The Walls Behind the Curtain: East European Prison Literature, 1945–1990

About the Artist, Maks Velo

ix The illustrations in this book are the work of the celebrated Albanian artist Maks Velo. Much of Velo’s career has been defined by the years he was forced to spend in the notorious forced labor camp at Spaç. He had already begun an impressive career as an artist and architect when his work was interrupted and he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for deviating from the norms of socialist realism and demonstrating too great an interest in Western avant-garde art. Released after eight years by the terms of an amnesty, he had to wait until the collapse of the Communist regime before he could resume his career. The degrading conditions he had experienced in prison were seared in his memory and eventually given voice in most of the books he has published to date as well as in his creative work as an artist. The most impressive pictorial legacy of his time as a forced laborer in the copper mines at Spaç is a collection of well over one hundred brush and ink drawings. Velo used a number of them as illustrations for his two books of prison camp stories, Palltoja e burgut (The Prison Coat, 1995) and Thesi i burgut (The Prison Sack, 1996). The collection as a whole was exhibited publicly for the first time in Tirana in 1995 under the title Kokëqethja (Shorn Head), and subsequently published as an album under the same title. Velo’s prison illustrations, several of which are reproduced in this book with the artist’s kind permission, powerfully convey the inhumanity he was forced to endure and to which he bore witness as a prisoner at Spaç. Velo’s abstract style heightens their impact. Tormented and twisted figures in a stark landscape often lack limbs and heads or appear yoked by chains or impaled in macabre group portraits. Implements of torture are omnipresent, and a certain predilection for Christian imagery is evident in a number of illustrations with crucifixion motifs. Velo’s contempt for tyranny and dictatorship pervades and animates his work, visual and literary. Authoritarian figures loom menacingly over the collected skulls or bodies of victims. Death abo uT The ar TisT, Mak s Vel o wears the crown as animallike figures with grotesquely monstrous beaks and claws assume the role of jailers or participants in torture. The attenuated figures of Velo’s prison sketches underscore the fragility of the human being hopelessly trapped in the hell of the camps. Velo’s oeuvre embraces more than the Spaç sketches for which he is so well known and admired. A number of oil and acrylic canvases retain the prison camp figures, but there they move playfully through space as if in absurd dance routines. Other works are devoted to Albanian national and folk subjects; one important album consists entirely of images of Mother Teresa. Since his official “exoneration” in 1991, Maks Velo has exhibited his art and architectural designs throughout the globe, including the United States on four separate occasions. In recognition of his championship of human rights and democratic freedoms, in 1992 he became an active member of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. x | about tHE artist Th e Wal l s beh ind Th e Cur Tain ...