Corneliu Baba
Corneliu Baba ( born November 18, 1906 in Craiova, † December 28, 1997 in Bucharest ) was a Romanian painter and one of the foremost portrait artists of his country.
Life
As Corneliu Baba was seven years old, his father Gheorghe, who was a church painter asked him, in his own studio easel. He taught his son to the then strict guidelines Academy in portraiture. Corneliu Baba was interested in except for art passionate for music and literature, he made his Abitur in 1926 and applied for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he initially but fell through. He had his first exhibition together with his father. In 1934 he became a student of Nicolae Tonitza at the University of Iaşi. 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 painted portrait of him Jesus at the entrance gate is very similar to him. This can be on a gemalteten of Baba self-portrait from 1922 seen .. During his time in Oradea he concluded acquaintance with the painters Alfred Macalik, Erno Tibor and Moritz Barat. In 1939 he became an assistant at the Department of Painting of Fine Arts in Iasi, in 1946 professor of painting. Two years later he was briefly arrested and suspended in 1949 without cause, by the lessons. He moved to Bucharest, painted intensive and married a second time. In 1954 he was awarded the " National Prize for Art ", a year later the gold medal at the International Exhibition in Warsaw. In 1956 he participated in the Venice Biennale in part (including the 1948 resulting image " chess player ") and in other exhibitions in Moscow, Leningrad and Prague. Two years later he was appointed professor of painting at the Institute of Fine Arts " Nicolae Grigorescu " in Bucharest. Over the next few years he traveled abroad, participated in numerous exhibitions (including Cairo, London, New Delhi and Beijing) and received other awards, such as the 1962 title " Artist of the People". His first exhibition abroad was in 1964 in Brussels, the first own retrospectives in 1978 in Bucharest, Moscow and Vienna. In 1988, he fell on the steps of his studio, which its mobility was restricted. He died 91 years old and was buried in 1997 at the Bucharest cemetery " Bellu ". Posthumously, he was awarded by the Cultural Foundation of Romania, the "Prix d'excellence ".
Art
Portraits
Baba's focus was portraiture; He painted portraits from 1922 to 1992 and brought it with many design aspects to a major championship in this genus. It was in the course of time become one of the most sought-after portraitists of Romania; many cultural workers were happy for him, including the composer George Enescu, the writer and the singer Mary Tudor Arghezi Tănase. Sustainable fascinated by the possibilities of expression and the inner workings of the human face. Were his images initially arrested tradition strongly aligned to the model, he later tried more represent the moral attitude and inner traits of a person. " Baba's melancholy expressed in his pictures of people often characterized by the expression of melancholy, not as gloom, heartache or Weltschmerz, but as a deep meaning and the highest degree of increased seriousness. "
Harlequins and Crazy King
In his numerous Harlequin images Baba could experiment with color and compositional variations. They allowed multiple motives, joy to sadness, as well as game and ambiguity of existence. His cycle " The Mad King " shows dramatic portraits; there are tragedies of the decline of man.
Society portraits
"Monks ", " farmer ", "Dinner ", " returning from a funeral " and " The Steel Workers ' loud exemplary titles of his paintings, which belong to the genre of society portraits. Baba could not embed from the ideological demands of the time, his famous picture " The Kolchosegründung " (1950 ), which is now in the Museum of History and Art in Bucharest has, impressive and atypical " no proximity to the purely external gestures, or professional superficiality and glorifying poses on Socialist Realism. "In his last phase, he created, in contrast to the previous more still images, with the cycles " Pietà "and" fear " society portraits, the dramatic features have, in which he violence, horror and despair discussed.
Landscapes and still life
Landscapes painted Baba only during the first creative phases. His Venetian landscapes are guided by architectural elements, the orientation of the building in the room. In this time also a number of works of the genus Still Life, which stands out in some works, for example, " Still Life with Chess ", especially the symbolism.
"Painter of the People "
The Romanian writer Tudor Vianu described Baba as a "painter of the people ". Baba himself writes in his memoirs:
- "Art is a spiritual act of creation, which enjoys the status of absolute subjectivity for me. Since then, fifty years have passed, a period in which I myself as well as I could past crept, always trying to contradict the criticism that had attached me the label of Untimely at all fashions and trends, and the mystery of the seven colors of the palette faithful to stay and to go against them no heresy. [ ... ] Despite the events in the middle of my life, I have always held and defended, which I liked and I believed the painting, and, I think, shows a clear tendency to an eternal, nameless human. "