Abstract painters, NS Khrushchev and Igor Vieru’s “donkey”.
Exhausted and irritated after a few hours of viewing, when he got to the works of some “so-called” abstract painters he raged.
His eyes saw only “a scribble devoid of meaning, content and form”, “a pitiful imitation of the decadent formalist art of the bourgeois West”. He blindly pounced on the few painters who had dared to defy the canons of Soviet art. He cursed and threatened them. He asked them to think carefully about why the people were rejecting their “creation”. Mocking their “paintings”, Khrushchev wondered “if they are drawn by a human hand or scrawled by a donkey’s tail”.
After the “pogrom” in Manej, it was emphasized in the Kremlin that the communist ideology had to be kept untainted, and the artists had to be protected from the pestilence of Western decadence. Aesthetic education of all working people had to be in the center of attention.
In Chisinau, a group of painters, including Mihai Grecu, Aurel David, Leonid Grigorascenco, Gleb Sainciuc, Igor Vieru, Filimon Hămuraru, Alexei Grabco, found themselves invited to “a round table” at the “Moldova socialistă” newspaper office. The publication of the Communist Party of Moldavia aimed to put together a collaboration plan with the painters for the year 1963, which was knocking on the door. The meeting ended with a call “to all painters from Moldova” to participate in the noble work of creating an authentic art, “as the party and the working man do not teach”.
The fruits of this exhortation did not take long to appear. On January 1, 1963 “Moldova socialistă” inaugurated a new column “Plocones in images”. Two of the inserted caricatures dealt with the current theme of abstract painters.
If Filimon Hămuraru was not in doubt, firmly lowering the barrier in front of the non-conformists when passing to us, Igor Vieru offers another perspective. His caricature was directly inspired by Khrushchev’s expression about the “scribble” of the donkey’s tail. The master’s brush brought the innocent figure of the donkey right at the entrance in front of the infamous “paintings”. The fine irony of the caricature was that under the mask of the donkey-author, with a little imagination, one can easily guess the physiognomy of the very author of the phrase in question.