Famous Romanian Painters - Nicolae Tonitza

Self-portrait 1923 - Nicolae Tonitza

"The art of Nicolae Tonitza preserves its integrity and unaltered beauty, expressing a progressive side of Romanian culture." (Șorban, Raul Nicolae Tonitza, Maeștrii artei românești, Ed. Meridiane, Bucharest, 1965, p. 14) In Tonitza (1886-1940) we notice the Dobrogean landscapes, the portraits of clowns, children, young women, the static natures, full of warmth, composed in large plans, following the tender play of light on objects, in vibrant tones. He is considered the interpreter of "luxuriantly colored sadnesses" and of children's eyes. The world he reflects is not festive, but the temperature of the representation, the ardor of poetic transfiguration, the ample intonation invest it with a celebratory fullness.

Nicolae Tonitza's painting remains, beyond the daily turmoil or engagement in contemporary events, a serene one. His artistic vision is outlined in the portraits of children. "Tonitza's eyes", large, round and expressive, look at us today with a nostalgic innocence, with a bitter melancholy.

Little girl - Nicolae Tonitza

The man depicted by Tonitza is the direct expression of a society at a certain political and historical moment. In Tonitza's art, various influences are noticeable in the early canvases: from Daumier (The Chess Players), Manet (Portrait of the Architect D. Mohor), to Toulouse-Lautrec (Man of a New World). The line circumscribes the figures, interprets movement, suggests the expression of the faces, sinuous or interrupted, forms the folds of the clothing. Color becomes for him the sensitive image of an idea, a sign with significance, related to the attitude, thought and emotion of man, which alone give value to art. In Tonitza's work, the theme of the child and childhood found an embodiment with the significance of a symbol.

Child Portrait 1926 - Nicolae Tonitza

The child's face appears to him like a microcosm, which he sometimes examines with a kind of lucid tenderness, and at other times he envelops it protectively, as if to soothe his anxiety. Of the few expressive elements of a child's head, he dwells especially on the eyes. Among these we encounter eyes immersed in the fairy tale proper to age; exhausted, sad, astonished eyes; eyes that look at the "agitation of the world that they fear", eyes that understand nothing, others that seem to know that everything is in vain. The lips, however, are frozen in a mysterious silence.

The Forester's Girl 1924 - Nicolae Tonitza

Also in Tonitza's paintings, the doll motif appears, either integrated as an object in a still life, becoming the very title of the work, or in the portraits of little girls, whose ambiguity is noticeable only when we compare them with some female nude portraits or with some of his drawn portraits.

Scherzzo 1886 - Nicolae Tonitza

The work is characterized, above all by thematic ingenuity, by the chromatic breadth and expressiveness, which, in turn, was necessitated by the arrangement of the compositional space. The glazed aspect, like that of folk pottery, is conveyed by the warm repertoire of the chosen tones, which contrasts, atypically, with the primordiality of black, that (non)color whose conception absorbs all pigmentary light. Black is proposed as the throne of the composition in the form of an African doll, a unique central motif even in the doll cycle that Tonitza conceived in the period 1925-1927. Even if the chosen subject is shocking, Tonitza does not diminish its significance in the economy of the canvas, which he approaches in exactly the institutionalized manner in the case of portraits or still lifes. The predominant chromatic register is again that scenographic canvas, reminiscent of the floral decoration of the “Lăutului”, a source of inspiration declared by Tonitza as the embodiment of the national specifics, reminiscent of the old Romanian barks. In the series of Saltimbanci, the painter manages to “notice in the social content of the mask the hereditary bivalence: for some, a few, entertainment in front of a comic caricature; an intense lyrical-emotional participation on the part of the crowd that identifies in the represented character the human being of the one who represents him” (Șorban, Raul, Nicolae Tonitza, Maeștrii artei românești, Ed. Meridiane, Bucharest, 1965, p. 43-44). The saltimbanci in Tonitza’s work disturbingly reflect the turmoil of his own life that he projects onto the clown’s mask. In the images of the Clown and the Clown Woman, a deep inner feeling is discernible, and the atmosphere of the physiognomies is reflected in the entire ambience of the compositions. The Clown's Face, the third piece of the triptych, starts not from a mask, but from a portrait. The artist directly examines her expression, sees her worry, fatigue, the lack of any illusion imprinted on a face on which, despite her youth, the maturity of sadness and poverty has already settled.

Clown 1925 - Nicolae Tonitza

Tonitza creates an original expression, capable of moving, of a sensibility and a conception that tends to assimilate the way of seeing and feeling of the masses.