Tyler Collection of Romanian and Modern Art: University of Tasmania
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Folio, inscribed
No full textFolio - handmade by Silvia Radu. Although inscribed as having 14 drawings, there are only 12 present. It also contains handmade birthday cards/notes to Geoffrey Tyler, dated 1983 and 1988. It is most likely Tyler added these items later to the folio for safe-keeping, and this is how they arrived at the university
Gheorghe Saru
No full textGheorghe Saru was a Romanian-American painter and children’s illustrator, born in the South West of Romania on 1st March 1920. He spent the last 20 years of his life in the United States, where he painted up to his last days even though he was declared legally blind. He graduated first in Iasi, then received his Masters of Fine Arts in 1948 at the Academy of Fine Arts, Bucharest; in 1963 he was able to study at the Academia di Belle Arti Pietro Vannuco, Perugia, Italy. Saru studied and first exhibited during the Second World War at a time when Romanian painting was mainly narrative, confined within a restrictive environment for deep analysis and synthesis. At a time when travel outside, and even within, the Iron Curtain was beyond the reach of most people, his works were exhibited in Mexico, France, Spain, Portugal, England, Italy, Switzerland, USA, Denmark, West Germany, Belgium, Holland, Luxemburg, Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, USSR and other countries. He was invited to live and paint abroad twice, first in 1965 in Mexico, then in 1983 in the United States, an invitation extended by the USIA (United States Information Agency).
As a student of a great Romanian artist and pedagogue, Jean Al. Steriade, the young Saru was preoccupied, following the tradition of Francisc Sirato, Stefan Dimitrescu and Dumitru Gheata, by a modern synthesis of motifs from Romanian folk art which “rejected the pleasant picturesque” (Grigorescu, p.7) in favour of a balanced construction. From the sixties onwards he explored experimental and abstract avenues, but remained faithful to the ideas of his youth, dominated by an acute sense of logical construction and complex compositions. He also worked alongside his wife Liana Saru on large tapestries. Saru died in 2003, having been planning to return to Romania, and is buried in New York. His later paintings reflect an inner world emerging from his approach to the reality behind the reality.
Saru’s work illustrates the transition from traditional figurative art - with its emphasis on a descriptive, almost narrative style of representation - to non-figurative, even abstract, art in which “tradition was no longer a landmark, either as a supporting element or as an obstacle. An endeavour to link up with the modern currents of world art often made it necessary to give up some national features, and that price was paid especially by those who developed towards abstract art, conceptual art or objectual art.”[i]
Saru’s meticulous approach to line and colour is similar to that of a portrait painter. He has an ability to visualise transparency and to depict a glowing radiance (e.g. Perla Rosie, Red Pearl, 1979), animating geometric constructions and transforming the figurative quality of Romanian folk art by simplifying his forms, shapes and lines. His work gives the impression of living and developing objects: some of his flowers resemble inflating balloons which are just about to be released. His careful preoccupation with the ordering of space balances both the visible forms and the anticipatory invisible ones with full control. His pictures are not picturesque, although, in spite of their complex composition, the subjects are recognisable by their stylized vegetal elements (i.e. leaves, stems, corollas), e.g. Flori (Flowers, 1981). Within the shape and colours of these flowers, he dictates their quality and meaning; but at the same time they are framed within a bell jar, both protected and asphyxiated. Unlike Plath’s suicidal heroine, Saru’s flowers seem to attempt to expand beyond the bell jar, inviting the viewer to release them and embrace them. Saru always, but only just, maintains control and keeps the rigorous forms and colours, he controls them by the environment in which they are implanted.
After his trip to Mexico in 1965, when Saru was exposed to Inca and Aztec cultures, his work began to combine elements of Romanian folk and Aztec art. However, Grigorescu claims that Saru’s influence was primarily Romanian rather than Mexican, and he labours this claim almost to the point of obsession. This is perhaps rooted in Grigorescu’s need to conform to establishment requirements: it was desirable for an artist like Saru to be presented as a national artist, not merely anchored in material reality but also in his national identity. Grigorescu draws on vague and nationalistic ideas about Romanian art and employs simplistic clichés to enlist Saru within “a tradition among Romanian painters… who, fathoming foreign cultures, re-evaluated the sense of the national tradition.”[ii] His didactic style comes across even more strikingly in Irina Bojin’s English translation:
“Whoever chanced to see the fabrics and earthenware made in a region spreading north of Rio Grande, from the Navajo and Pueblo settlements in Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico to see the high plateaus of Sierra Madre, could not possibly help being struck by the frequency of familiar ornamental motives and colours belonging to the equally ancient peasant creation of a civilization so remote as that developed in the Carpato-Danubian zone.”[iii]
Petru Comarnescu, quoted in Saru’s 1977 exhibition (the year of the great earthquake in which many of his fellow artists died), offers a more digestible take on the artist:
“Gheorghe Saru suggests in his landscapes of caves, windswept walls, gardens in various seasons, the metamorphoses of substance, the tribulations of geological transformation, the poetry of spaces and seasons, the strangeness of forms, whether real or imaginary.
He paints forms and spaces as if taken from the essence of abstraction, quickening them by means of coloured harmonies and by transforming geometry into a set of transparencies and signs which, in their imaginary representation, respect a poetical order. Through the unreal or fantastic atmosphere of his pictures, a blending of primitiveness and modern refinement, he receives echoes of Aztec art and Klee’s art, yet without breaking the relationship with his native tradition of painting.”[iv]
Similar themes seem to re-emerge between the introductions to these Meridiane monographs, particularly between the ones on Pacea, Gheorghiu, and Saru: a concern with reality, the material world and the importance of the subject; the unity of line and colour; downplaying external influences (e.g. mythology, Mexico, etc.) while emphasising the importance of Romanian folk art; comparison with the greatest international artists (sometimes just suggestive quotes). [Written by Alex Popescu, December 2016]
[i] Florea, p. 144.
[ii] Second page of Irina Bojin’s English translation of Grigorescu’s introduction text, ‘A Painter of Serene Geometries’.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Petru Comarnescu, Five Contemporary Romanian Painters, Catalogue (Memphis, Tennessee: 1967), quoted in ‘Saru ’77: Pictura’, exhibition catalogue (Galerile de Arta ale Municipiului Bucuresti: 1977).
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Georgeta Naparus
No full textThe most well documented and researched monograph in the Tyler collection, based on the editor’s direct interviews with the artist, archival research and press cuttings. There are photo reproductions from various museums.
Georgeta Naparus was born in 1930 in Comarnic, Prahova County, a land of rich culture and ancient traditions dating back thousands of years, and died in Bucharest in 1997. In 1965 she married the painter Octav Grigorescu (1933-1987) and had one son. Her brother, Serban Naparus, still lives in Prahova Valley. Naparus studied painting at the Institute of Fine Arts ‘Nicolae Grigorescu’, Bucharest (1951-1957) under prominent artists such as Corina Lecca, Titina Călugăru, Adina Paula Moscu, and was taught by the painter Rudolf Schweitzer-Cumpăna. She graduated in 1957 with an artwork called Țesătoare de covoare (Carpet Weaver, now lost).
Her formative years coincided with the 1950s, i.e. the ‘obsessive decade’ (obsedantul deceniu), a period characterized by unprecedented abuses from the Soviet authorities which imposed an atheist proletarian culture in post-World War II Romania. After the Red Army’s withdrawal in 1958, she benefited from the de-Stalinisation and relative freeing of Romanian art and culture from the ideological constraints of Socialist Realism in the early 1960s. In the mid-1960s she became more familiar with the masters of Bauhaus modernism, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Their fascination with utopian Communist views, which legitimised their artworks within the Iron Curtain, enabled artists like Naparus in post-Soviet Romania to take up their artistic flow of imagination and cartoonesque sense of simplification and abstraction.
Her playful sense of composition seems to invite the viewer’s imagination to engage in a carnivalesque rhythm of untold stories dormant within her archaic and imaginary world. This playfulness intensifies at the interface between the seriousness and gravity of her themes, which include maternity, historical events, harvests, and the humorous and comic aspects, at times veering towards the grotesque, e.g. Circul (The Circus, 1967), Sperietoare (Scarecrow, 1980) and Caruta cu Paiate (Puppet Cart, 1977). In works like Miniaturi I (Miniatures 1, 1971) and Scena de Familie (Family Scene, 1979), Naparus organises the painting in a gallery-like manner which requires a chronological and ordered examination of faces and silhouettes. These gallery-like compositions have an iconographic resemblance to the Byzantine iconostasis (the painted screen separating the altar and the congregation in Orthodox churches).
Other works such as Bluza pe Fond Rosu (Blouse on Red Background, 1981) and Costum cu Rama Pictata (Costume with Painted Frame, 1976) require a different approach. Her technique here has a holographic nature about it, inviting the eye to come closer, towards the detail, which can thus be explored three dimensionally in its surprising and eventful depth. For Naparus, the painting as first exhibited is not always its final form, because sometimes, months or years later, she would return to her artworks out of a creative impulse, even if just to alter or add a detail, e.g. 1 Mai (1 May, 1971; International Labour Day, celebrating the working class).
Naparus is an artist fully immersed in and developing traditional folk art. This is conveyed not only by her themes or style but also by pictorial details which can trigger ancient narratives, as if told by impromptu storytellers of village mythology. Radu Bogdan writes about her richly coloured series of costumes and shirts:
“Of their double quality as clothing items of daily use – aesthetic and practical – what the costumes and the shirt retain in a painting is only the aesthetic dimension, of course, a dimension which is also suggestive of ancient myths and outlandish worlds; once purified through a sui-generis artistic filter, these outfits and garments appear in her paintings as mere shapes, contours and alterations of drawings and colours which, seen from a distance, remind one of the embroidered blouses and ornamental patterns of the peasant women’s skirts. A ‘victim’ of such optical illusions, a viewer is prepared for recollections of folk arts and traditions, which are so deeply rooted in the artist’s subconscious and in the even more powerful memories of a happy childhood spent in the countryside, among people whose beautifully adorned clothes fascinated her. As the viewer approaches the painting, what had at first looked like a costume or a shirt gradually opens new perspectives and displays more magic little areas, captivating the eye and the mind with endless surprises and enigmas. Hidden and confined within a delicately traced cell, all kinds of figures, personages, objects and symbols can now be identified: trees, butterflies, flowers, animals, masks, medallions, heads from front and profile, nudes, necklaces, clowns, dolls, kings, fairy queens and Prince Charming, town dwellers and peasants, garlands, arabesques, coats of arms – an infinite diversity which, by eliminating the concrete folklore elements, makes up an original world of its own.” (Bogdan, from English translation, pp.61-2)
Naparus’ paintings recall Romanian carpets: her work seems to have a textile feel about it, sometimes looking from the blurry reproductions like tapestries. It is difficult for the art critic to comprehend her work with its telescopic openings into distant and hidden universes, and to formulate value judgements about work which essentially “escapes definitions and classifications” (Bogdan, from English translation, p.61).
“I started to become increasingly interested in working on small surfaces. Perhaps this is because I have seen many pictures which tell you everything from the beginning and which after a first glance do not give you any reason to look contemplate them. I would like viewers to always discover something new in my pictures, to oblige them to return and to give them the opportunity of discovering another “something” every time. I also believe that I have reached a moment of feeling an almost censorial pleasure in colour. Little brushstrokes offer me the possibility of more nuances.” (Naparus, quoted by Bogdan, p.16)
Instead of exploring the depth of her imaginative and individual style, Radu Bogdan plays up the Romanian folk influence and roots it in familiar nationalism: “while deeply committed to pursuing a style of her own, [her work] remains faithful to her roots and their characteristic treasures … the major source of inspiration for one of the most original Romanian painters of today.” (Bogdan, trans. p.62) He conjures up the rather more conventional image of an idyllic happy childhood in the countryside. At times, this stifles her independence and enthusiasm, her strange visions, her dreams. Even her intimate relationship with Christianity is downplayed by Bogdan who sees influence of the church as a historical “monument”, rather than as a living body (Bogdan, p.19).
Bogdan rationalises and adds lucidity to the dreamlike qualities of her art, downplaying the innocent, playful power of her oniric imagery.[i]
“‘Sogni dei pittori’, painters’ dreams, were the names given to grotesque Renaissance works of art; this is precisely because, like in dreams and especially in reverie, the grotesque vision turns the natural order of things upside down and confuses elements which naturally exclude each other.” (Bogdan, p.31)[ii]
At times he is cynical about her lyrical expression, reading undue humour and irony in works such as Puppet Cart, rather than appreciating the joyful and celebratory regression back to happy childhood that it stimulates. Naparus’ art offers the maternal comfort, reassurance and love which enables the viewer to enter into her mysterious world and to recreate that innocent universe of awe and self-discovery through the eyes of the child within. [Written by Alex Popescu, December 2016]
[i] Bogdan quotes Paul Claudel’s distinction between order as “la beauté de la raison” and disorder as “le délice de l’imagination” (p.15). For Bogdan’s assessment of the oniric in Naparus’ art, see p.25.
[ii]In his notes, Bogdan discusses Mihail Bakhtin’s distinction between the Renaissance and Romantic views on the carnivalesque/grotesque (pp.44-5): the former links it to folk culture in public squares, while the latter internalises it from a distance. In both cases, laughter, as an aesthetic attitude, defies natural logic and fosters moral transformation. What in Bogdan’s view is Naparus’ laughter should perhaps rather be taken as a knowing smile.
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Card with an accompanying art work from Corneliu and Mariana Petrescu to Geoffrey Tyler, 1 December 1983
No full textThe accompanying artwork was created by Corneliu Petresc