Art
Perhaps unfashionably for a 20th century painter, Baba consciously worked in the tradition of the Old Masters, although, from the outset of his studies with his father, he was also influenced by expressionism, art nouveau, academicism and "remnants" of impressionism. Baba himself cited El Greco, Rembrandt, and Goya as particularly strong influences. This did not put him in good stead either with the official Socialist realism of the Eastern bloc (where, especially in the early Communist years, he periodically received damning criticism—and sometimes punishment, such as being suspended from teaching—for his "formalism").
Nearly all of Corneliu Baba's work remains in Romania; hardly a major museum in that country is without some of his work. Among his notable works are a 1952 portrait of Mihail Sadoveanu (now in Bucharest's National Art Museum) and a 1957 portrait of Krikor Zambaccian, (now in the Zambaccian Museum, also in Bucharest). One of his few pieces on public display outside of Romania is a rather impressionistic 1977-79 group scene entitled Fear, (one of several in a "Fears" series) in the Szépművészeti Museum in Budapest.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Baba did an extensive series of paintings of Harlequins and "Mad Kings",; most of the latter remained in the artist's personal collection until his death, much as with Francisco Goya and his "black paintings".
Read more about this topic: Corneliu Baba
Famous quotes containing the word art:
“Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
“In contrast to the flux and muddle of life, art is clarity and enduring presence. In the stream of life, few things are perceived clearly because few things stay put. Every mood or emotion is mixed or diluted by contrary and extraneous elements. The clarity of art—the precise evocation of mood in the novel, or of summer twilight in a painting—is like waking to a bright landscape after a long fitful slumber, or the fragrance of chicken soup after a week of head cold.”
—Yi-Fu Tuan (b. 1930)
“May we not assure ourselves that whatever woman’s thought and study shall embrace will thereby receive a new inspiration, that she will save science from materialism, and art from a gross realism; that the “eternal womanly shall lead upward and onward”?”
—Louisa Parsons Hopkins, U.S. scientist and author. As quoted in The Fair Women, ch. 16, by Jeanne Madeline Weimann (1981)