Negotiating artistic autonomy and political heteronomy

This research will discuss the struggle of an artist’s career living under communism and aiming to enter the global art market. The main research question in this thesis is: How did visual artists living under communist rule enter the global art market and develop an international career in the twentieth century? To answer this research question I am using a case study of an artist that has lived under communism in the twentieth century. The case study is Ion Bitzan, (1924-1997) a socialist-realist and experimental artist that lived in Romania. Throughout his career, Bitzan exhibited all over Western Europe with experimental art, but simultaneously had to satisfy the communist regime by producing socialist realist artworks. Mixed methods is used in this research, with a main focus in social network analysis on Ion Bitzan’s career trajectory. Social network analysis is a method that is used to analyze the relationships between different cultural actors from an individual, relational and structural level within a network. The structure of the findings is based on the concepts of autonomy and political heteronomy. The political circumstances shaped his career; it created difficulties and provided opportunities. The main political events that occurred throughout his career are the refusal of the Warsaw pact in 1968, the July theses in 1971 and the revolution in 1989. The Warsaw pact resulted in a political liberalization of the country that resulted in an international breakthrough for Ion Bitzan’s experimental art. During this period Bitzan was showing his socialist as well as the experimental art abroad.The contact that Bitzan had with his network of national and international cultural actors throughout his career show us how Bitzan managed an international career while living under communism. Bitzan was able to enter the global art market, because the artistic recognition that was given to him by cultural gatekeepers living under communist rule, was picked up by cultural gatekeepers from the global art world. Bitzan was able to enter the global art market and develop an international career, because he was a respected artist of socialist realist paintings. He had a good reputation on the side of the communists; as well on the side of the experimentalists he was autonomous and heteronomous at the same time. Bitzan’s career as a visual artist cannot be separately seen from the political circumstances in his country.