During a visit to London last month I headed to the delightfully quirky Horniman Museum at Forest Hill, where curator Fiona Kerlogue gave me a tour of the Revisiting Romania exhibition, on show since October.
The exhibition offers a beautiful display of Romanian folk art, from embroidered sheepskin jackets to the intricately carved distaffs often given to girls by their suitors. But the exhibition, and the origins of the extensive Romanian collection at the Horniman Museum which underpins it, also provide a fascinating insight into the way that the bilateral relationship between our two countries has evolved over the last century or so.
Some of the items on display were collected in the early 20th century by British travellers to Romania. The kind of item which caught their eye as souvenirs included the silk headscarves known as maramă, which provided an exotic adornment to the type of evening dress popular in Britain at the time. There is a decidedly upper crust feel to this part of the exhibition, reflecting the links between British and Romanian aristocracies. On display is, for example, the costume worn by Lady Augusta Monson, accompanying Princess Marie of Edinburgh to her wedding in 1893, a Romanian aristocratic take on village wear.
A second component of the exhibition is the legacy of the cultural diplomacy activities of communist Romania. A couple of exhibitions in London in the early 1950s, jointly organised by the British-Romanian Friendship Society and the Romanian Institute for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, had included some pieces of folk art, but set within an overall focus on modernisation and the fulfilment of the first five-year plan. The left-wing director of the Horniman Museum, Otto Samson, offered to host a further exhibition, more squarely focused on folk art, and the outcome had been that the Romanian authorities had collected an array of material for exhibition at the Horniman in 1957, which had then been gifted to the museum.
The irony of all this, of course, was that Romanian folk art was being displayed in London at a time when many people in Romania were being removed from the countryside for the new industrial complexes. And some of the items on display hint at the way in which folk art was coming to be used during the communist period to evoke an idealised past, while the regime set about destroying the real one. A display of dolls for example, adorned in standardised version of regional costume to represent the different administrative regions of Romania.
The exhibits also demonstrate how folk art continuously evolves, whether in response to changes in technology, politics, or fashion. The collection of ceramics from the town of Horezu which forms part of the 1957 exhibition contains not a single plate or bowl sporting a rooster – now considered the iconic image of ceramics from that town.
A third component of the Revisiting Romania exhibition is modern; a collection of portraits of Romanians living and working in London. The work of photographer Ion Paciu, the project was funded by the Romanian Cultural Institute in London. The richness of experience and range of occupations of the Romanians photographed for the exhibition provides a powerful corrective to the stereotypes portrayed in some sections of the media about Romanian migrants to the UK. There is Ira Merzlichin, a freelance documentary researcher, photographed with a large fresh fish on her lap, as a nod to her roots in the Lipovan fishing community on the Danube. Marius Zmarandescu, a truck driver, who holds up in his tattooed arms the scarf of FC Romania, a football team made up of Romanian expatriates in London. And Sir George Iacobescu, standing in front of a model of Canary Warf, which he has done so much to develop.
The exhibition runs until next September (Ion Paciu’s portrait exhibition until March). There has never been a better time to revisit Romania.