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 They are a brigadier, a factory worker and a youth volunteer
with a hoe. They are paintings of socialist realism. They are
also all Albanian women from the time of Enver Hoxha, who
created one of the world's most closed societies until his death
in 1985.
Visitors to Greece's capital have a relatively rare opportunity
to see Hoxha-era art on display outside its regular home in
Tirana's National Gallery of Art.
The portraits are part of documenta 14, the Kassel,
Germany-based exhibition of Western European modern art that
this year is being hosted both in Kassel and Athens.
Hundreds of documenta 14 displays are to be found in museums
across the Greek city until July, with the three women portraits
among the offerings at EMST, the National Museum of Contemporary
Art located in the old but renovated Fix brewery building.
The paintings - by Spiro Kristo (1976), Zef Shoshi (1969) and
Hasan Nallbani (1968) - draw you in and can inspire.
But they were also political, more than acceptable to Hoxha, who
saw threats from the West, Russia, the then-Yugolavia and just
about everywhere.
In a sense they are modernist icons for the only society in the
world that was officially atheist.
As Edi Muka, an Albanian art critic and curator notes of
Shoshi's factory worker, "representations of motherhood as
constitutive of women’s central role in religious art are
carefully removed".
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Hoxha-era paranoia was to be found everywhere from spikes in
vineyards to deter potential enemy paratroopers to more than 700,000
concrete bunkers across the country, housing soldiers on guard for
potential attack.
So it was not all easy for painters. Not far from the three women,
documenta 14 has hung a 1971 painting "Planting of Trees" by Edi
Hila.
It depicts blissfully happy young people planting trees for their
country.
Too blissfully happy, perhaps. Almost "expressive dancing", in the
words of the painter.
"My work stepped out of the contours of socialist realism," Hila
told Reuters in Tirana. "Generally in those works the positive, the
hero, is in the center ... The compositional structure was different
so this hurt their taste."
Hila, deemed to be in need of re-education, ended up being sentenced
to work as a loader on a chicken farm. His drawings from that time -
showing a different kind of realism - are also on display in Athens.
(Additional reporting by Benet Koleka in Tirana; Editing by Alison
Williams)
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