page_title: Symbolist movement in Romania
section_title: Birth of Tinerimea Artistică
hierarchical_section_title: Symbolist movement in Romania / Tinerimea Artistică, Symbolism and Art Nouveau / Birth of Tinerimea Artistică
caption_attribution_description: English: Caricature group portrait of the Romanian visual artists who founded the Tinerimea Artistică salon. From left: Arthur Verona, Nicolae Grant, Kimon Loghi, George Demetrescu Mirea, Friedrich Storck, Gheorghe Petraşcu, Ştefan Popescu. Originally published in the satirical magazine Zeflemeaua, March 23, 1903.
context_page_description: The Symbolist movement in Romania, active during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, marked the development of Romanian culture in both literature and visual arts. Bringing the assimilation of France's Symbolism, Decadence and Parnassianism, it promoted a distinctly urban culture, characterized by cosmopolitanism, Francophilia and endorsement of Westernization, and was generally opposed to either rural themes or patriotic displays in art. Like its Western European counterparts, the movement stood for idealism, sentimentalism or exoticism, alongside a noted interest in spirituality and esotericism, covering on its own the ground between local Romanticism and the emerging modernism of the fin de siècle. Despite such unifying traits, Romanian Symbolism was an eclectic, factionalized and often self-contradictory current.
  Originally presided upon by poet and novelist Alexandru Macedonski, founder of Literatorul magazine, the movement sparked much controversy with its stated disregard for established convention.
context_section_description: The same interval brought the first explicit manifestations of Symbolism in local visual arts. The second half of the 1890s witnessed the birth of opposition to academic art under the guidance of Macedonski's associate, poet, political agitator and art patron Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești, who set up an organization based on the French Société des Artistes Indépendants. In 1898, Bogdan-Pitești, together with Ioan Bacalbașa and Ștefan Ciocâlteu, founded Ileana, an international art society dedicated to the promotion of new art currents. The same year, Ileana financed and advertised the arrival to Bucharest of Joséphin Péladan, a French Decadentist writer and Rosicrucian mystic. After 1900, the Ileana group began publishing an eponymous art magazine, the first one of its kind in Romania, but was undecided about which style Romanian art should follow.
  The 1890s saw the worldwide emergence of Art Nouveau as a Symbolist art form, challenging the popularity of Impressionism. The indirect impact of Vienna Secession was major, even outside the realm of visual arts, prompting literary historian Ștefan Cazimir to suggest the existence of a Secession period in local letters during the fin de siècle. Connections with French Symbolist aesthetics were being preserved, in Paris itself, by sculptor, actor and lawyer Constantin Ganesco and, with noted success, by the Greek Romanian painter and printmaker Michel Simonidy. According to the authors of the 1970 overview Pictura românească în imagini ("Illustrated Romanian Painting"), a new Art Nouveau school was born around 1900: "The predilection for Symbolist imagery, for the plant-like ornament, especially the floral one, for the decorative arabesque, for the matte pastel in brushwork techniques, are all [...] stylistic traits characteristic for this visual aesthetics, which was not fully developed in our country, but which was symptomatic in what regards the creation [...] of a new art climate".
  In Romania, the innovating aesthetics were first promoted by means of Tinerimea Artistică society. Created in 1901, it reunited artists familiarized with both France's Art Nouveau scene and the Secession phenomenon. Like Ileana, Tinerimea was still frequented by mainstream conservatives, and, art historian Tom Sandqvist argues, only radicalized itself after 1905—the year when it became home to both the post-Impressionist Camil Ressu and the Secessionist Dimitrie Hârlescu. Overall, art historian Mariana Vida notes, the society was stylistically undecided, but its members tended to display the same Symbolist psychology: "the Symbolist artist is a decadent, swept over by morbidezza and eroticism, persuaded by suffering, despising the bourgeois life. Jewels, shiny stones, exotic flowers [...], perfumes, obscurities and spectral lights emphasize themes that appeal to the senses and a piercing synesthesia." She also argues: "In the case of visual arts, the problem of defining Romanian Symbolism remains up for debate, given the stylistic complexity of this phenomenon, the interferences of Art Nouveau aesthetics and a strong local color, the result of the tastes and mentalities of an area located at the Gates of the Orient."
caption: Some of the Tinerimea Artistică founders, in a caricature by Nicolae Petrescu-Găină (1903)
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