Monumental artists Yoan Leviev, Hristo Stefanov, Dimitar Kirov, Encho Pironkov and Georgi “Slona” Bozhilov were part of the Plovdiv group of artists. They represented the core of authors who laid the foundations for the establishment of monumental art as a common practice in Bulgarian artistic life. Their similar figurative-plastic explorations, the enduring interest in the challenges of monumental art, the cooperative work, and the personal awareness of belonging to a group, give grounds for considering them as a creative community.

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The formative years of the five artists were in the 1950s, a period when the principles of socialist realism were the ruling norm in Bulgarian art. At the time, Bulgarian artists were isolated from international artistic developments. The norms set by the authorities led to the intense ideologization of artistic production. In order to meet the requirement for high quality content, a ready-made formula of artistic plasticity was introduced into Bulgaria, directly taken from Soviet art. The many similar iconographic schemes in the portraits, the narrative compositions in the thematic paintings, the illustrative storylines, and the dictated optimism of the images are indicative of this. The “thawing” and the sharp turn in cultural policy after the April plenum of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1956 restored the genre balance in art. The aspiration of young artists was to convey their ideas in the most influential way and they naturally turned to large formats with the restored expressive power of color, using complex, thick layers of medium, deformed drawing, and embossed treatment of space.

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At the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, the Plovdiv monumentalists established the field of monumental art as a thriving artistic practice. During this period, the artists set the foundations of the stylistic characteristics of monumental art. Returning to their hometown after graduating from the Academy of Arts in the early 1960s, they established Plovdiv as the center of mural art in our country. During this period, they devoted themselves to experimenting with the possibilities of monumental art. Without the existence of approved procedures for assignment, with the support of Atanas Krastev, the Mayor of Old Plovdiv, they created some of the most stimulating and unconstrained works. What stood out with the group was the general search for renewal of the plastic language of the mural and the establishment of its dominant interaction with architecture.

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Two opposing views on the significance and place of art, which played a significant role in the work of generations of Bulgarian artists, collided during this period—the confrontation of socialist realism and the influence of modernism.

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The culture and art sectors were important tools in this process of re-education and shaping. The education of the working class and the peasants was a priority. That is why works of art had to be straightforward and quick to understand. This ideological training was accompanied by the reeducation of the intelligentsia. The party’s demand was that content and form should be able to inform promptly, to give answers to pre-set topics and issues. It was undesirable that the viewers become involved in a situation in which they might ask themselves existential, philosophical, or any other questions. The task of art was to unite the audience in the same aesthetic and imaginative experience. Painting was especially important in the official pictorial system, because it could be illustrative and narrative—properties that could be used for propaganda and for persuasive and educational purposes. Modernism, on the other hand, was becoming a sign of the triumph over a political and cultural system that needed to be changed. The complex and expansive term formalism was introduced, which would become a particularly reprehensible motive for critique. Thus, the socialist party-state a priori defined the concept of culture with strictly determined and guarded parameters. This culture had a testamentary character, and the role of the artist allowed him to fit only into the imposed framework in order to illustrate certain ideas and concepts. The course of artistic practice however, turned out to be a complex, flexible and ambivalent process, difficult to define in advance.

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The specificity of monumental art as a form of artistic activity is associated with the recognizability and the notional quality of the image. The requirement for pictorial credibility stemed from these murals’ orientation towards a wide audience. Added to this was their function as a means of promoting certain ideas arising from the pursuits of the patron entity. The Plovdiv monumentalists categorically declared their creative presence and developed a conception aimed at the adoption of means of expression, independent of the imposed thematic agenda of the patron. They renewed the plastic form with a type of modeling in which the mural was an active factor in communication with the architectural environment. The stylistics of the visual appearance of their mural works embodied the moral stance of the epoch, in combination with the authors’ creative and existential outlook. At the cost of a compromise to fulfill the commissions set by the patron, the Plovdiv monumentalists achieved their goals: to awaken free associations, to overcome plain reproduction of visible reality and at the same time to follow the way officially legitimized by the government to realize their inherent creative urge.

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Secular monumental art reached its apogee in our country in the period from the late 1960s to 1989. In the years since, the period of democratic transition affected both directly and indirectly the processes in this field of art. SCFAAA functioned until 1992. The state, the sole patron up to that time, ceased to play a leading role as a financial engine in artistic life—replaced by private interest embodied in the form of the investor.

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With the coming of the new political era, monumental painting declined. Its status as official state-supported art began to disintegrate progressively, and the institutional mechanisms of commissioning and reimbursement disappeared. Due to its axiomatic connection with government commissioning, and hence with state-party power, works of mural art have remained on the periphery of public attention to this day. In Plovdiv, many of the buildings decorated with murals no longer exist, while others are deteriorating. The purpose of some buildings has changed, while others are home to mural artworks that have been deliberately neglected thus erasing the murals’ traces. With the lack of purpose, the mural has ceased to live in a functional environment. The possibility remains to preserve, show and study it as part of the polemical and diverse history of Bulgarian art.

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The word monumental comes from the Latin moneo—reminder. We are confident that the implementation of the project will remind the citizens and guests of the city of this forgotten layer of cultural heritage from the recent past and will preserve the memory of the mural monuments, which no longer exist in our city.