Nicolae Tonitza

Biography

In August 1916 Tonitza spent five days at the front at Turtucaia. He served in an infantry regiment, was wounded and was taken prisoner by the Bulgarians. The Order of Michael the Brave, third class, was awarded to him in November of that year, when he was already in a camp.

He was born on 13 April 1886 in Bârlad, the eldest of five children. In 1902 he went to Iași, to the National School of Fine Arts, where his teachers were Gheorghe Popovici and Emanoil Bardasare. By some accounts he did not receive a diploma: in his last year he took part in a student strike; he completed the course in 1912. In 1903 he travelled to Italy with a group of archaeology students from the University of Bucharest, and the following summer he painted the walls of a church in the village of Grozești with fellow students. In 1908 he went to Munich and entered the Academy of Fine Arts. There he exhibited, sent cartoons to the magazine Furnica and published his first article on art in the Iași magazine Arta Română. He did not finish in Munich. In the summer of 1909 he visited Italy, then spent two years in Paris, going round the studios and copying well-known paintings. Later he defended the Munich school against the “obscure imitators of Matisse”. After returning in 1911 he lived in Bârlad and Iași, taught drawing, painted church murals in Moldavia and, with Cezar Petrescu, edited the newspaper Iașul. According to the recollections of the collector Krikor Zambaccian, the paper sided with the Conservatives and opposed Romania’s entry into the war. In 1913 Tonitza married Ecaterina Climescu.

He spent his captivity in a camp at Kardzhali, together with the painter Sever Burada and the sculptor Horia Boambă. There he fell ill with malaria and rheumatism, and the illnesses stayed with him for the rest of his life. He returned home in April 1918.

After the war he drew a great deal for left-wing publications: Socialismul, Hiena, Rampa, Clopotul and others. He also wrote articles on culture. He was friends with the writer Gala Galaction, illustrated his book O lume nouă (“A New World”, 1919) and painted his portrait (1920). The preface to Tonitza’s first catalogue (1920) was written by the poet and critic Tudor Arghezi. Among the large works of those years I would single out “Queuing for Bread” (1920), in which the influence of Expressionism is noticeable. Beside it, his graphic work shows traces of Daumier, Käthe Kollwitz and Frans Masereel.

In 1921 he made designs for a ceramics factory and organised an exhibition of ceramics, and then settled at Vălenii de Munte, where by some accounts he lived until 1924. There he painted the work with which his name is associated: children’s faces, flowers, modest scenes in rooms. Zambaccian explained these subjects by the fact that Tonitza was a father; that is hard to verify. The “Tonitza eyes”, large, round and sad, became the recognisable feature of his portraits of children. In 1922 he became editor of the magazine Artele Frumoase, travelled to Transylvania and made friends with the painter Aurel Popp. The same year he came to the defence of Camil Ressu in the scandal over his design for the curtain of the National Theatre in Bucharest. In 1925 a large exhibition of his Vălenii de Munte works opened in Bucharest; critics, Ressu among them, reproached them for a “poster-like” style. Soon afterwards he left the Arta Română society and, with Oscar Han, Francisc Șirato and Ștefan Dimitrescu, founded the Group of Four; by one account this was in 1925, by another in 1926. The group exhibited until 1934; he himself exhibited in Barcelona, Amsterdam and Brussels.

In 1931 Tonitza divided his time between Bucharest and Constanța, where he undertook to paint the walls of the Church of Saint George. He was offended at having to compete with lesser-known artists, but he got the commission and worked on the murals for two years, drifting away from the group. After Dimitrescu’s death in 1933 he took his chair at the Academy of Fine Arts in Iași. He painted his last landscapes around Balchik, in 1933–1934 together with Șirato.

In May 1935 he signed an appeal to strengthen cultural ties between Romania and the USSR, after which a society was created to pursue this. In 1937 he fell seriously ill.

He died in Bucharest in February 1940 and is buried in Ghencea Cemetery.