aesthetic theory, his writings
on artistic topics have inspired most of the reflections on the relation-
ship between art and politics inside what can be called the “Marxist con-
stellation.”68 The connection between art and politics has been analyzed
under different names and from different viewpoints, such as the rela-
tionship between society and art, the commitment of the artist, art for
art versus committed art, etc. The common denominator of these stud-
ies is found in the Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches, such as those of
Georg Lukacs and the Frankfurt School scholars: Theodor Adorno, Max
Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Critical theory analyzes the impor-
tance of cultural industries and their effects, such as individual alienation
in advanced capitalism, but their conclusions are not useful for the com-
munist experience; they can, however, be applied to the South American
cases, which saw a neo-liberal experiment.
Post-Marxist influences are also quite common in studies of art
and politics, especially those of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and,
most importantly, Jacques Rancière. Different art forms have also
seen the development of even more specific approaches: film (Gilles
Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, Walter Benjamin), photography (Roland
Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag), theater (J. Rancière), music
(T. Adorno), literature (Pierre Bourdieu, J. Rancière), and visual arts
(J. Rancière, Michel Foucault). These different theorizations make it
even more difficult to pinpoint the meaning of the general “art and poli-
tics” heading.
In accordance with the taxonomy of regimes codified after the Second
World War—democratic versus totalitarian—there are several studies that
20 C. PREDA
discuss totalitarian art, yet there are none that discuss art during mod-
ern dictatorships and also take into account cases aside from totalitarian
regimes.
In this context, one of the most comprehensive analyses of totalitarian
art is that of Igor Golomstock, who subscribes to the Arendtian perspec-
tive. Golomstock believes that artistic life in the period 1932–1937 in
the Nazi dictatorship, and in the Soviet Union, was “entirely determined
by Hannah Arendt’s three main characteristics of totalitarianism: ideol-
ogy, organization and terror.”69 This same framework of analysis is use-
ful for the understanding of other dictatorships because they impose an
official vision of art (ideology) and convey an institutionalization of this
official art through institutions (organization), ensuring that no alterna-
tive projects can contest their monopoly (terror). Golomstock delineates
five stages in the process of imposing totalitarian art within totalitarian
regimes:
(1) The State declares art (and culture as a whole) to be an ideologi-

cal weapon and a means of struggle for power; (2) the State acquires a
monopoly over all manifestations of the country’s artistic life; (3) the State
constructs an all-embracing apparatus for the control and direction of art;
(4) from the multiplicity of artistic movements then in existence, the State
selects one movement, always the most conservative, which most nearly
answers its needs and declares it to be official and obligatory; (5) finally
the State declares war to death against all styles and movements other than
the official ones, declaring them to be reactionary and hostile to class, race,
people, Party or State, to humanity, to social or artistic progress etc.70
Totalitarian regimes constructed an institutional framework that central-

ized every artistic gesture. Nonetheless, other forms of art continued to
exist. What is specific to totalitarian regimes, in Golomstock’s opinion,
is that they create a specific cultural expression: “totalitarian art with its
own ideology, aesthetics, its own organization and style.”71 “Total real-
ism” was the international style of totalitarian culture and could be seen
in Nazi Germany, in the Soviet Union and its satellites, and in commu-
nist China.72
The main principle of totalitarian ideology was the spirit of the party which
meant that an artist had to look at reality through the eyes of the party
… and to accomplish this task, the writer and the artist had to live the
life of the people, had to play an active role in the building of the new
society and depict, in a simple language and generally comprehensible, the

works and accomplishments of the masses under the guiding of their lead-
ers, struggling to create history.73
Socialist Realism, which became the unique and mandatory official style
in the Soviet Union after 1932, and in the satellite communist coun-
tries after 1945, demanded that artworks were “‘realistic’ in form, and
socialist in content.”74 Beginning with writers, this unique style was
extended to all art forms. Without any conceptual rigor, Socialist Realism
“reflected a surreal reality, reconstructed ideally from political directives,”
and the artists had to abide by these and “to tell the truth. The truth was
what the Party said.”75 Aucouturier notes that “the aesthetic content was
secondary, the essence of Socialist Realism did not reside in its directives,
but in its orthodoxy statute that placed art under the jurisdiction of the
totalitarian Party-State.”76
One of the main characteristics of the totalitarian unions was that they
were mandatory: if an artist wanted to continue to create, he had to join
the official union based on the new dogma.77 An important aspect of
totalitarian art in its Eastern European version is the organization by the
state of the different artistic fields and the establishment of what Miklos
Haraszti called the “state artist.” The Hungarian intellectual describes
the situation of his country’s artists in his famous volume The Velvet
Prison: Artists Under State Socialism, but it is also applicable to other
communist countries, where artists were transformed into state workers
as in any other field. “These artists are educated to be unable to cre-
ate anything unpublishable. They are trained to be creative executors.”78
In fact, as Overy observed, “there existed very little cultural resistance
in either state [the Nazi and Stalinist regimes] to the stifling of artistic
experiment and openness” and “one of the chief reasons for this success
lies not in the apparatus of cultural repression, but in the extent to which
the great majority of those engaged in all the many forms of cultural
expression participated, willingly or otherwise, in sustaining the new
artistic reality.”79
Cultural terror, not just voluntary collaboration, was essential to the
totalitarian models. In different ways, from physical elimination to psy-
chological pressure, the totalitarian regimes ensured artists either com-
plied to the official dogma or were purged.
Totalitarian regimes developed into post-totalitarianism and the char-
acteristics of art and artists were also transformed. In Eastern Europe,
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them striped and splashed and dotted with puttycolor and blue and
green of camouflage paint. A man in a motorboat waved his arms.
The men in khaki slickers huddled on the gray dripping deck of the
transport begin to sing
Oh the infantry, the infantry,
With the dirt behind their ears ...
Through the brightbeaded mist behind the low buildings of
Governors Island they can make out the tall pylons, the curving
cables, the airy lace of Brooklyn Bridge. Robertson pulls a package
out of his pocket and pitches it overboard.
“What was that?”
“Just my propho kit.... Wont need it no more.”
“How’s that?”
“Oh I’m goin to live clean an get a good job and maybe get
married.”
“I guess that’s not such a bad idear. I’m tired o playin round
myself. Jez somebody must a cleaned up good on them Shippin
Board boats.” “That’s where the dollar a year men get theirs I guess.”
“I’ll tell the world they do.”
Up forward they are singing
Oh she works in a jam factoree
And that may be all right ...
“Jez we’re goin up the East River Sarge. Where the devil do they
think they’re goin to land us?”
“God, I’d be willin to swim ashore myself. An just think of all the
guys been here all this time cleanin up on us.... Ten dollars a day
workin in a shipyard mind you ...”
“Hell Sarge we got the experience.”
“Experience ...”
Apres la guerre finee
Back to the States for me....
“I bet the skipper’s been drinkin beaucoup highballs an thinks
Brooklyn’s Hoboken.”
“Well there’s Wall Street, bo.”
They are passing under Brooklyn Bridge. There is a humming
whine of electric trains over their heads, an occasional violet flash
from the wet rails. Behind them beyond barges tugboats carferries
the tall buildings, streaked white with whisps of steam and mist,
tower gray into sagged clouds.
Nobody said anything while they ate the soup. Mrs. Merivale sat
in black at the head of the oval table looking out through the half
drawn portières and the drawingroom window beyond at a column of
white smoke that uncoiled in the sunlight above the trainyards,
remembering her husband and how they had come years ago to look
at the apartment in the unfinished house that smelled of plaster and
paint. At last when she had finished her soup she roused herself and
said: “Well Jimmy, are you going back to newspaper work?”
“I guess so.”
“James has had three jobs offered him already. I think it’s
remarkable.”
“I guess I’ll go in with the Major though,” said James Merivale to
Ellen who sat next to him. “Major Goodyear you know, Cousin
Helena.... One of the Buffalo Goodyears. He’s head of the foreign
exchange department of the Banker’s Trust.... He says he can work
me up quickly. We were friends overseas.”
“That’ll be wonderful,” said Maisie in a cooing voice, “wont it
Jimmy?” She sat opposite slender and rosy in her black dress.
“He’s putting me up for Piping Rock,” went on Merivale.
“What’s that?”
“Why Jimmy you must know.... I’m sure Cousin Helena has been
out there to tea many a time.”
“You know Jimps,” said Ellen with her eyes in her plate. “That’s
where Stan Emery’s father used to go every Sunday.”
“Oh did you know that unfortunate young man? That was a
horrible thing,” said Mrs. Merivale. “So many horrible things have
been happening these years.... I’d almost forgotten about it.”
“Yes I knew him,” said Ellen.
The leg of lamb came in accompanied by fried eggplant, late corn,
and sweet potatoes. “Do you know I think it is just terrible,” said Mrs.
Merivale when she had done carving, “the way you fellows wont tell
us any of your experiences over there.... Lots of them must have
been remarkably interesting. Jimmy I should think you’d write a book
about your experiences.”
“I have tried a few articles.”
“When are they coming out?”
“Nobody seems to want to print them.... You see I differ radically
in certain matters of opinion ...”
“Mrs. Merivale it’s years since I’ve eaten such delicious sweet
potatoes.... These taste like yams.”
“They are good.... It’s just the way I have them cooked.”
“Well it was a great war while it lasted,” said Merivale.
“Where were you Armistice night, Jimmy?”
“I was in Jerusalem with the Red Cross. Isn’t that absurd?”
“I was in Paris.”
“So was I,” said Ellen.
“And so you were over there too Helena? I’m going to call you
Helena eventually, so I might as well begin now.... Isn’t that
interesting? Did you and Jimmy meet over there?”
“Oh no we were old friends.... But we were thrown together a
lot.... We were in the same department of the Red Cross—the
Publicity Department.”
“A real war romance,” chanted Mrs. Merivale. “Isn’t that
interesting?”
“Now fellers it’s this way,” shouted Joe O’Keefe, the sweat
breaking out on his red face. “Are we going to put over this bonus
proposition or aint we?... We fought for em didnt we, we cleaned up
the squareheads, didnt we? And now when we come home we get
the dirty end of the stick. No jobs.... Our girls have gone and married
other fellers.... Treat us like a bunch o dirty bums and loafers when
we ask for our just and legal and lawful compensation ... the bonus.
Are we goin to stand for it?... No. Are we goin to stand for a bunch of
politicians treatin us like we was goin round to the back door to ask
for a handout?... I ask you fellers....”
Feet stamped on the floor. “No.” “To hell wid em,” shouted
voices.... “Now I say to hell wid de politicians.... We’ll carry our
campaign to the country ... to the great big generous bighearted
American people we fought and bled and laid down our lives for.”
The long armory room roared with applause. The wounded men
in the front row banged the floor with their crutches. “Joey’s a good
guy,” said a man without arms to a man with one eye and an artificial
leg who sat beside him. “He is that Buddy.” While they were filing out
offering each other cigarettes, a man stood in the door calling out,
“Committee meeting, Committee on Bonus.”
The four of them sat round a table in the room the Colonel had
lent them. “Well fellers let’s have a cigar.” Joe hopped over to the
Colonel’s desk and brought out four Romeo and Juliets. “He’ll never
miss em.”
“Some little grafter I’ll say,” said Sid Garnett stretching out his long
legs.
“Havent got a case of Scotch in there, have you Joey?” said Bill
Dougan.
“Naw I’m not drinkin myself jus for the moment.”
“I know where you kin get guaranteed Haig and Haig,” put in
Segal cockily—“before the war stuff for six dollars a quart.”
“An where are we goin to get the six dollars for crissake?”
“Now look here fellers,” said Joe, sitting on the edge of the table,
“let’s get down to brass tacks.... What we’ve got to do is raise a fund
from the gang and anywhere else we can.... Are we agreed about
that?”
“Sure we are, you tell em,” said Dougan.
“I know lot of old fellers even, thinks the boys are gettin a raw
deal.... We’ll call it the Brooklyn Bonus Agitation Committee
associated with the Sheamus O’Rielly Post of the A. L.... No use doin
anythin unless you do it up right.... Now are yous guys wid me or aint
yer?”
“Sure we are Joey.... You tell em an we’ll mark time.”
“Well Dougan’s got to be president cause he’s the best lookin.”
Dougan went crimson and began to stammer.
“Oh you seabeach Apollo,” jeered Garnett.
“And I think I can do best as treasurer because I’ve had more
experience.”
“Cause you’re the crookedest you mean,” said Segal under his
breath.
Joe stuck out his jaw. “Look here Segal are you wid us or aint
yer? You’d better come right out wid it now if you’re not.”
“Sure, cut de comedy,” said Dougan. “Joey’s de guy to put dis ting
trough an you know it.... Cut de comedy.... If you dont like it you kin
git out.”
Segal rubbed his thin hooked nose. “I was juss jokin gents, I didn’t
mean no harm.”
“Look here,” went on Joe angrily, “what do you think I’m givin up
my time for?... Why I turned down fifty dollars a week only yesterday,
aint that so, Sid? You seen me talkin to de guy.”
“Sure I did Joey.”
“Oh pipe down fellers,” said Segal. “I was just stringin Joey
along.”
“Well I think Segal you ought to be secretary, cause you know
about office work....”
“Office work?”
“Sure,” said Joe puffing his chest out. “We’re goin to have desk
space in the office of a guy I know.... It’s all fixed. He’s goin to let us
have it free till we get a start. An we’re goin to have office stationery.
Cant get nowhere in this world without presentin things right.”
“An where do I come in?” asked Sid Garnett.
“You’re the committee, you big stiff.”
After the meeting Joe O’Keefe walked whistling down Atlantic
Avenue. It was a crisp night; he was walking on springs. There was a
light in Dr. Gordon’s office. He rang. A whitefaced man in a white
jacket opened the door.
“Hello Doc.”
“Is that you O’Keefe? Come on in my boy.” Something in the
doctor’s voice clutched like a cold hand at his spine.
“Well did your test come out all right doc?”
“All right ... positive all right.”
“Christ.”
“Dont worry too much about it, my boy, we’ll fix you up in a few
months.”
“Months.”
“Why at a conservative estimate fiftyfive percent of the people you
meet on the street have a syphilitic taint.”
“It’s not as if I’d been a damn fool. I was careful over there.”
“Inevitable in wartime....”
“Now I wish I’d let loose.... Oh the chances I passed up.”
The doctor laughed. “You probably wont even have any
symptoms.... It’s just a question of injections. I’ll have you sound as a
dollar in no time.... Do you want to take a shot now? I’ve got it all
ready.”
O’Keefe’s hands went cold. “Well I guess so,” he forced a laugh. “I
guess I’ll be a goddam thermometer by the time you’re through with
me.” The doctor laughed creakily. “Full up of arsenic and mercury
eh.... That’s it.”
The wind was blowing up colder. His teeth were chattering.
Through the rasping castiron night he walked home. Fool to pass out
that way when he stuck me. He could still feel the sickening lunge of
the needle. He gritted his teeth. After this I got to have some luck.... I
got to have some luck.
Two stout men and a lean man sit at a table by a window. The
light of a zinc sky catches brightedged glints off glasses, silverware,
oystershells, eyes. George Baldwin has his back to the window. Gus
McNiel sits on his right, and Densch on his left. When the waiter
leans over to take away the empty oystershells he can see through
the window, beyond the graystone parapet, the tops of a few
buildings jutting like the last trees at the edge of a cliff and the tinfoil
reaches of the harbor littered with ships. “I’m lecturin you this time,
George.... Lord knows you used to lecture me enough in the old
days. Honest it’s rank foolishness,” Gus McNiel is saying. “... It’s rank
foolishness to pass up the chance of a political career at your time of
life.... There’s no man in New York better fitted to hold office ...”
“Looks to me as if it were your duty, Baldwin,” says Densch in a
deep voice, taking his tortoiseshell glasses out of a case and
applying them hurriedly to his nose.
The waiter has brought a large planked steak surrounded by
bulwarks of mushrooms and chopped carrots and peas and frilled
browned mashed potatoes. Densch straightens his glasses and
stares attentively at the planked steak.
“A very handsome dish Ben, a very handsome dish I must say....
It’s just this Baldwin ... as I look at it ... the country is going through a
dangerous period of reconstruction ... the confusion attendant on the
winding up of a great conflict ... the bankruptcy of a continent ...
bolshevism and subversive doctrines rife ... America ...” he says,
cutting with the sharp polished steel knife into the thick steak, rare
and well peppered. He chews a mouthful slowly. “America,” he
begins again, “is in the position of taking over the receivership of the
world. The great principles of democracy, of that commercial
freedom upon which our whole civilization depends are more than
ever at stake. Now as at no other time we need men of established
ability and unblemished integrity in public office, particularly in the
offices requiring expert judicial and legal knowledge.”
“That’s what I was tryin to tell ye the other day George.”
“But that’s all very well Gus, but how do you know I’d be
elected.... After all it would mean giving up my law practice for a
number of years, it would mean ...”
“You just leave that to me.... George you’re elected already.”
“An extraordinarily good steak,” says Densch, “I must say.... No
but newspaper talk aside ... I happen to know from a secret and
reliable source that there is a subversive plot among undesirable
elements in this country.... Good God think of the Wall Street bomb
outrage.... I must say that the attitude of the press has been
gratifying in one respect ... in fact we’re approaching a national unity
undreamed of before the war.”
“No but George,” breaks in Gus, “put it this way.... The publicity
value of a political career’d kinder bolster up your law practice.”
“It would and it wouldn’t Gus.”
Densch is unrolling the tinfoil off a cigar. “At any rate it’s a grand
sight.” He takes off his glasses and cranes his thick neck to look out
into the bright expanse of harbor that stretches full of masts, smoke,
blobs of steam, dark oblongs of barges, to the hazeblurred hills of
Staten Island.
Bright flakes of cloud were scaling off a sky of crushing indigo
over the Battery where groups of dingy darkdressed people stood
round the Ellis Island landing station and the small boat dock waiting
silently for something. Frayed smoke of tugs and steamers hung low
and trailed along the opaque glassgreen water. A threemasted
schooner was being towed down the North River. A newhoisted jib
flopped awkwardly in the wind. Down the harbor loomed taller, taller
a steamer head on, four red stacks packed into one, creamy
superstructure gleaming. “Mauretania just acomin in twentyfour
hours lyte,” yelled the man with the telescope and fieldglasses....
“Tyke a look at the Mauretania, farstest ocean greyhound, twentyfour
hours lyte.” The Mauretania stalked like a skyscraper through the
harbor shipping. A rift of sunlight sharpened the shadow under the
broad bridge, along the white stripes of upper decks, glinted in the
rows of portholes. The smokestacks stood apart, the hull lengthened.
The black relentless hull of the Mauretania pushing puffing tugs
ahead of it cut like a long knife into the North River.
A ferry was leaving the immigrant station, a murmur rustled
through the crowd that packed the edges of the wharf. “Deportees....
It’s the communists the Department of Justice is having deported ...
deportees ... Reds.... It’s the Reds they are deporting.” The ferry was
out of the slip. In the stern a group of men stood still tiny like tin
soldiers. “They are sending the Reds back to Russia.” A
handkerchief waved on the ferry, a red handkerchief. People tiptoed
gently to the edge of the walk, tiptoeing, quiet like in a sickroom.
Behind the backs of the men and women crowding to the edge of
the water, gorillafaced chipontheshoulder policemen walked back
and forth nervously swinging their billies.
“They are sending the Reds back to Russia.... Deportees....
Agitators.... Undesirables.” ... Gulls wheeled crying. A catsupbottle
bobbed gravely in the little ground-glass waves. A sound of singing
came from the ferryboat getting small, slipping away across the
water.
C’est la lutte finale, groupons-nous et demain
L’Internationale sera le genre humain.
“Take a look at the deportees.... Take a look at the undesirable
aliens,” shouted the man with the telescopes and fieldglasses. A
girl’s voice burst out suddenly, “Arise prisoners of starvation,” “Sh....
They could pull you for that.”
The singing trailed away across the water. At the end of a
marbled wake the ferryboat was shrinking into haze. International ...
shall be the human race. The singing died. From up the river came
the longdrawn rattling throb of a steamer leaving dock. Gulls
wheeled above the dark dingydressed crowd that stood silently
looking down the bay.
II. Nickelodeon
A
nickel before midnight buys tomorrow ...
holdup headlines, a cup of coffee in the
automat, a ride to Woodlawn, Fort Lee,
Flatbush.... A nickel in the slot buys chewing
gum. Somebody Loves Me, Baby Divine,
You’re in Kentucky Juss Shu’ As You’re Born
... bruised notes of foxtrots go limping out of
doors, blues, waltzes (We’d Danced the
Whole Night Through) trail gyrating tinsel
memories.... On Sixth Avenue on Fourteenth
there are still flyspecked stereopticons
where for a nickel you can peep at yellowed
yesterdays. Beside the peppering shooting
gallery you stoop into the flicker A Hot Time,
The Bachelor’s Surprise, The Stolen
Garter ... wastebasket of tornup
daydreams.... A nickel before midnight buys
our yesterdays.
R
uth Prynne came out of the doctor’s office pulled the fur tight
round her throat. She felt faint. Taxi. As she stepped in she
remembered the smell of cosmetics and toast and the littered
hallway at Mrs. Sunderlands. Oh I cant go home just yet. “Driver go
to the Old English Tea Room on Fortieth Street please.” She opened
her long green leather purse and looked in. My God, only a dollar a
quarter a nickel and two pennies. She kept her eyes on the figures
flickering on the taximeter. She wanted to break down and cry.... The
way money goes. The gritty cold wind rasped at her throat when she
got out. “Eighty cents miss.... I haven’t any change miss.” “All right
keep the change.” Heavens only thirtytwo cents.... Inside it was
warm and smelled cozily of tea and cookies.
“Why Ruth, if it isn’t Ruth.... Dearest come to my arms after all
these years.” It was Billy Waldron. He was fatter and whiter than he
used to be. He gave her a stagy hug and kissed her on the forehead.
“How are you? Do tell me.... How distinguée you look in that hat.”
“I’ve just been having my throat X-rayed,” she said with a giggle.
“I feel like the wrath of God.”
“What are you doing Ruth? I havent heard of you for ages.”
“Put me down as a back number, hadn’t you?” She caught his
words up fiercely.
“After that beautiful performance you gave in The Orchard
Queen....”
“To tell the truth Billy I’ve had a terrible run of bad luck.”
“Oh I know everything is dead.”
“I have an appointment to see Belasco next week.... Something
may come of that.”
“Why I should say it might Ruth.... Are you expecting someone?”
“No.... Oh Billy you’re still the same old tease.... Dont tease me
this afternoon. I dont feel up to it.”
“You poor dear sit down and have a cup of tea with me.
“I tell you Ruth it’s a terrible year. Many a good trouper will pawn
the last link of his watch chain this year.... I suppose you’re going the
rounds.”
“Dont talk about it.... If I could only get my throat all right.... A thing
like that wears you down.”
“Remember the old days at the Somerville Stock?”
“Billy could I ever forget them?... Wasnt it a scream?”
“The last time I saw you Ruth was in The Butterfly on the Wheel in
Seattle. I was out front....”
“Why didn’t you come back and see me?”
“I was still angry at you I suppose.... It was my lowest moment. In
the valley of shadow ... melancholia ... neurasthenia. I was stranded
penniless.... That night I was a little under the influence, you
understand. I didn’t want you to see the beast in me.”
Ruth poured herself a fresh cup of tea. She suddenly felt
feverishly gay. “Oh but Billy havent you forgotten all that?... I was a
foolish little girl then.... I was afraid that love or marriage or anything
like that would interfere with my art, you understand.... I was so
crazy to succeed.”
“Would you do the same thing again?”
“I wonder....”
“How does it go?... The moving finger writes and having writ
moves on ...”
“Something about Nor all your tears wash out a word of it ... But
Billy,” she threw back her head and laughed, “I thought you were
getting ready to propose to me all over again.... Ou my throat.”
“Ruth I wish you werent taking that X-ray treatment.... I’ve heard
it’s very dangerous. Dont let me alarm you about it my dear ... but I
have heard of cases of cancer contracted that way.”
“That’s nonsense Billy.... That’s only when X-rays are improperly
used, and it takes years of exposure.... No I think this Dr. Warner’s a
remarkable man.”
Later, sitting in the uptown express in the subway, she still could
feel his soft hand patting her gloved hand. “Goodby little girl, God
bless you,” he’d said huskily. He’s gotten to be a ham actor if there
ever was one, something was jeering inside her all the while. “Thank
heavens you will never know.” ... Then with a sweep of his
broadbrimmed hat and a toss of his silky white hair, as if he were
playing in Monsieur Beaucaire, he had turned and walked off among
the crowd up Broadway. I may be down on my luck, but I’m not all
ham inside the way he is.... Cancer he said. She looked up and
down the car at the joggling faces opposite her. Of all those people
one of them must have it. Four Out of Every Five Get ... Silly,
that’s not cancer. Ex-lax, Nujol, O’Sullivan’s.... She put her hand
to her throat. Her throat was terribly swollen, her throat throbbed
feverishly. Maybe it was worse. It is something alive that grows in
flesh, eats all your life, leaves you horrible, rotten.... The people
opposite stared straight ahead of them, young men and young
women, middleaged people, green faces in the dingy light, under the
sourcolored advertisements. Four Out of Every Five ... A trainload
of jiggling corpses, nodding and swaying as the express roared
shrilly towards Ninetysixth Street. At Ninetysixth she had to change
for the local.
Dutch Robertson sat on a bench on Brooklyn Bridge with the

collar of his army overcoat turned up, running his eye down Business
Opportunities. It was a muggy fog-choked afternoon; the bridge was
dripping and aloof like an arbor in a dense garden of
steamboatwhistles. Two sailors passed. “Ze best joint I’ve been in
since B. A.”
Partner movie theater, busy neighborhood ... stand investigation
... $3,000.... Jez I haven’t got three thousand mills.... Cigar stand,
busy building, compelled sacrifice.... Attractive and completely
outfitted radio and music shop ... busy.... Modern mediumsized
printingplant consisting of cylinders, Kelleys, Miller feeders, job
presses, linotype machines and a complete bindery.... Kosher
restaurant and delicatessen.... Bowling alley ... busy.... Live spot
large dancehall and other concessions. We Buy False Teeth, old
gold, platinum, old jewelry. The hell they do. Help Wanted Male.
That’s more your speed you rummy. Addressers, first class
penmen.... Lets me out.... Artist, Attendant, Auto, Bicycle and
Motorcycle repair shop.... He took out the back of an envelope and
marked down the address. Bootblacks.... Not yet. Boy; no I guess I
aint a boy any more, Candystore, Canvassers, Carwashers,
Dishwasher. Earn While You Learn. Mechanical dentistry is your
shortest way to success.... No dull seasons....
“Hello Dutch.... I thought I’d never get here.” A grayfaced girl in a
red hat and gray rabbit coat sat down beside him.
“Jez I’m sick o readin want ads.” He stretched out his arms and
yawned letting the paper slip down his legs.
“Aint you chilly, sittin out here on the bridge?”
“Maybe I am.... Let’s go and eat.” He jumped to his feet and put
his red face with its thin broken nose close to hers and looked in her
black eyes with his pale gray eyes. He tapped her arm sharply.
“Hello Francie.... How’s my lil girl?”
They walked back towards Manhattan, the way she had come.
Under them the river glinted through the mist. A big steamer drifted
by slowly, lights already lit; over the edge of the walk they looked
down the black smokestacks.
“Was it a boat as big as that you went overseas on Dutch?”
“Bigger ’n that.”
“Gee I’d like to go.”
“I’ll take you over some time and show you all them places over
there ... I went to a lot of places that time I went A.W.O.L.”
In the L station they hesitated. “Francie got any jack on you?”
“Sure I got a dollar.... I ought to keep that for tomorrer though.”
“All I got’s my last quarter. Let’s go eat two fiftyfive cent dinners at
that chink place ... That’ll be a dollar ten.”
“I got to have a nickel to get down to the office in the mornin.”
“Oh Hell! Goddam it I wish we could have some money.”
“Got anything lined up yet?”
“Wouldn’t I have told ye if I had?”
“Come ahead I’ve got a half a dollar saved up in my room. I can
take carfare outa that.” She changed the dollar and put two nickels
into the turnstile. They sat down in a Third Avenue train.
“Say Francie will they let us dance in a khaki shirt?”
“Why not Dutch it looks all right.”
“I feel kinder fussed about it.”
The jazzband in the restaurant was playing Hindustan. It smelled
of chop suey and Chinese sauce. They slipped into a booth.
Slickhaired young men and little bobhaired girls were dancing
hugged close. As they sat down they smiled into each other’s eyes.
“Jez I’m hungry.”
“Are you Dutch?”
He pushed forward his knees until they locked with hers. “Gee
you’re a good kid,” he said when he had finished his soup. “Honest
I’ll get a job this week. And then we’ll get a nice room an get married
an everything.”
When they got up to dance they were trembling so they could
barely keep time to the music.
“Mister ... no dance without ploper dless ...” said a dapper
Chinaman putting his hand on Dutch’s arm.
“Waz he want?” he growled dancing on.
“I guess it’s the shirt, Dutch.”
“The hell it is.”
“I’m tired. I’d rather talk than dance anyway ...” They went back to
their booth and their sliced pineapple for dessert.
Afterwards they walked east along Fourteenth. “Dutch cant we go
to your room?”
“I ain’t got no room. The old stiff wont let me stay and she’s got all
my stuff. Honest if I dont get a job this week I’m goin to a recruiting
sergeant an re-enlist.”
“Oh dont do that; we wouldn’t ever get married then Dutch.... Gee
though why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to worry you Francie.... Six months out of work ...
Jez it’s enough to drive a guy cookoo.”
“But Dutch where can we go?”
“We might go out that wharf.... I know a wharf.”
“It’s so cold.”
“I couldn’t get cold when you were with me kid.”
“Dont talk like that.... I dont like it.”
They walked leaning together in the darkness up the muddy
rutted riverside streets, between huge swelling gastanks,
brokendown fences, long manywindowed warehouses. At a corner
under a streetlamp a boy catcalled as they passed.
“I’ll poke your face in you little bastard,” Dutch let fly out of the
corner of his mouth.
“Dont answer him,” Francie whispered, “or we’ll have the whole
gang down on us.”
They slipped through a little door in a tall fence above which crazy
lumberpiles towered. They could smell the river and cedarwood and
sawdust. They could hear the river lapping at the piles under their
feet. Dutch drew her to him and pressed his mouth down on hers.
“Hay dere dont you know you cant come out here at night
disaway?” a voice yapped at them. The watchman flashed a lantern
in their eyes.
“All right keep your shirt on, we were just taking a little walk.”
“Some walk.”
They were dragging themselves down the street again with the
black riverwind in their teeth.
“Look out.” A policeman passed whistling softly to himself. They
drew apart. “Oh Francie they’ll be takin us to the nuthouse if we keep
this up. Let’s go to your room.”
“Landlady’ll throw me out, that’s all.”
“I wont make any noise.... You got your key aint ye? I’ll sneak out
before light. Goddam it they make you feel like a skunk.”
“All right Dutch let’s go home.... I dont care no more what
happens.”
They walked up mudtracked stairs to the top floor of the
tenement.
“Take off your shoes,” she hissed in his ear as she slipped the key
in the lock.
“I got holes in my stockings.”
“That dont matter, silly. I’ll see if it’s all right. My room’s way back
past the kitchen so if they’re all in bed they cant hear us.”
When she left him he could hear his heart beating. In a second
she came back. He tiptoed after her down a creaky hall. A sound of
snoring came through a door. There was a smell of cabbage and
sleep in the hall. Once in her room she locked the door and put a
chair against it under the knob. A triangle of ashen light came in from
the street. “Now for crissake keep still Dutch.” One shoe still in each
hand he reached for her and hugged her.
He lay beside her whispering on and on with his lips against her
ear. “And Francie I’ll make good, honest I will; I got to be a sergeant
overseas till they busted me for goin A.W.O.L. That shows I got it in
me. Once I get a chance I’ll make a whole lot of jack and you an
me’ll go back an see Château Teery an Paree an all that stuff;
honest you’d like it Francie ... Jez the towns are old and funny and
quiet and cozy-like an they have the swellest ginmills where you sit
outside at little tables in the sun an watch the people pass an the
food’s swell too once you get to like it an they have hotels all over
where we could have gone like tonight an they dont care if your
married or nutten. An they have big beds all cozy made of wood and
they bring ye up breakfast in bed. Jez Francie you’d like it.”
They were walking to dinner through the snow. Big snowfeathers

spun and spiraled about them mottling the glare of the streets with
blue and pink and yellow, blotting perspectives.
“Ellie I hate to have you take that job.... You ought to keep on with
your acting.”
“But Jimps, we’ve got to live.”
“I know ... I know. You’d certainly didn’t have your wits about you
Ellie when you married me.”
“Oh let’s not talk about it any more.”
“Do let’s have a good time tonight.... It’s the first snow.”
“Is this the place?” They stood before an unlighted basement door
covered by a closemeshed grating. “Let’s try.”
“Did the bell ring?”
“I think so.”
The inner door opened and a girl in a pink apron peered out at
them. “Bon soir mademoiselle.”
“Ah ... bon soir monsieur ’dame.” She ushered them into a
foodsmelling gaslit hall hung with overcoats and hats and mufflers.
Through a curtained door the restaurant blew in their faces a hot
breath of bread and cocktails and frying butter and perfumes and
lipsticks and clatter and jingling talk.
“I can smell absinthe,” said Ellen. “Let’s get terribly tight.”
“Good Lord, there’s Congo.... Dont you remember Congo Jake at
the Seaside Inn?”
He stood bulky at the end of the corridor beckoning to them. His
face was very tanned and he had a glossy black mustache. “Hello
Meester ’Erf.... Ow are you?”
“Fine as silk. Congo I want you to meet my wife.”
“If you dont mind the keetchen we will ’ave a drink.”
“Of course we dont.... It’s the best place in the house. Why you’re
limping.... What did you do to your leg?”
“Foutu ... I left it en Italie.... I couldnt breeng it along once they’d
cut it off.”
“How was that?”
“Damn fool thing on Mont Tomba.... My bruderinlaw e gave me a
very beautiful artificial leemb.... Sit ’ere. Look madame now can you
tell which is which?”
“No I cant,” said Ellie laughing. They were at a little marble table
in the corner of the crowded kitchen. A girl was dishing out at a deal
table in the center. Two cooks worked over the stove. The air was
rich with sizzling fatty foodsmells. Congo hobbled back to them with
three glasses on a small tray. He stood over them while they drank.
“Salut,” he said, raising his glass. “Absinthe cocktail, like they
make it in New Orleans.”
“It’s a knockout.” Congo took a card out of his vest pocket:
MARQUIS DES COULOMMIERS
Imports
Riverside 11121
“Maybe some day you need some little ting ... I deal in nutting but
prewar imported. I am the best bootleggair in New York.”
“If I ever get any money I certainly will spend it on you Congo....
How do you find business?”
“Veree good.... I tell you about it. Tonight I’m too busee.... Now I
find you a table in the restaurant.”
“Do you run this place too?”
“No this my bruderinlaw’s place.”
“I didnt know you had a sister.”
“Neither did I.”
When Congo limped away from their table silence came down
between them like an asbestos curtain in a theater.
“He’s a funny duck,” said Jimmy forcing a laugh.
“He certainly is.”

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Art and Politics under Modern

Dictatorships: A Comparison of Chile

Britain and the Dictatorships of Argentina and Chile,

Birth of Democratic Citizenship Women and Power in

Articulating Novelty in Science and Art The Comparative

Enfolding silence the transformation of Japanese

The Physics of Cancer 1st Edition Caterina A. M. La

The Art of Looking How to Read Modern and Contemporary

Time and Tide The Feminist and Cultural Politics of a

Art, Religion and Resistance in (Post-)Communist

Art and Politics under

ISBN 978-3-319-57269-7 ISBN 978-3-319-57270-3 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939331

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover Image: Courtesy of the artists of C.A.D.A. Photograph by Jorge Brantmayer.

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Art and Politics Under Modern Dictatorships:

2 The Two Modern Dictatorships in Romania

3 Art Should Be Apolitical: Official Art in Chile 83

4 Art Must Be Politicized: Official Art in Romania 141

5 Alternative Art in Chile: Politicized Art 211

6 Alternative Art in Romania: Aesthetic Resistance 253

7 A Model for Comparative Analysis of Art

Fig. 1.1 Ion Grigorescu, Dialogue with Nicolae Ceauşescu

Fig. 5.1 Lotty Rosenfeld, Acción de arte Palacio Presidencial

Art and Politics Under Modern

Nicolae Ceaușescu began the building of the House of the Republic

© The Author(s) 2017 1

This book furthermore argues that a modern dictatorship entails

Romania came to be apolitical, following only aesthetic dimensions and

1.1 Methodologically Speaking

The artworks considered here are very diverse, originating from

1.2 Studying Modern Dictatorships

interest in autocracies has emerged, but the general approach of political

From tyranny through despotism, “the selfish rule by a single individ-

system. Aron differentiates between pluralist-constitutional regimes and

of society, and is not the bearer of a utopian ideology intended to alter

theoreticians to delineate a succinct theory of modern dictatorship,38

The acceptance of dictatorship was created, in large part, by this kind of

powerful central figure: the dictator or a small group of people, as in the

1.3 The Study of Art and Politics

Dictatorships have been studied from several perspectives, including their

regimes, and most specifically in the case of totalitarian regimes, which

(1) The State declares art (and culture as a whole) to be an ideologi-

Totalitarian regimes constructed an institutional framework that central-

society and depict, in a simple language and generally comprehensible, the

Dutch Robertson sat on a bench on Brooklyn Bridge with the

They were walking to dinner through the snow. Big snowfeathers

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3 Art Should Be Apolitical: Official Art in Chile 83

4 Art Must Be Politicized: Official Art in Romania 141

5 Alternative Art in Chile: Politicized Art 211

6 Alternative Art in Romania: Aesthetic Resistance 253

1.3 The Study of Art and Politics