He entered literary life in the early 1930s, while enrolled at Nicolae Bălcescu High School; he then attended the University of Bucharest, specializing in aesthetics, but also taking degrees in law and pedagogy.

He only got his break into the mainstream after the anti-fascist coup of August 1944, when he joined the new cultural establishment—he was initially involved with the generic democratic press, including National Liberal Party's Viitorul, and wrote on a variety of topics; with time, he was exclusively employed by communist papers, and had to embrace the core tenets of Socialist Realism.

For a while after 1948, Romania's new communist regime promoted Schileru, assigning him to a publishing company, to the Romanian Academy's library, and finally to the Nicolae Grigorescu Fine Arts Institute.

He was then primarily active as a lecturer and columnist on art and literary topics, drawing both praise, for his innovative approach, and criticism, for his lengthy digressions and lack of academic focus.

[2] In a more detailed report, poet George Astaloș, who had met and befriended Schileru in his later years, recalls being told that Henri, a man of German Jewish extraction, was also a medic and colonel in the Romanian Land Forces, while Maria had been born to a wealthy shepherd from Țara Moților.

[6] His younger friend, the art historian Geo Șerban, notes that he arrived in Bucharest alongside another author, Dolfi Trost, and that both were fleeing the rapidly declining Brăila.

[10] Schileru was reportedly welcomed into the Democratic Students' Front, an anti-fascist group formed around Gogu Rădulescu;[1] through this sort of affiliations, he was an adherent by proxy of the then-illegal Union of Communist Youth (UTC).

[6] The latter organization was a branch of the similarly outlawed PCR—in a 1972 writer Nicolae Dan Fruntelată included Schileru and Virgile Solomonidis on a list of PCR/UTC men who, at some point before 1939, had formed a party cell within the university's Faculty of Letters.

As Balaci recalls, the unit they trained with did not provide them with uniforms; Schileru, as an "indigent boy", begged his commanding officer not to have him perform exercises that would have ruined his suit.

[22] He was also a regular with film and art chronicles Revista Fundațiilor Regale and in George Călinescu's Lumea, where he also produced translations of French works by Benjamin Fondane.

"[9] A version of Lope de Vega's Dog in the Manger, done by Schileru from the Spanish original, was used by the Bucharest Municipal Theater for a 1948 production, with Beate Fredanov and Ion Lucian in the main roles.

[27] Novelist Constantin Țoiu, who was being subjected to ideological "verification" (during which he denied the separate existence of a working-class culture), reports that he was comforted by a group of "valuable Jews", including Schileru, Iosifescu, and Călin.

[31] Journalist and editor Vlaicu Bârna recalls however that, in early 1950, Schileru used the "classics of Marxism" against his former employer Călinescu—advising state publishers to not feature Călinescu's new novel, Bietul Ioanide, since it was ideologically suspect.

[35] Schileru was not prevented from publishing and, in 1954, was reportedly the unsigned contributor to Oprescu's History of Romanian Sculpture—his chapter, covering the more modern contributions, was also the first communist-era work to praise Constantin Brâncuși as an "exceptional talent".

[36] Though Schileru was generally not granted permission to leave Romania during his entire subsequent career (and had to rely on traveling friends to obtain any foreign books),[37] he was able to conserve his position at Grigorescu Institute.

[40] After 1956, George Ivașcu, who was editor at Contemporanul, sought to expand that magazine's coverage of all artistic areas, and offered Schileru a permanent column (he was recruited alongside Vianu, Ion Frunzetti, Ecaterina Oproiu, and D. I.

In 1958, Cesare Zavattini was welcomed in Bucharest; this in turn prompted Schileru and his colleague Florian Potra to openly discuss the merits of neorealism, and to speak of it as a positive influence on Romania's own film school.

[44] He himself continued to be formally attached to Socialist Realism, and, in Contemporanul, spoke of it as the more superior form of modern art, since it could answer the valid questions posed by Existentialism and Neo-expressionism.

His work there received mixed reviews from his literary peers: Sami Damian referred to the column as "competent", though he chided his "overflow of information" and desire to "astound" his readers; Eugen Simion was impressed by Schileru's ability to draw connections between cinema and other arts, but noted that he was "hesitant" in his verdicts, even when it came to panning films that were of dubious quality.

[50] During the liberalization episode that peaked around 1964, Schileru could be seen queuing up for Western magazines that had been vetted be censors, alongside figures such as Cosașu, Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu, Horia Deleanu, and Nicolae Steinhardt.

[23] The same friend notes that Schileru was never alone, but rather integrated within various groups, "from the kids who played in [Romania's] first-ever electric-guitar orchestras to the brilliant young artists, in whose youth he believed as if fascinated by some vital genius".

[51] Scholar Emil Moangă calls the book "penetrating and empathetic", noting that Schileru had placed his subject's style and psychology in their historical context, leading to a larger meditation on the development of chiaroscuro from its sources in the International Gothic.

[54] The art critic always remained in touch with literary life, prefacing translations from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Thomas Mann, Herman Melville, Alberto Moravia and Cesare Pavese.

[2] Schileru himself translated, alone or in collaboration, works by Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, James Hilton, Horace McCoy, Giovanni Germanetto, André Ribard, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Albert Maltz, Richard Sasuly and Tirso de Molina.

[2][55] As reported by Comarnescu, Schileru spent an inordinate amount of time researching local figures such as sculptor Victor Roman and the "mediocre painter" Ion Sima—the latter, only because Sima's wife had "lured" him in with food and drink.

[59] An obituary piece in Scînteia noted: "Gifted with a rare charm, brilliant in his lectures and conferencing, attentive and loving when it came to cultivating young talents, he has had a far-reaching contribution toward shaping new generations of artists and art theorists, over two decades.

[2] The latter was issued from raw text, and was as such incomplete; according to Moangă, it should be praised for its "stylistic clarity" in discussing obscure pictorial techniques, and with its analysis of Impressionism as an intellectual current and a mood (in outlining this thesis, Schileru proposed that Marcel Proust was a literary exponent).

[60] Scrisoarea de dragoste ("Love Letter"), comprising eight of Schileru's essays on various topics,[48] appeared in 1971, also at Meridiane; they were arranged for print by his daughter, Mihaela (or Micaela) Schileru-Chiose, and carried a preface by sociologist Miron Constantinescu.

"[13] With additional input from the works of Norbert Wiener and Max Dvořák, Scrisoarea de dragoste tackled modernist art as "entropy", and therefore as a function of alienation under capitalism.

[6] For a few months in 2009, Bucharest's Dialog Art Gallery hosted an exhibit showcasing Schileru's life and surviving books, alongside portraits done by Corneliu Baba and Henri Mavrodin, and engravings by Mircia Dumitrescu.