Romanian Painting [antikvár]

By bringing out this book, the Meridiane Publishing House aims to meet a constant and justified desideratum, that of providing a wide category of Romanian and foreign readers with a systematic, concise and yet fairly comprehensive survey of an artistic phenomenon with valuable traditions in Romania. Having its roots in the period when the Romanian feudal states came into exist- ence, and closely depending on the economic, socio-political and cultural flower- ing of these states, painting is the art in which many of the Romanian people's ideals, aspirations and spiritual propensities have found expression. Although restrained in their creative freedom by the medieval spirituality, as materialized in canons and prescriptions, the old painters were more than once interpreters of our struggle for national independence. Such a lofty purport has been ascribed, for instance, to the iconographie programme of the frescoes at the Voronet, Moldovita and Sucevita monasteries — monuments unique for their painted fa- çades that a scholar like André Grabar has compared to "an illustrated book open at all its pages." Later on, around the turn of the 19th century, when essen- tial structural changes had occurred in Romanian society and the germs of the capitalist system had emerged, painting gradually abandoned the Byzantine tradition and adapted to modern life, assuming a lay character and evolving in two main directions : the portrait and the historical scene with an educating function. Academicism and Romanticism were the two poles between which many outstanding talents of the time oscillated until, starting with Nicolae Grigorescu, Romanian painting took a definite course towards a lyric attitude of the artist to reality. Hence, its predilection for landscapes, flowers, still life, and interiors, which afford ample opportunities for asserting the colouristic virtues of the Romanian people, its love of beauty, basic optimism and poetic sensibility — all these being essential features of a specific national character embracing the oeuvre of artists like Andreescu, Luchian, Petrascu, Pallady, Tonitza, Stefan Dimitrescu, Sirató, Ressu, Steriadi, Ghiatá, Dáráscu, Lucián Grigorescu, and others, who reached their full maturity in the inter-war years, when Romanian painting asserted itself with particular vigour. Some of these artists have carried on their work into the post-war period, under the new his- torical conditions, expanding the range of their subjects and taking an increa- sed interest in the significant aspects of present-day life. Of those who started painting before the war, manifesting, already at that time, their stylistic options and their predilection for the problems of man, artists like Ion Tuculescu, Henri Catargi, Catul Bogdan, Aurel Ciupe, Alexandru Ciucurencu, Corneliu Baba, Hans Eder, Stefan Szönyi, Victor Mihailescu-Craiu, Lucia Dem. Balacescu, Micaela Eleutheriade, Margaréta Sterian, and many others now give full measure of their talent : their work, penetrated with an evi- dent spirit of renovation, follows the traditional line of Romanian spirituality. The refreshing of their means of expression by nuanced adjustment to a much enriched content of ideas is closely blended with a considerable broadening of their interests. Thus, many easel painters practise other genres too, such as