Corneliu Baba

Biography

Baba’s debut at the Bucharest salon in 1948 turned out to be almost disastrous. The painting was called “The Chess Player”, and soon after it was shown the artist was arrested and briefly held in Galata Prison in Iași. A year later he was suspended from teaching in Iași without explanation and moved to Bucharest.

The authorities considered him a formalist.

He was born on 18 November 1906 in Craiova, the son of the painter Gheorghe Baba, and had his first lessons from his father. He then studied briefly at the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest but received no diploma; according to other accounts, in those same years he studied at the faculty of letters and philosophy. His first public exhibition took place in 1934 in the spa town of Băile Herculane. After it he went to Iași to study with Nicolae Tonitza, and in 1938 he graduated from the local school of fine arts. In 1939 he was taken on as an assistant in the chair of painting, and in 1946 he became a professor. He spent the 1940s searching for his own language, at a time when official painting was hardening into neo-academic forms. For a while Baba also painted in the spirit of Socialist Realism, the official Soviet-style doctrine: steelworkers, peasants. But fairly soon he returned to something else. He painted peasants, scenes from the 1907 uprising, and canvases such as “Return from the Fields” (1943) and “Rest in the Field” (1954). He made illustrations for Mihail Sadoveanu’s novel “Mitrea Cocor”. Book illustration did much to keep him afloat: despite a difficult relationship with the authorities, he established himself as an illustrator and as a painter.

The turning point came in the mid-1950s. In 1955 he was allowed to travel to the USSR, and in the same year he won a gold medal at an international exhibition in Warsaw. In 1956 “The Chess Player” and two other paintings of his were shown at the Venice Biennale, and then in Moscow, Leningrad and Prague. In 1958 Baba was appointed professor at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest. Among his pupils were Vladimir Zamfirescu, Niculiță Secrieriu and Ștefan Câlția. In those years he also became an honorary member of the USSR Academy of Arts.

Honours followed one after another. In 1962 he was given the title of People’s Artist of Romania, in 1963 he became a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy, and in 1964 he was elected by the Academy of Arts in East Berlin. Exhibitions were held in Cairo, Helsinki, Vienna and New Delhi; in 1964 he had a solo exhibition in Brussels, and in 1970 in New York. In Romania and, to some extent, in the countries of Eastern Europe he became very well known. He never achieved equal fame in the West.

He is best known for his portraits. Among them are the portrait of Mihail Sadoveanu (1952) and the portrait of the collector Krikor Zambaccian (1957, Zambaccian Museum in Bucharest). He also painted Lucia Sturdza-Bulandra, George Enescu, Tudor Arghezi and the sculptor Ion Irimescu. In his portraits he gave special weight to the hands and, like Rembrandt, prepared them with many sketches of hands and eyes. He himself named El Greco, Rembrandt and Goya as his main influences; traces of Expressionism, Art Nouveau and Impressionism are visible in his work. It seems to me that this loyalty to the Old Masters in the mid-twentieth century irritated the critics most of all: he fitted neither official realism nor Western modernism.

Between the ages of seventy and eighty Baba painted an extensive series of harlequins and “mad kings”. Most of these pictures stayed with him until his death, like Goya’s “black paintings”. Some critics saw in the series a personal reaction to the absurdity of the communist dictatorship. One of the “Fears”, “Fear” (1977–1979), is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest.

In 1988 he was seriously injured in an accident in his studio and was immobilised for several months. After the revolution, in 1990, he was elected a full member of the Romanian Academy. Shortly before his death his memoir, “Notes by an Artist of Eastern Europe”, was published. Corneliu Baba died on 28 December 1997 in Bucharest. The largest collection of his work, more than eighty paintings, was given to the Art Museum in Timișoara by his widow.