Hungary Auctions Off Communist Kitsch

By GORDON FAIRCLOUGH And VERONIKA GULYAS

BUDAPEST—Competition was fierce for Lot No. 38, a fine ceramic sculpture of Vladimir Lenin.

The winning bidder was 22-year-old Timea Szabo, who offered nearly $1,000 for the small likeness of the communist hero. Ms. Szabo, too young to remember Hungary's socialist past, is firmly engaged with its capitalist present.

"We're not into Lenin, really," says Ms. Szabo, who works at a real-estate company that caters to Budapest's newly rich.



But sizing up her new acquisition—which portrays the first Soviet leader grasping the lapel of his overcoat, a stern expression on his bearded face—she declares: "It will look pretty in the office."

More than 20 years after the collapse of communism here, Hungary's government is holding a vast rummage sale, auctioning off socialist-era paintings, sculptures and photographs that have been gathering dust in storage.

The proceeds will be used to help clean up after another reminder of central planning: an industrial accident that in October left villages in western Hungary flooded with caustic red sludge—waste from a once state-owned aluminum factory.

On Monday night, hundreds of people joined the bidding at an art gallery that formerly served as a warehouse for Hungary's secret police.

Hungary's current political leadership views the purge in part as a symbolic exorcism of the ghosts of socialism—and a reminder of past suffering.

To advertise the auction, the government created a logo showing the hammer of the communists' old hammer-and-sickle emblem striking Lenin's head and causing him to see red stars. Below it is inscribed the motto, "Never Again."

"It's an important gesture. Almost every Hungarian family was somehow a victim in the communist period," says Gergely Boszormenyi Nagy, an official of the Ministry of Public Administration and Justice, which organized the auction. "This is the end of the line. We won't keep this stuff anymore."

But the event also comes at a time of rising nostalgia for the socialist years —at least in some quarters of Hungarian society.

The country's economy has been upended by the global financial crisis. Unemployment soared as the country sank into its worst recession since the transition to capitalism in 1989.

Many older people thrown out of work now say that at least under the communist regime everyone had a job and something to eat.

Gyorgy Torok, 45, who bought a vintage Lenin lithograph for about $50 on Monday night, says that the art works on sale reminded him of his youth and of his father, a mining engineer and avid collector of communist-era memorabilia who died earlier this year.

"When I was young, I didn't really look deeply into the faults of the system," says Mr. Torok, a real-estate entrepreneur who says that his business is struggling amid the economic downturn. "I lived a calm, secure life where bread cost 3.5 forints and everyone had a job."

Today, a loaf of bread costs about 200 Hungarian forints, or $1.

rt played an important propaganda role throughout the Soviet sphere. When communism collapsed in 1989, politicians across Central and Eastern Europe had to decide what to do with decades' worth of statues, paintings and other works of public art.

In most countries, the hulking images of Lenin, Stalin and other communist VIPs were pulled from their pedestals in parks and corralled in museums.

Many of Hungary's are now in a sculpture garden outside Budapest.

Some pieces were snapped up by collectors of communist kitsch in the West and put on display—like the Lenin statue perched on the roof of Red Square, an apartment building on New York City's Lower East Side.

The art works for sale this week in Hungary are a mixed bag. They offer a glimpse of the iconography of socialism as well as the dissonant results when artists' varying styles were applied to what the communist party deemed appropriate subjects.

On offer was an impressionist-style painting of women working on a television factory assembly line, as well as lush oil paintings of shipyards, railroads and steel mills.

A painting entitled "Soviet-Hungarian Friendship" from 1950, six years before Hungary's unsuccessful revolt against Russian domination in 1956, shows Hungarian peasants relaxing with Soviet soldiers, one of whom holds a submachine gun. Two Soviet tanks idle in the background.

A few of the pieces are by well-known Hungarian artists who, willingly or unwillingly, joined the communist government's propaganda efforts.

The Lenin statue bought by Ms. Szabo was the work of Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl. He was famous in Hungary and the U.K. for his depictions of figures as disparate as George Bernard Shaw and the future Queen Elizabeth.

"We need to take into consideration the experiences of the old times and learn from them, to confront the past and use it cleverly," says Gergely Mikola, 33, the chairman of the British Chamber of Commerce in Hungary. He had his eye on several lots, but was outbid.

At Monday's auction, the Wende Museum of Culver City, Calif., purchased 25 pieces that it termed "significant works" of communist-era Hungarian art.

The museum specializes in visual arts of Cold War Eastern Europe.

"The works are representative of an extinct era in world history," says Justinian Jampol, the museum's executive director.

Sales reached $63,000 on Monday, the first day of the auction. Wednesday's session, which also included non-socialist pieces, raised roughly $96,000, organizers say. The auction concludes Thursday.

Peter Pinter, the owner of the gallery that is handling the auctions for the Hungarian government, believes that many of the items on the block are those that apparatchiks didn't deem good enough to pilfer when the communist system fell apart.

"Since the auction was announced, a lot of people have been calling, saying, 'We have a Lenin, we have a Stalin at home. Will you sell it for us?'" Mr. Pinter says. "Parents most likely kept these pieces due either to nostalgia or because they held a certain value to them.... But children feel that these are just a burden."

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