Octav Băncilă

Biography

In 1907, after the crushing of the peasants’ revolt in Romania, Octav Băncilă began travelling the country, gathering evidence of violence by the authorities. The trip produced a series of twelve paintings, not all of which survive. The best known figure in it is an old peasant with outstretched arms, “Before 1907” (Înainte de 1907). There are canvases of bodies piled up in fields while soldiers look on, and the work “1907”: three ragged peasants running into rifle fire.

He was born in 1872 near Botoșani. Sources disagree on the date: 27 January or 4 February. According to some accounts, the place of birth was the village of Corni, near Botoșani.

At four he was orphaned: his father died in 1876, and the family had by then gone bankrupt. The boy was taken to Iași by his elder sister Sofia and her husband Ioan Nădejde, who edited the socialist-leaning journal “Contemporanul”. He helped sort the print run and carried manuscripts to the printer, and one of his childhood drawings settled his future: Nădejde saw a figure made of corn silk and charcoal in the yard and enrolled him at the Fine Arts School in Iași. He was no more than sixteen, and had not finished secondary school. His teachers are said to have included Gheorghe Panaiteanu-Bardasare, Constantin Stahi and Emanoil Bardasare. He graduated in 1893, winning first prize for the composition “Charity”.

The scholarship promised for study abroad was delayed: the ministry released no money, and in March 1894 Băncilă went to Bucharest to protest. In the autumn he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he studied under Nikolaos Gysis. Whether he graduated is not known. In Munich he was drawn to the realists, above all Franz von Lenbach. The scholarship was cut off and restored by turns, and he came home more than once. He also visited France and Italy.

In 1898 he returned to Iași and served in the army until 1900. It was then that he painted “The Recruit”, the first of many works about soldiers’ lives. He had wanted to open a studio in the centre of the city, but money ran short and he settled on the outskirts. There, in the Cucu market, among Jewish shops and decrepit houses, he found his models: old-clothes dealers, menders, elderly men at prayer. The paintings “The Emigrant” and “A Good Deal” were long discussed in the press. In 1900 he showed more than a hundred works in Iași: oil, watercolour, gouache, pastel, drawings. After 1901 he taught calligraphy and drawing in the city’s primary schools.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 drew him towards socialist circles. He knew Gala Galaction and Paul Bujor. From 1905 workers became one of his themes: “The Worker” and “Worker at Rest”. Later came “The Strikers” (1914) and “The Worker” (1927). There is a Roma series of more than a hundred works, with caravans under blue skies. He never belonged to the Communist Party of Romania, though toward the end of his life he sympathised with communist ideas.

During the First World War Băncilă took part in the pacifist movement, and in 1916 he painted “Peace”. In the same year he was appointed professor at the Fine Arts School in Iași, a post he held until his retirement in 1937. In 1919, with Constantin Ion Parhon and Bujor, he founded the Laborer Party, which soon merged into the Peasants’ Party. In Greater Romania he went on criticising what he saw around him, supported strikes in the Jiu Valley, and used his work to speak out against antisemitic currents. In his later pictures the social edge weakens, and still lifes, landscapes and genre scenes take up more room. Portraits of types, for example “The Old Tailor” (1908) and “The Worker” (1911), are in the National Museum of Art of Romania in Bucharest.

Băncilă died in Bucharest on 3 April 1944. In 1930, in his lifetime, a bust of him was put up in Iași.

Streets in several Romanian towns and the National College of Art in Iași are named after him, and a postage stamp was issued in 1972.