World Painting in the Art Museum of the Socialist Republic of Romania [antikvár]

A museum, as any traveller knows in this century of intense touring, is not (to use the words written in 1826 by one of the first Romanians with European views, if not "the first modern Romanian": Dinicu Golescu) merely "an assemblage of pictures worth regarding." It is that too, of course, but it is much more than that: a nucleus of spiritual irradiation, with a structure of its own. He who has had the privilege of seeing the great museums of the world, ciJtural establishments of long-standing prestige in Europe or America, quite naturally compared with those in East Asia or North Africa, has no doubt understood that, from one gallery to another, it is only the large number of works on view, or their historical significance and aesthetic value, that can determine a visitor's feelings, but also (or, especially) such elements as are of an imponderable, affective nature. Particulary important is the museum's capability to awaken in the visitor's mind something more than a purely sporting or touring interest (as expressed by the words "I did the Hermitage", very much like "I did the Retezat Mountains"), or sheer curiosity, reduced to the recording of novelties, akin to an appetite for the sensational, the uncommon and the gigantic. What actually matters, however, is a collection's capacity to offer itself to the viewer as an organic entity, with its own structure and specific configuration, a peculiar manner of being somehow round, complete, if one may say so — although an art gallery is, by its very nature, of a selective, anthological character, however unintentional the anthology. Vital as a soul it must be, whole in the image of the beings, and revealing to the inward structure of the person who comes to see it. In the heart of the capital of Socialist Romania, occupying a new wing of the Palace of the Republic — in former times a princely, and then a royal, palace — built during the years of people's power, one finds now, among the other galleries of the big Art Museum of the Socialist Republic of Romania, a Foreign Art Gallery, opened on 20 June 1951. Visited by hundreds of thousands of art lovers every year, it is. within the country's museum network, a powerful centre of aesthetic education and cultural propaganda, a nucleus of spiritual radiance. No doubt, the motley public passing in front of the well-aired pictures, roomily and luminously placed in a rational modern museographical arrangement, which is a pleasant surprise particularly to those visitors who have grown used to the great museums (usually suffering from the lack of functional suitability of the sumptuous old historical palaces lodging them, with the untouchable architecture of their interiors), can be thankful for the fact that, housed in a new, specially built and equipped wing of the edifice, this greatest, Romanian art museum has had no such restrictions to struggle with and has unfolded its exhibitional programme with the ease of such organisms as grow naturally in their own medium, free from any sort of constraint. Of course, as the collections gradually increase (and the rate has already become rapid enough), the need • for extension will make itself felt. But at present the twenty-four rooms (some of great capacity).