Romania Shrugs Off Reminder of Its Past
What are the arts worth?
In straitened times it’s easy to mistake cost for value. You might also say it’s the difference between cash and culture, the price of something and what’s ultimately priceless.
Romanians, it seems, have been prone to confuse the two since even before the revolution that overthrew the country’s Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and executed him and his wife, Elena, nearly 20 years ago.
That’s one explanation, at least, for why, when the courts here recently ruled that some art formerly in the possession of the Ceausescu family should be returned to Nicolae’s only surviving child, Valentin, Romanians hardly blinked.
The art is mostly Romanian paintings, but also some Goya prints. That ruling was not quite an equivalent to German courts handing art formerly at Berchtesgaden over to Hitler’s relatives. But it was close.
A soft-spoken 60-year-old physicist who never helped run his father’s regime, Valentin Ceausescu has said the works he wanted to get back belonged to his own former wife, Iordana, an art historian and the daughter of a onetime Communist leader. Valentin’s father, who didn’t approve of the marriage, expelled her years ago to Canada.
Other works being returned, however, belonged to Valentin’s brother, Nicu, a much-loathed figure when he was the dictator’s heir apparent. He died of cirrhosis in 1996, at 45. (Ceausescu’s third child, a daughter, Zoe, who also had some works of art, died from lung cancer in 2006, at 57.)...
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In straitened times it’s easy to mistake cost for value. You might also say it’s the difference between cash and culture, the price of something and what’s ultimately priceless.
Romanians, it seems, have been prone to confuse the two since even before the revolution that overthrew the country’s Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and executed him and his wife, Elena, nearly 20 years ago.
That’s one explanation, at least, for why, when the courts here recently ruled that some art formerly in the possession of the Ceausescu family should be returned to Nicolae’s only surviving child, Valentin, Romanians hardly blinked.
The art is mostly Romanian paintings, but also some Goya prints. That ruling was not quite an equivalent to German courts handing art formerly at Berchtesgaden over to Hitler’s relatives. But it was close.
A soft-spoken 60-year-old physicist who never helped run his father’s regime, Valentin Ceausescu has said the works he wanted to get back belonged to his own former wife, Iordana, an art historian and the daughter of a onetime Communist leader. Valentin’s father, who didn’t approve of the marriage, expelled her years ago to Canada.
Other works being returned, however, belonged to Valentin’s brother, Nicu, a much-loathed figure when he was the dictator’s heir apparent. He died of cirrhosis in 1996, at 45. (Ceausescu’s third child, a daughter, Zoe, who also had some works of art, died from lung cancer in 2006, at 57.)...