Sabin Bălaşa

Sabin Bălaşa (June 17, 1932, Dobriceni - April 1, 2008, Bucharest) was a contemporary Romanian painter. His works are described by himself as belonging to cosmic Romanticism. He was also an author, writer and director of animated painting films.

In 1956 he graduated the Art Academy in Bucharest and he followed the courses of Art Academies from Siena and Perugia – Italy. He naturally started from the traditions of the Romanian art, which he assimilated in a creative way, and studied with interest and fervor the history and mythology of the Romanian people, pledging himself to conjure up a fascinating universe of great expressive power, conveying to the onlooker an impression or a rare strength.

Universe of love

Among Bălaşa's most notable works are several large-scale fresco paintings, which decorate the inside of the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi. The Hall of the Lost Footfalls was painted over a period of 10 years and consists in 18 great wall paintings. Main themes include youth, the history and poetry of the Romanian people.

The Ball of Phantoms

Whether he painted such heroes of the national pantheon as Decebalus, Stephen the Great, Bălcescu or Eminescu, evoked characters of legend, epic or ballad or creates images living beyond time and space, Sabin Bălaşa constantly remains faithful to the most generous and noble human ideals.

Traveler in Time

He had many personal exhibitions in Warsaw (1955), Moscow (1958), Cairo, Alexandria, Damasc (1960-1961), Youth Biennial in Paris (1961), Pescara – Italy (1965), Roma (1966), Orly (1968), Torino, Roma (1969), Tel-Aviv, Yugoslavia, Bulgary, Japan (1970-1972), Conges sur Mer – France (1973), Cuba (1974), Greece, Russia, Finland (1976), Norway, Sweden, USA (1978) and many others. Some of his works are exhibited in many museums and are part of private collections all over the world.

Vision

Between 1966 and 1976 he created and directed 12 animated painting films. He was a member of the Jury at the international festivals of the animation films - Annecy (France - 1973). He has written novels such "The Blue Desert" (1996), "Exodus Toward The Light" (2002).

The Cavalcade

Wedding Traveling in Space

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Hedda Sterne

Hedda Sterne (born August 4, 1910, in Bucharest, Romania), is an artist known for maintaining a stubborn independence from styles and trends, including Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, with which she is often associated.

Hedda Sterne, Life Magazine

Hedda Sterne was born in Bucharest in 1910 as Hedwig Lindenberg. She was the second child with her only sibling, Edouard, who later became a prominent conductor in Paris. Sterne was raised with artistic values from a young age, most notably, her tie to Surrealism, which stemmed from a family friend, Victor Brauner. Sterne was home schooled until age 11. Upon her high school graduation in 1927,at age 17, she attended art classes in Vienna, then had a short attendance at the University of Bucharest studying philosophy and art history before she dropped out to pursue artistic training independently. She spent time traveling, especially to Paris developing her technical skills as both a painter and sculptor. She studied with Fernand Leger and Andreé Lhote, first exhibiting with the Surrealists in Paris (in a group show, the 11th Exposition du Salon des Surindépendants, in Paris in 1938). Hedda Sterne married a childhood friend Frederick Sterne in 1932 when she was 22. In 1941 she escaped a certain death from Nazi encroachment during WWII when she fled to New York to be with her husband Frederick Sterne. In 1944 she remarried Saul Steinberg and became a U.S. citizen. It is not mentioned if she ever had children. She was involved in many shows and exhibits in New York and practiced her art up until she had a stroke that affected her vision and movement when she was 94. She is still alive however unable to follow her passions of drawing.

Machine 5

The year 1941 was a landmark year for Sterne as her move to New York was overshadowed by her inclusion in the Art of This Century exhibition, funded by Peggy Guggenheim. It was here where notable dealer Betty Parsons discovered Sterne’s work and gave her a solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1943 and it was for this exhibition that Sterne first presented her use of circular canvases to create the Tondo Series. These Tondos are mounted on a central axis so the viewer can turn them at will to gain varying perspectives. A pioneer in her use of both medium and form, Sterne used the tondo throughout the balance of her career. Similar to Pollock, Sterne was also recognized for her divergence from using mediums and forms contemporaneous with the times.

Antro II

The theme of Sterne’s works during the 1940’s and 1950’s was essentially machine-based, whether their nature was Surrealist or completely abstract. Some of her works, including New York Apt. #5, 1955, shown here, are part of her New York series. Depicted in this series are "hurtling trains, derricks, and bridges as though they were looming monsters, in an attempt to portray the pace and power of the big city". Both Pollock and his "drip" and Sterne and her spray paint had a unique relationship with their mediums; the precision of their objectives set the terms upon which their deliverance was so successful. Sterne’s use of acrylic spray paint allowed her to echo speed and motion while also discovering that illusion of depth could be achieved without the use of perspective.

Lettuce (1960, ink and acrylic)

It was also during this time period that she became associated with the New York School, and as a result began using more primary and muted colors. As a result Sterne is also well-known for her semi-abstract cityscape, and non-objective paintings with horizontal bands and stripes of color, as shown here.

Profile

When researching Sterne in most art books you will find that she is most famous for being the only woman in a group of rogue artists who were dubbed "The Irascibles". The term was coined to represent the group consisting of 18 prominent artists of their day, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. These artists were also thought to be a part of the New York School as well as Sterne (although she prefers not to be aligned with any artistic group). "The Irascibles" are the artists who signed a letter protesting conservative group-exhibition juries to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950. They were referred to as "The Irascibles" in an article featured in an issue of Life where the infamous Nina Leen photograph was published of all members of "The Irascibles".

The Irascibles, Life Magazine, January 15, 1951

Sterne was primarily interested in the desire for invisibility and abandonment of self, in her work, in exchange for receptivity to her environment. While Sterne constantly changed her styles and techniques, regardless of the positive reviews she received, her resistance to imposing any kind of personal identity upon her work was an idea which contrasted sharply with her contemporaries and a desire which ultimately buried her successes as they came along.

Self-portrait (1938)

Her brilliant mind is ruled by a passion for precision. Discipline characterizes her approach to the painter’s life. Sterne’s work is represented in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan, Museum of Modern Art, Rockefeller Institute, Carnegie Institute, Whitney, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is seldom available.

After Wikipedia, Fine Arts Dealers Association, and other sources.

Victor Brauner

Victor Brauner (June 15, 1903 Piatra Neamţ - March 12, 1966 Paris), Romanian Surrealist painter and sculptor with Jewish roots; his art, obsessed with the real and unreal, and laden with symbolic eroticism, feeds off of ancient mythology as well as popular art.


In 1912 young Victor settled in Vienna with his family for a few years; his father, a passionate devotee of Spiritualism, regularly organized séances and corresponded with the famous mediums of the day. As an observer and participant, young Victor acquired a taste for the fantastic, which his art distinctly reflects. When his family returned to the country in 1914, he continued his studies at the Evangelical school in Brăila, then at the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he painted Cézannesque landscapes. He exhibited paintings in his subsequent expressionist style at his first solo show at the Galerie Mozart in Bucharest in 1924. He went to Paris in 1925 but returned to Bucharest approximately a year later. Brauner helped found the Dadaist review 75 HP in Bucharest and in 1929 was associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist review UNU.


Composition (1929)

Trio
He moved to Paris in 1930 where, through the sculptor Constatin Brâncuşi (a fellow-Romanian), he met the painter Yves Tanguy, who introduced him to other members of the Surrealist movement. The Surrealists were departing not only from the realism and academicism of nineteenth-century art but also from tendencies toward painterly abstraction of the early modernists. Partly under the influence of contemporary psychology, they sought unexpected juxtapositions of sharply depicted figurative images, often recalling the landscapes of dreams. In 1934, André Breton wrote an enthusiastic introduction to the catalogue for Brauner’s first Parisian solo show at the Galerie Pierre. In 1935 Brauner returned to Bucharest, where he remained until 1938.


Self-portrait with a plucked eye (1931)
That year he moved to Paris and painted a number of works featuring distorted human figures with mutilated eyes. Some of these paintings, dated as early as 1931, proved gruesomely prophetic when he lost his own eye in a scuffle in 1938. At the outset of World War II, Brauner fled to the South of France, where he maintained contact with other Surrealists in Marseilles. Later he sought refuge in Switzerland; unable to obtain suitable materials there, he improvised an encaustic from candle wax and developed a graffito technique. Brauner returned to Paris in 1945. He was included in the Exposition internationale du surréalisme at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1947.


Recto: Sans titre (1945)

L'Archechat (1948)
In 1948, after he broke with the Surrealists, Brauner's work was more inspired by relics of archaic and primitive civilizations. Visitors to his studio in the Montmartre section of Paris often commented on his collection of primitive art, which comprised Oceanic cult objects as well as Native American artifacts. Gradually, his imagery became more heraldic, stark, and simplified, often evoking Egyptian or Pre-Columbian art.


Prelude to a Civilization (1954)
Beginning in the early 1960's Brauner lived and worked in Varengeville, France; he represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and in 1966, the year he died in Paris as a result of a prolonged illness.


Téléventre
The epitaph on his tomb from the Montmartre cemetery is a phrase from his notebooks: "Peindre, c'est la vie, la vraie vie, ma vie" ("Painting is life, the real life, my life"). The painter’s notebooks with private notes, which he handed to Max Pol Fouchet, partly enclose the "key" of his creation: "Each painting that I make is projected from the deepest sources of my anxiety..."