070: Art & politics, then and now. Historian and playwright Cristina Bejan chronicles the Criterion Association.
Cristina Bejan’s book about the Criterion Association in Romania is the foundation of our conversation for this episode. The Criterion Association was a modernist progressive cultural circle that operated in the early 1930s (the Romanian equivalent of the Bloomsbury Group). Criterion members discussed wide-ranging topics such as Gandhi, Greta Garbo, Lenin and Mussolini. They also …