page_title: Symbolist movement in Romania
section_title: Symbolist climate and modern art venues
hierarchical_section_title: Symbolist movement in Romania / Symbolist expansion / Symbolist climate and modern art venues
caption_attribution_description: English: Lux in tenebris lucet ("The Light Shines in the Darkness"), exhibited at the 1909 Tinerimea Artistică Salon.
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 literary mutation was echoed in local modern art, where the currents emerging from post-Impressionism, Synthetism and Fauvism were being slowly acclimatized. This transition was in large part owed to graphic artist Iosif Iser, known for his adversity to Secession art, but also for his contributions to the German Jugend and his borrowings from Art Nouveau cartoonists like Thomas Theodor Heine and Félix Vallotton. In 1908, Iser organized a Bucharest exhibit of works by French-based modernists André Derain, Jean-Louis Forain and Demetrios Galanis. Also famous as the illustrator of Minulescu and Arghezi, he progressively incorporated the newer artistic styles into his personal palette—resulting in what some have called "Iserism". Like many other artists and writers, he frequented Bogdan-Pitești's newly founded Bucharest club or the artists' colony his patron had set up in Colonești.
  According to semiotician Sorin Alexandrescu, there emerged a pattern of anti-Symbolism among Romanian painters, including those who studied with French Symbolist teachers. Alexandrescu writes that Romanian art students were "opaque to both the symbolic substance and the decorative efflorescence that so enthused the Paris of their formative years", only preserving from this environment a love for the "picturesque". Art historians have traditionally placed the moment of rebellion in visual arts in or around 1910, when Tinerimea Artistică finally split into traditionalist-classical Symbolist wing and a modernist one. The period also witnessed the arrival into art criticism of Symbolist poet Theodor Cornel. Although he died a young man in 1911, Cornel is credited with having introduced Romanians to the primitivist and exotic tendencies of post-Impressionism, and to have been among the first authoritative critics in the country to discuss such new phenomena as Cubism or Abstraction, sometimes in competition with the Moldavian Expressionist painter Arthur Segal. This context produced the first works by Romanian primitivists: Cecilia Cuțescu-Storck, Friedrich Storck, Ion Theodorescu-Sion, and, foremost among them, sculptor Constantin Brâncuși.
  Of this group, Brâncuși did not generally follow the Symbolist guidelines, and instead reached international fame with an original semi-abstract modernist style influenced by Romanian folklore. Theodorescu-Sion also discarded all forms of Symbolism by the end of the decade, and incorporated into his art the solid shape painting of Paul Cézanne, while Cuțescu-Storck was still a classical Symbolist in 1910. With draftsman Ary Murnu, she contributed Art Nouveau illustrations to the Tinerimea catalogs. By 1911, Tinerimea had also received into its ranks the painter Theodor Pallady, whose debut works were dominated by Symbolist imagery, but who was later a prominent anti-Symbolist.
  The new generation of Romanian Symbolist artists also included several sculptors who, like Brâncuși, trained with French master Auguste Rodin: Horia Boambă, Teodor Burcă, Anghel Chiciu, Filip Marin, Ion Jalea, Dimitrie Paciurea, Alexandru Severin. Boambă earned a short-lived notoriety with works contrasting delicate figures with rough surfaces, while Marin alternated academic busts with Symbolist statuettes. A poet as well as sculptor, Severin was close to Alexandru Macedonski, with whom he founded Cenaclul Idealist ("The Idealist Club"), also including painters Alexis Macedonski, Leon Alexandru Biju and Dimitrie Mihăilescu. His sculptures, notably exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1908, displayed his interest in the mysterious or expressed his admiration for Rodin. The young Paciurea was mainly adapting Rodin's Impressionist themes to the Romanian historist school, and only later became a truly Symbolist artist.
caption: Ion Theodorescu-Sion, Lux in tenebris lucet, 1909
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