Corneliu Baba - Fame

Fame

In 1958 Baba was appointed Professor of Painting at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where Niculiţă Secrieriu and Ștefan Câlția were among his pupils. The same year he received the title of Emeritus Master of Art. By this time, his earlier problems with the communist authorities appear to have been smoothed over. In the next decade, both he and his paintings were to travel the world, participating in exhibitions in places as diverse as Cairo, Helsinki, Vienna, and New Delhi, culminating in a 1964 solo exhibition in Brussels. In 1962, the Romanian government gave him the title of People's Artist; in 1963 he was appointed a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy, and in 1964 was similarly honored by the East Berlin Academy of Fine Art.

Honors and exhibitions continued to accumulate, ranging from a 1970 solo exhibition in New York City to the receipt of a Red Star decoration in 1971. While his name became a household word in Romania and, to a lesser extent, throughout the Eastern bloc, he never achieved comparable fame in the West.

In 1988, Baba was seriously injured by an accident in his studio, and was immobilized for several months. Shortly before his death in 1997, Baba published his memoir, Notes by an Artist of Eastern Europe. He was posthumously awarded the Prize for Excellence by the Romanian Cultural Foundation.

Corneliu Baba appears in the People of influence painting of Chinese artists Zhang An, Li Tiezi, and Dai Dudu.