Thursday, February 26, 2009

Another former dictator's Art collection


After Ceausescu visited Pyongyang in North Korea, he decided to rebuild his own capital city. The result was to wipe out much of historic Bucharest to make way for grotesque and gigantic building projects that still spoil the city center, and sycophants kept a virtual army of state-approved artists busy painting portraits of Ceausescu and his wife, thousands of them. These ended up in public buildings and in the various homes of the dictator, who loved to receive as birthday gifts pictures of himself showing how much the Romanian people loved him. Ceausescu constructed a whole building to store these portraits.

-Romania Shrugs Off Reminder of Its Past

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