Press releases
(05-04-2010)
Author: Gianina Ungureanu-Iovanel, Raluca Bara, "Forbes"
(12-03-2010)
Author: Mihai PLĂMADEALĂ, "Observatorul Cultural"
Doina Pauleanu received the "Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres" distinction (24-07-2008)
Mrs. Doina Pauleanu is an esteemed collaborator of ELITE ART GALLERY. Her work in studying and promoting the Romanian modern painting current known as the Balcic School was of great inspiration for our Gallery in its efforts to establish the “Nowadays Painters in Balcic” project.
On July the 23rd, Doina Pauleanu, PhD, manager of the Art Museum of Constanta, received the distinction “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” from His Excellency Mr. Henri Paul, Ambassador of France in Romania. The event took place at the French Alliance building from Constanta, in front of a small audience. Doina Pauleanu is the first cultural personality in Constanta County to receive this highly esteemed distinction, as an acknowledgement of her cultural merits and contribution to promoting French culture.
The Ambassador of France in Romania, Mr. Henri Paul, provided an overview on Mrs. Pauleanu’s cultural efforts. “It is a moment of great emotion for me, to be presented with the medal “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” by His Excellency the Ambassador, Mr. Henri Paul. I am deeply touched, because this distinction is an official acknowledgement of my admiration that sustained the efforts towards promoting French art. I have always been fascinated with the Romanian modern and contemporary art which was created under the influence of the French spirit. The more I got to know about the great centuries of civilization and culture the more my admiration for this spirit of remarkable refinement, order and beauty strengthened. For so many times, France has been the cultural capital of the European world. When studying the works of Romanian painters one cannot overlook the French cultural environment from which they sprang, and would certainly feel compelled to revisit this mysterious cultural space that shaped their personalities by means of fruitful contact with the peaks of novelty, good taste and modernity which the Parisian visual arts avant-garde had to offer”, said the art critic Doina Pauleanu.
The “Order for Arts and Literature” is an honorary French decoration, presented to those who stand out through their creation in the fields of art and literature or through their contribution to promoting arts and literature in France and worldwide. The medal “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” was created by Raymond Subes and the order itself was established on May, the 2nd, 1957 by the French Ministry of Culture.
This is not the first distinction of this sort to be received by the Romanian art critic. In 2000, the Romanian Ministry of Culture awarded Doina Pauleanu with the distinction of Chevalier of the “Order for Cultural Merit”. The eminent French distinction received recently comes as a reward for “an exercise of admiration for the French art and Romanian painting”, as the art critic confessed. As yet another proof of Mrs. Pauleanu’s great interest in French art, she is currently preparing a bilingual volume, entitled “Brittany in Romanian painting”, a book which will be accompanied by a virtual exhibition.
Source of the article: TELEGRAF, July 24, 2008 http://www.telegrafonline.ro/1216846800/articol/search/60190/doina_pauleanu_a_primit_distinctia_8222chevalier_de_l8217ordre_des_arts_et_des_lettres8220.html
Author: Mirela Stinga, "Telegraful-Constanta"
(20-07-2008)
Author: Cristina Diac, "Jurnalul National"
A WALK ACROSS A CENTURY OF INSPIRATION (16-03-2008)
A bundle of thistles in a transparent pot, near a typewriter and a pipe. A still life, to quote the dull idiom of art albums.
However, the colours and the dynamic distribution of objects, the breakdown of space into ambiguous geometric shapes, the light of a sun-bathed field at summer create a slightly surreal touch. Gellu Naum, Victor Brauner, something in this space conjures up a series of secret correlations. Indeed, Naum could have used a typewriter like that in the painting signed by one of his contemporaries, who happens to me my contemporary as well. Alma Redingler, born in 1924. Alma Redingler, who, in 1946 was awarded the Prize of the Ministry of Fine Arts. Only two years earlier, Naum had published his Corridor of Sleep, including a portrait by Brauner. A bit farther, as if looking through a French window (the famous fenêtres-françaises) I can see a small square, an urban façade with an advertising text written in fonts from bygone days. It reads: “phones”. An inspired hand has confidently drawn a few lines in the semi-busy street from half a century ago, amidst indifferent or curious passer-by. What is certain, yet, is that the she-passer-by used to wear hats adorned with flowers or feathers, whereas gentlemen had canes, gloves and flowers at their buttonholes. Sanda Saramat, Landscape in Bucharest. Sanda Saramat, born in 1927. The surreal game goes on, as the space I have entered is as warm and able to make one dream as the houses of some grandparents who lived their youth in the Inter-War. A hand-wave from Paul Klee whose special geometry emerges from a painting by Yvonne Hasan, a great admirer of the artist and one who walked in his footsteps. Yvonne Hasan, born in 1925. In 1966, Revue Française published a substantial article written by Yvonne Hasan about her contemporary, Victor Brauner. The article is now available on the artist’s blog: www.yvonnehasan.ro. Reassuring, isn’t it?
Further away. Some corner of an orchard that can be only seen in a dream flirting with genius or madness. A painting that belongs to Traian Bradean, born in 1927. Downtown, some of his works are sold for as much as 20.000 EUR, according to Alexandru Mircea, our guide through the infra-real space. Further away, within a closely related conceptual register but taken to extremes, an intense violet, encompassing some bizarre shapes. Ion Pana, born in 1927. “100% abstract painting, our guide adds. Two little girls attended the opening and one of them said that what she saw there was a moustached man who got a flu, while the other one was positive that it was a winged animal” Both Alexandru and I conceded that it was a sort of avant-la-lettre Milka violet. We go on.
A comforting bundle of yellow water lilies allows me to recognize Alma Redingler’s mosaic-like vision. Cranes, barges, forests that initially catch your eye with their stridency but then beguile you and keep you more tightly in a sort of incandescent peace. The chain of paintings ends, as the generous walls can no longer host them. The journey through time, spaces and past lives of princes and princesses of the brush – our contemporaries, as if by magic- reaches its end within the boundaries of 3 D. However, at a spiritual level, a generous spiral persists, with wide loops through the Inter-War, marked by the vivid and masterful testimonies of the ten artists born prior to1930.
We continue the conversation with Alexandru Mir¬cea, our guide, the Program Manager of ELITE ART Club UNESCO (organizer of the exhibition). The exhibition mirrors accurately a certain attitude specific to the art world of the ’20-’50: “With many of these works, one grasps a very interesting feel, which, I would say, is related to a salient feature of modern Romanian fine art (not of contemporary art, still), believes Alexandru Mircea. “To be more specific, behind the classical themes they deal with (still life and landscape, for their most part) one feels that the lesson of modern art was absorbed, with its most salient features: vanguard, abstraction. Just like in paintings dating from the ’20-’50 and kept in collections by museums, behind the obedience of themes much cubism, constructivism, orphism, even a bit of surrealism lie in disguise. To me, this feature seems either a mark of artistic courage or at least one of originality. I think that a large proportion of the value residing in Romanian modern art and in the works included in our exhibition consists of this specific feature. The artists who are present in the in-house gallery, organized within Elite Art’s premises, (until April, 20) are a sort of artistic “bridge” between two important time periods of the late history of Romanian painting. “Their works display an obvious continuity in style and themes with Romanian modern art”. Personally, the feeling this exhibition conveys to me is that it shows how Pallady, Vasile Popescu, Ciucurencu, Petrascu, Michaela Eleutheriade would paint if they worked today. It is this link to the old art that caught the eye of art collectors.”
Another aspect is that the artists who take part in the exhibition lived their adulthood in the fifties, at a time when the political regime was already interfering in all social fields, influencing art too and trying to subordinate it as a propaganda tool. This can be seen in the “choices” of themes and approach that artists made “dating from a time when the only officially approved style guide was that of “socialist realism”. Back then, artists who provided works to the “Salons” painted factories, oil wells, workers, scenes of strike, which they strove to “fill” with as much art as they could. Among these, they sometimes managed to mingle in official exhibitions a portrait, a still life or a landscape, which they painted for themselves and according to personal standards, in the studio”, added Alexandru Mircea.
Author: Eliza DUMITRESCU, "Jurnalul National"
TYING TOGETHER THE THREADS OF A BROKEN TRADITION. ROMANIAN PAINTERS OF TODAY IN BALCIC (04-07-2006)
I had noted the title of an exhibition “Romanian Painters of Today in Balcic”, without paying much attention to it. Another group exhibition, another series of landscape from a part of Dobruja intensely visited by painters and mainly Inter-War artists, I said to myself.
However, the Artist Chases the Chimera
I took a closer look to the concept of “Romanian Painters of Today in Balcic" and saw that things were not as simple as they had seemed. The Inter-War tradition is still exerting a great deal of fascination on people working in the field of fine arts. I could not say whether the artists who work there yearly set off to somehow meet "across trends and time" Satmari, Cecilia Cutescu Storck, Darascu, Steriadi, Ghiata, Tonitza, Theodorescu-Sion, Petrascu, Ipolit Strambu, Kimon Loghi and many others. If questioned, the artists of the day do not state this.
According to Doina Pauleanu, art historian and manager of Constanta Art Museum (lavishly adorned with Inter-War Balcic paintings), Balcic used to be a sort of trend, with each annual salon displaying several landscapes of the area, to the extent that art critics of the day came to exclaim "Again Balcic!". Adrian Silvan-Ionescu, art historian, noted that Balcic played the part of a Southern France substitute to the Romanian painters who had not bathed in the the light of Impressionist at due time. As always, I must add, the European art movement arrived late in Romania. It is true that the Balcic of those times was not a heaven to Romanian Impressionists but somehow opened a page of Impressionism in the works of some Romanian painters, the most important ones, who practised a different kind of art. What took over the entire work of so many Western painters, especially French – and I am referring here to Impressionism- represented a chapter of the work of several Romanian painters. Strange, though, following its reincorporation, Balcic failed to become an attraction to Bulgarian painters. And it has yet to be one, though in the ancillary buildings of the castle there was an art house active for a long while, currently a cultural centre.
In the Quest of a Bygone Balcic
Nowadays, there is almost nothing in Balcic of what we see and know that the bygone Balcic had. Until about 1970 it continued to keep the visible marks of a picturesque, Turkish and Tatar Balcic, stubbornly striving to remain an Isarlac stuck in time. Today, there are few buildings of that time. Bulgarian communism replaced them with the well-known Soviet-like block of flats that exist in Romania too, in several thousands of dismal copies. The hills are the only ones to have remained the same, white, made of limestone, while the springs along which Queen Marie set her castle with a minaret are still flowing, just like in Lucian Blaga’s home village, Lancram.
Besides, Queen Marie herself was the spirit of this settlement of artists that no one but themselves organized, the “sultana” of Tatars being lured here by a painter: Alexandru Satmari. A mundane and artful life swarmed here, but for a very short time: starting from about 1925 until 1940, when part of Southern Dobruja was awarded to Bulgaria. Her traces are to be found, first and foremost, in so many paintings of famous artists, as well as in the diaries of writers, such as that of Mihail Sebastian. (The latter writes there that he used to travel to Balcic by plane.)
The re-discovery of a chimerical Balcic is what EliteArt Club UNESCO aims at, by organizing each year (starting from 2004) an art camp in which the following took part. In 2004: Gabriela Draghici, Ion Draghici, Cristina Ilias, Marilena Murariu (the initiator), Virgiliu Parghel, Luca Puscasu. In 2005: Marcel Chitac, Serbana Dragoescu, Silvia Cambir, Marilena Murariu, Emanoil Mazilu, Minu Movila, Mihai Sarbulescu, Dan Palade, Ilie Boca. Their works can be seen in Constanta Art Museum, where Doina Pauleanu offered them a distinct place.
Romanian Flag in Bulgarian Restaurants
Walking down on the bazaar-alley to the castle ("dvoreta") one is struck by the presence of several Romanian flags, displayed in a few restaurants that invite you in Romanian language to visit them. First thought: and the fuss over the Hungarian flag hanging for a few hours in some town in Transylvania! Besides, the fact itself that Bulgarian authorities allow this Romanian art display in a territory that once belonged to Romania is a sign of friendliness. Or a sign of compatibility between Bulgaria and the EU. Not many others can be seen so often.
The Silver Coast and Painters of Today
Last week, when I reached Balcic together with some fellow-journalists, the third group of the art camp was still on the spot, in the wide gardens of Queen Marie’s castle. They were just completing their mission, so to speak. Those who went to Balcic this year were: Angela Tomaselli, Manolescu Nita Ioan, Ana Ruxandra Ilfoveanu, Felix Lupu, Larisa Astreyn, Mihai Tarus, Tudor Mitroi, Alexandru Andronache. Ms. Mihaela Dragomir, president of Elite Art Club UNESCO stated: "Our wish is that the project grows and are aiming to bring increasingly more of what Balcic used to mean to Inter-War artists." This is, however, impossible: neither Balcic, nor the artist equates to the Inter-War counterpart. What is still possible is to achieve a spiritual re-possession of a space very close to Romania, that was a part of its history for a while and that can generate other art works, of a wholly different nature, as Tudor Mitroi, one of today’s participants in the meeting with the media stated. Tudor Mitroi, an artist interested in maps could apply his obsession on another space, just like those who did not confess it. "By crossing the sea, it is the sky that changes, not the soul”, said Eminescu (I memorized the quotation, so it may not be exact). Thinking of it, the sky of Balcic contributed to so many remarkable art works that a new attempt, prompted by a UNESCO club in conjunction with a travel agency can prove to be beneficial. This autumn, a new exhibition will talk about it more accurately.
Perhaps one day somebody will publish an album bearing this title, an equivalent of that signed by Doina Pauleanu, about Inter-War artists who painted Balcic, very often ignoring the sea and focusing mostly on the picturesque of the houses and human faces or the burning light reflected by the limestone hills from above this album-town, a sobriquet contrived by the very organizer of the new series, ELITE ART Club UNESCO.
Author: Nicolae PRELIPCEANU, "Romania Libera"
