Corneliu Baba

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Corneliu Baba

Corneliu Baba (born November 18, 1906 in Craiova , † December 28, 1997 in Bucharest ) was a Romanian painter and one of the most important portraitists in his country.

Life

When Corneliu Baba was seven years old, his father Gheorghe, who was a church painter, set up his own easel in his studio. He taught his son portrait painting according to the strict requirements of the academy at the time. In addition to art, Corneliu Baba was passionately interested in music and literature, he graduated from high school in 1926 and applied for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he initially failed. He had his first exhibition with his father. In 1934 he became a student of Nicolae Tonitza at the University of Iași . Two years later he married a classmate. In 1938 he was commissioned to design the interior of the Hasas chapel. It is interesting that the image of Jesus he painted at the entrance gate is very similar to him. This can be seen in a self-portrait painted by Baba from 1922. During his time in Oradea he made the acquaintance of the painters Alfred Macalik , Erno Tibor and Moritz Barat. In 1939 he became an assistant at the chair for fine arts painting in Iași, and in 1946 professor of painting. Two years later he was briefly arrested and suspended from classes in 1949 for no reason. He moved to Bucharest, painted intensively and married a second time. In 1954 he received the “State Prize for Art” and a year later the gold medal at the International Exhibition in Warsaw. In 1956 he took part in the Venice Biennale (including the 1948 picture “Chess Player”) and other exhibitions in Moscow, Leningrad and Prague. Two years later he was appointed professor of painting at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest. In the course of the next few years he traveled abroad, participated in numerous exhibitions (including in Cairo, London, New Delhi and Beijing) and received other awards, such as the 1962 title of "People's Artist". His first own exhibition abroad took place in Brussels in 1964, the first own retrospectives in 1978 in Bucharest, Moscow and Vienna. In 1988 he fell on the steps of his studio, which restricted his mobility. He died at the age of 91 and was buried in 1997 in the Bucharest cemetery "Bellu". Posthumously he was awarded the “Prix d'excellence” by the Romanian Cultural Foundation.

art

Portraits

Baba's focus was portrait painting; he painted portraits from 1922 to 1992 and achieved great mastery in this genre with many design aspects. In the course of time he became one of the most sought-after portraitists in Romania; many cultural workers were portrayed by him, including the composer George Enescu , the writer Tudor Arghezi and the singer Maria Tănase . He was fascinated by the possibilities of expression and the inner workings of the human face. While his pictures were initially strongly oriented towards the model in a tradition-bound manner, he later tried to show more the moral attitude and inner traits of a person. "Baba's melancholy is often expressed in his images of man through the expression of melancholy, not as gloom, heartache or weltschmerz, but as profundity and extremely heightened seriousness."

Harlequins and Mad King

In his numerous harlequin pictures, Baba was able to experiment with color and compositional variations. They allowed multiple motives, from joy to sadness as well as play and ambiguity of existence. His cycle “The Crazy King” shows dramatic portraits; they are tragedies of human decline.

Society portraits

"Monks", "Peasants", "Dinner", "Returning from a Funeral" and "The Steel Workers" are examples of the titles of his paintings, which belong to the genre of society portraits. Baba did not allow himself to be drawn into the ideological demands of the time; his well-known picture “The Kolkhoz Foundation” (1950), which is now in the Museum of History and Art in Bucharest, shows impressive and atypical “no proximity to purely external gestures or the professional superficiality and the glorifying poses of socialist realism . "In his last creative phase, in contrast to the previous rather calm pictures, with the cycles" Pietà "and" Angst " , he created portraits of society with dramatic traits in which he used violence, Thematized horror and despair.

Landscapes and Still Life

Baba painted landscapes only in the first creative phases. His Venetian landscapes are guided by architectural elements, by the orientation of the buildings in space. During this time, a number of works of the genre still life were created, whereby in some works, for example "Still Life with Chessboard", the symbolism particularly stands out.

"Painter of Man"

The Romanian writer Tudor Vianu described Baba as a "painter of man". Baba himself wrote in his memoir:

“For me, art is a spiritual act of creation that enjoys the status of absolute subjectivity. Fifty years have passed since then, a period of time in which I slipped past all fashions and developments as best I could, always trying to contradict the criticism that was attached to me as the untimely label and the mystery of the seven colors of the palette to remain faithful and not to make heresy towards them. […] Despite the mid-life events, I have always represented and defended the painting that I liked and believed in, and which, I believe, shows a clear inclination towards an eternal, nameless human. "

Works (selection)

year Image title Art Dimensions abode
1944 Still life with snipe Oil on cardboard 45 × 51.5 cm Moldova Museum, Iași
1948 Chess player Oil on canvas 100 × 93 cm National Art Museum Bucharest
1958 Wild Oil on canvas 80 × 60 cm Brukenthal Museum , Sibiu (Herrmannstadt)
1958 farmers Oil on canvas 183 × 242 cm National Art Museum, Bucharest
1976 Portrait of a woman Oil on canvas 61 × 57 cm New Masters Gallery , Dresden
1980 Author portrait Oil on canvas 110 × 81 cm Uffizi Gallery , Florence
1981 The mad king Oil on canvas 155 × 97 cm National Art Gallery, Sofia

Exhibitions (selection)

literature

  • Corneliu Baba: Corneliu Baba. Ȋnsemnari ale unui pictor din Est (Notes by a Painter from the East). Ed. Fundatia Culturala Româna, Bucharest 1997
  • Camilla Blechen: Painter of Romania. Corneliu Baba died . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , December 31, 1997
  • Helga Fuhrmann (editor): Corneliu Baba . State Art Collections Dresden. Dresden 1981
  • Jutta Hammer: Corneliu Baba . Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1978
  • Hans-Peter Greinke: Corneliu Baba. Painting and graphics . German Academy of the Arts, Berlin 1964
  • Eugen Jacob, Corneliu Baba: Corneliu Baba . Verlag der Kunst VEB, Dresden 1966
  • Günter Rieger (editor): Corneliu Baba. Paintings, sketches and drawings from museums and collections in the GDR . Center for art exhibitions in the GDR. Berlin 1994
  • Pavel Susura: Corneliu Baba, a painter from the East? Parkstone Publishers, London 2001, ISBN 1-85995-746-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gazeta de Sud of November 2, 2005 gds.ro accessed August 26, 2010
  2. ^ Catalog of the Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister , Dresden 1981
  3. ↑ Pavel Susura: Corneliu Baba, a painter from the East? P. 52
  4. ↑ Pavel Susura: Corneliu Baba, a painter from the East? P. 128
  5. ↑ Quoted from: Corneliu Baba: Corneliu Baba. Ȋnsemnari ale unui pictor din Est . Bucharest 1997, translated by Alexandra Richter
personal data
SURNAME Baba, Corneliu
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Romanian painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Craiova
DATE OF DEATH December 28, 1997
Place of death Bucharest