Famous Romanian Painters - Corneliu Baba

Self-portrait Corneliu Baba 1980

Corneliu Baba (1906-1997) was, first and foremost, a painter of man. For Baba, man is, above all, a physical being, thus, the long evolution of life granted him the suppleness, grace and delicacy, evoked in nudes, then the specifically human plasticity of a woman sleeping with her arms crossed above her head. Relationships between people were often represented by Baba . Another theme frequently approached by Baba is that of groups of peasants or workers, at work or at rest. Few Romanian painters have demonstrated such a profound knowledge of the way of being, of behaving, of grouping together of the villagers, of the nature of the feelings and deep thoughts that dominate them.

The portrait of a peasant, for example, will be the somatic and moral model around which the entire rural world and the entire civilization of the earth in Baba's painting will be built. Although in an individual portrait this peasant appears only in 1950, in one of the artist's great compositions, in Dinner , he is integrated as a character as early as 1942.

Corneliu Baba Dinner (1950)

His face, emptied of any active life, is the testimony of an existence suspended in an irremediable sadness or, perhaps, in an equally deep resignation. Moreover, in all his rural scenes and compositions: Stopover (1949), Rest in the Field (1954), Peasants (1958), Sleep (1962), Earth (1976), as well as in the preparatory sketches, the dominant note is that of recollection and melancholy.

Corneliu Baba Rest in the Field (1954)

Even if the artist gives these compositions a certain sociological coloring , generated from a human experience in which admiration and compassion enter alike, their essence is closer to mythical projection than to revolt, imprecation or denunciation. The connection of man with the earth, the peasant viewed as a being with a certain investiture in the broad ensemble of existence, gives these compositions, through the artistic vision and the moral perspective, the height of ceremonial acts and the monumentality of unrepeatable creations of nature.

The works Peasants and Sleep

Corneliu Baba takes his individual portraiture to the edge of the grave, to where painting and its conventions must be reinvented. In parallel with this portraiture of the individual and the species, placed somewhere between these extremes, the painter also experiments assiduously with social portraiture. The model of this portrait is no longer someone specific, with a precise identity, nor someone who, metonymically, represents the species itself, but the social being, the man integrated into collective norms, both in his individual version and in that of a group, category, even class. The Monks (1942), Portrait of a Peasant (1950), Steelworkers (1960), etc.

Corneliu Baba Steelworkers

The artist often liked to depict himself. But between man's consciousness and his nature, his self-image or the image that was formed in the minds of his fellow men, transmitted or, sometimes, imposed by them, can come between him. Self-portraitists often painted this mask with a kind of self-ironic intention, in which a part of the artist's lucid self-awareness sparkles. The self-portrait becomes a kind of source, an archetypal image for the entire portraiture. The first of them is the source itself, that is, the self-portrait, with its debut in 1922 extending over an interval whose upper limit is 1991. The second variant is a subdivision, a derivative, but one of exceptional scope, namely the portrait with a certain identity, in most cases of great cultural personalities or public figures ( Mihail Sadoveanu, Tudor Arghezi, George Enescu, Lucia Sturdza Bulandra, Maria Tanase, KHZambaccian, Nicolae Tonitza, Mihail Sorbul, etc. ).

Portraits of Sadoveanu, Arghezi and Enescu

In its immediate vicinity are the portraits of members of the artist's family - The Artist's Wife (1953 and 1982), the sketches of the portrait of his father, Gh. Baba (ca.1952), etc.), of people close to him or from his circle of acquaintances ( Portrait of a Young Woman (Elena Hascke ) - 1956; Portrait (Maria Calleya ) - 1982; Portrait (Florica Holban ) - 1983, etc.), or the anonymous one, revealing the vehicle of some psychologies without a specific identity, but generically identified as human presences with an unrepeatable status, saved from the amorphous through artistic consecration - Portrait of a Girl in Pink (1957), Portrait of a Girl (1964), Girl with a Feather (1970), Portrait of a Woman (1976), Spanish Woman (1976), etc. This type of individualized portrait will increasingly move away from the particular model, from the reducible man, tries to capture the moral being, a certain attitude towards life in general, and social life in particular.

Directly derived from the portraiture already mentioned, but raised to the heights of a specific meditation on the human condition is the great suite of Harlequins . A plastic subject with a brilliant career in modern painting, even if we only recall the interest that Picasso gave it, the Harlequin gives Baba the opportunity to confront two great problems that constantly intersect in his work: a plastic one proper and a moral one. As a plastic pretext, he offers an inexhaustible range of chromatic approaches, compositional variants, combination of static, almost hieratic pagination, with the most devilish dynamism of the manipulation of tones and brushwork. From a moral point of view, as a subject of meditation in other words, he represents the absolute model of the ambiguity of existence, of the cohabitation of the playful with the dramatic and of momentary joy with irremediable sadness. In its immediate lineage, detached from any festivity and any free show, stands the immense cycle of the Mad King . Antonym of Harlequin , he represents the other side of humanity, that of drama and degradation.

Corneliu Baba Harlequin

The human dimension is omnipresent in the aspects of his art. Corneliu Baba 's portraits incorporate, under its positive aspects, the function of the mask and the travesty. Thus, one must also understand the repeated inclusion in Baba 's iconographic repertoire of elements of travesty – from the traditional harlequin costume, to a composite theatrical costume with Shakespearean reminiscences – as well as of physiognomic configurations with a mask character, sometimes reminiscent of Brueghel, sometimes expressionist.