Art in Communist Hungary

Every aspect of life under Soviet influence was diligently controlled, including the artwork that citizens were allowed to create and consume. In Hungary, the Hungarian Communist Party tightly restricted artwork, categorizing every piece of art into 3 groups: supported, tolerated, or forbidden (Fowkes and Fowkes 2018, 373). Artists who created work that fell under the ‘supported’ category were often state-funded art that pushed ideologies and celebrated figures that represented values of Soviet politics. On the other side of the spectrum, artists who created ‘forbidden’ works were punished severely for going against Soviet political rules and values (Hardy and Berlin 2016, 60). In some areas under the Soviet sphere of influence, creation of forbidden artwork was even punishable by death, meaning that producing artwork that conformed to Soviet criteria for accepted artwork was essential not only to sustain the artist financially, but to protect their lives (Hardy and Berlin 2016, 62).  The criteria for these categories, however, were known to be applied extremely unevenly and subjectively. This allowed artists who were deemed ‘acceptable’ by the Hungarian Communist Party, i.e. state-funded artists, to experiment stylistically with their art, while those who were not state-funded had to abide by the Party's rules much more strictly (Fowkes and Fowkes 2018, 374).