Eustaţiu Stoenescu

Eustaţiu Stoenescu (1884, Craiova - 1957, New York) was a famous Romanian painter.


Self-portrait, 1943
Stoenescu had contact with the painting at 15 yo, when the French painter Leopold Durangel (1828-1898) comes into his parents' house to do a portrait of his mother. After visiting the retrospective exhibition Nicolae Grigorescu, opened in 1897 in Bucharest at the Romanian Athenaeum, he decided irreversibly to follow the same path.


Piazza San Marco
He studied at the Julian Academy and at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris with Jean-Paul Laurens, with whom he collaborated in the execution of the tapestry cartoons and some wall decorations. If the beginning of his career was influenced by Grigorescu, Stoenescu gradually broke away from any influence, building a highly personalized style.


Chimney
Stoenescu painted genre scenes, landscapes, still life, notably through subtle gray tones, but was mainly a virtuous portraitist, by the gift of an exceptionally laconic expression and distant vision, solemn, but not without expressiveness. Stoenescu´s portraits compel recognition, in terms of consummate execution, offhanded touch and spontaneous inspiration. Attentive to psychological details, the painter proved capable to transcribe reality faithfully, to select the essential and subordinate coloristic effects to expressiveness.


Panait Istrati
Painted in a wide range of styles, with an extraordinary verve, his portraits illustrate the talent of a gifted artist, to capture, with no hesitation, and to define clearly the universe of a human face as well as to concentrate, into a single image, the history of a lifetime. In Romania, as well as abroad, he was acknowledged as the artist who made the portraits of different officials, state leaders, members of the aristocracy, of wealthy intellectuals, of fashionable, distinguished ladies. He made them quickly, without endless sessions. He was a virtuoso, a magician of the brush.


Woman in artist's workshop, 1910
Endowed with exceptional qualities and moreover having received a remarkable education, Eustaţiu Stoenescu created an oeuvre, which focused attention on him on three continents: Europe, North America an Asia. Thus, his participation in the great exhibitions of the time or his one-man shows in Paris, Venice, New York, London, Rome, Geneva, Bucharest etc. brought him the unanimous appreciation of experts, critics, the press and the art collectors. Numerous prizes, special honors as well as the purchase of his paintings for great museums and private collections from France, Italy, the USA, Great Britain, Belgium, and Holland etc. established him internationally.


Henrieta Delavrancea-Gibory
As a constant presence in the fashionable circles of the time, Stoenescu had the image of a cosmopolitan character, refined and somewhat arrogant. Painter of great talent, considered one of the greatest portrait painters of the time, Eustaţiu Stoenescu entered into obscurity after the WWII, after his death being almost forgotten.

Aurel Cojan

Aurel Cojan (March 3, 1914, Beceni, Buzau, - December, 2005, Paris) was a renowned Romanian painter and decorative artist.


Between 1932-1934 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he studied under Francisc Sirato and Camil Ressu. Between 1933-1944 he exhibited at the Official Salons, and from 1944 to 1969 at State and Regional Exhibitions. Cojan's first personal exhibition was in 1945, at Hasefer Hall in Bucharest, followed by the exhibitions in 1946 and 1947 at the Romanian Athenaeum and in 1956, 1964 at the Plastic Fund Gallery in Bucharest. He exposed abroad in Prague (1962), Warsaw (1964), in Havana (1966), at the Sao Paolo Biennale (1967).


In 1969 he left the country and never returned to Romania, living in Paris.


Since 1971 he exhibited in France at Comparaisons, Realites Nouvelles, Salons of Villeparisis, Musee de Clermont-Ferrand and various other artistic events, such as Adam Gallery (Paris, 1974), Galleries Chevalier, Raph, Jacques Barbier, Francois Mitaine (Paris, 1978). His most recent solo exhibition were at Alain Margaron Gallery (Paris 1998, 1999), Counterpoint Gallery (Bucharest, 1999), Romanian Cultural Center in Paris (1999), Counterpoint Gallery (Bucharest, 2002). Aurel Cojan has permanent exhibitions at Alain Margaron Gallery in Paris and at Counterpoint Gallery in Bucharest.


In 1966 he was awarded the Prize for painting of the Romanian Artists Union. In 1983 he received the title of Knight of Arts and Letters from the Ministry of Culture of France, recognizing its artistic merits in his adopted homeland. In 1996 he received the prize "Thalens" of the parisian Beaux-Arts Magazine. In 2004, commemorating 90 years of age he was decorated by the President of Romania with the Order of Cultural Merit as Grand Officer and by the Ministry of Culture with the Excellence Award.

Idel Ianchelevici

Idel Ianchelevici (May 5, 1909, Leova — June 28, 1994, Maison-Laffitte) was a Romanian and Belgian sculptor and draughtsman.


Born to Jewish parents in Leova, Bessarabia, he left Romania for Belgium in 1928 to devote himself entirely to his passion for sculpture and drawing. After completing his military service back home, he returned to Liège and registered at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de la Ville, where he was awarded First Prize for statuary art in 1933.


La Cracheuse, 1943, Brussels
The same year, he married Elisabeth Frenay and moved to Brussels. He took part in the design of the Romanian pavilion for the Exposition Internationale Universelle in Brussels in 1935 and went on to hold a variety of exhibitions of his own in Brussels, Tel-Aviv, Paris, Amsterdam and several other cities.



Le plongeur, Liège
1945 was the watershed year: Ianchelevici obtained Belgian citizenship, and his famous statue L'Appel ("The Call") was officially unveiled in La Louvière. 10 years later, Ianchelevici was awarded a grant to work in the Belgian Congo, where he designed three statues intended to supplement the famous Stanley-monument in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) and produced a number of outstanding drawings. He subsequently exhibited his work in countries throughout the world. In 1950, he settled in France, at Maison-Laffitte, where he remained until his death on at the age of 86. A cultural center in the town now bears his name.


Homme assis aux jambes croisées, pencil, 1945
The works of Ianchelevici literally step out of the medium. There is no void, no gap: the composition is entirely dictated by the mass and form of its volume (Paternel). From 1945 onwards, Ianchelevici began sculpting marble and stone - two notoriously difficult materials which require simplification of form. Limbs grew longer and more supple and the themes moved on, taking inspiration from the unformed, girlish figures of his young subjects. The artist's career underwent a major change at this point, as he embarked upon a ceaseless quest for simpler forms and more schematic faces (Eve, 1980). Alongside his sculpting, Ianchelevici never stopped drawing. His drawings are works of art in their own right, and not always sketches for his sculptures. In both disciplines, however, he draws on the same themes and strives for the same simplicity of form. (From Wikipedia. Visit also Le Musée Ianchelevici)

Corneliu Baba

Corneliu Baba (November 18, 1906, Craiova — December 20, 1997) was a great Romanian painter, portraitist, genre painter and an illustrator of books.


Having first studied under his father, the academic painter Gheorghe Baba, he studied the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy (1926-1930) and – paralelly – the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest, but did not receive a degree. His first public exhibition was in 1934 in the spa town of Băile Herculane; this led to his studying later that year under Nicolae Tonitza in Iaşi, finally receiving a diploma in Fine Arts from the faculty at Iaşi in 1938, where he was named assistant to the Chair of Painting in 1939 and a Professor of Painting in 1946.


Shortly after his 1948 official debut with a painting called The Chess Player at the Art Salon in Bucharest, he was arrested and briefly imprisoned in Galata Prison in Iaşi. The following year he was suspended without explanation from his faculty position and moved from Iaşi to Bucharest. Despite an initially uneasy relationship with communist authorities who denounced him as formalist, Baba soon established himself as an illustrator and artist. In 1955 he was allowed to travel to the Soviet Union, and won a Gold Medal in an international exhibition in Warsaw, Poland. In 1956, Baba accompanied The Chess Player and two other paintings showed at the Venice Biennale, after which the paintings traveled on to exhibits in Moscow, Leningrad, and Prague.



His works were present at the main exhibitions in Romania and abroad (Vienna 1954, 1956; the "Non-Abstract Art" exhibition, Tokio 1964; Berlin 1964; New York 1970; Bucharest 1978; Moscow, Vienna, Leningrad, 1979). He was awarded numerous distinctions; he was a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy (1963), of the Art Academy in Berlin (1964), of the "Tommaso Campanella" Academy in Rome (1970), State Prize (1953, 1954), Golden Medal at the Warsaw International Exhibition (1955), Golden Medal at the Leipzig Book Illustration International Exhibition (1960), Prize for Portrait at the International Triennial for Committed Art - Sofia (1973); Honoured Master of Arts (1958), Honorary Member of the USSR Arts Academy (1968), People's Artist of Romania (1962), a.s.o. He was posthumously awarded the Prize for Excellence by the Romanian Cultural Foundation.



The beginnings of Baba’s creation can be defined in relationship with two polarising tendencies that dominated, at the time, the artistic experience. For a decade (1940-1950), while he was searching for his own way, the artist was confronted with the phenomenon of dispersion and of the disappearance of the image on one hand, and that of the freezing language of neo-academic, conventional formulae. Baba went beyond those simplifying contradictions, avoiding to accept either trend in favor of another one in which the presentation of reality and the preocupation for innovation of the means of expression are naturally combined. The solution is based on resorting to the great values of traditional painting which we were used to call "a space of classicism".



Baba cultivated a strong composition that recalls Renaissance and Post-Renaissance rigors. His figurative material is ordered in stable, geometrical structures. Centered, or displayed in pyramidal settings, the force lines of his characters are closing up harmoniously. The diagonals are used so they would not disturb - by their ascending and descending tensions – the balance of the whole. The image was animated on the premises of stability. He used a dynamic system of lights, resembling the ones in the Baroque painting, stressing the most important figures or body elements. Richly colored, his paintings preserve areas of darkness, in a permanent dialogue with the lightened parts, as in the portraits he painted of famous artists such or as in his Venetian and Spanish landscapes – the two geographical areas had fascinated the artist. His reputation which is well established from the Danube to the Yang-Tse, has yet to be fully appreciated in the Western World.