'Criticism Will Open Up New Horizons': The Union of Writers and Artists and the Development of Art Critical Discourse in Socialist Albania

• In Event: Creating for the State During Socialism: The Role of Artists' Unions

Abstract

During its roughly 45 years of existence, virtually no attempts were made to write a comprehensive history of art in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, from either a nationalist or a communist perspective. However, members of the Albanian Union of Writers and Artists—the government organ devoted to literature and the fine arts—did generate an impressive body of artistic criticism. This corpus of highly ideological writing set out to position Albanian socialist realism against both Western aesthetic modernisms and against cultural production of the country’s onetime mentor, the Soviet Union. Albania never possessed an avant-garde modernist tradition in the way that many East European countries did, and its socialist art criticism faced the task of outlining a particularly amorphous and open-ended Socialist Realism. This paper considers the role of the Union of Writers and Artists in developing a critical discourse on Socialist Realist sculpture in particular. It focuses on the critical writings of artists and historians such as Kujtim Buza, Andon Kuqali, and Kristaq Rama, showing how critical writing about sculptural production (and especially public sculpture) was crucial both to establishing a historical consciousness and to differentiating Albania’s cultural production from that of other socialist nations.

Author

• Raino Isto, U of Maryland, College Park