[7] Shortly after his 1948 official debut with a painting called The Chess Player at the Art Salon in Bucharest, he was arrested and briefly imprisoned in Galata Prison in Iași.

[9] 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.

[11][12] 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.

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

Perhaps unfashionably for a 20th-century painter, Baba consciously worked in the tradition of the Old Masters,[18] although, from the outset of his studies with his father, he was also influenced by expressionism, Art Nouveau, academicism and "remnants" of Impressionism.

[20] This did not put him in good stead either with the official Socialist realism of the Eastern bloc (where, especially in the early Communist years, he periodically received damning criticism—and sometimes punishment, such as being suspended from teaching—for his "formalism").