Return to Romanticism

We grew up after the war. There was hardly anything to be got from the shops. And when something did turn up, it had to be queued for in long lines. Everything was bought on the black market: bread, second-hand shoes and clothes, kitchen utensils... Slowly, life was getting back to normal. When our mother went shopping she took us with her. Among the goods on the black market, among what was necessary for survival, among old military uniforms and sacks of potatoes, bright-coloured paintings or hand painted pictures on pieces of white canvas were hung. They were marvellous... Idyllic landscapes with white and black swans or mighty stags, enormous bouquets of flowers in bulky vases, blue-eyed children exchanging kisses, cats, dogs... What happines it would be if one could have such a picture at home! But our mother never had spare money to buy these...

We grew up and at school clever people taught us that such pictures are petty-bourgeois art and as the future builders of communism we were to disdain such art. When I studied at the university, it was already called by the foreign word, "kitsch", and again we had to feel contempt, this time as "high artists".

Past is the time of the pioneers with red scarves and past is the desire to conquer the Olympus of world art. Childhood left us the memories of caring mothers and worried fathers, of their world of unrealized longing for idyllic life for their blue-eyed, green-eyed, black-eyed and brown-eyed children...