Gheorghe Petrașcu

With unbridled passion, he paints landscapes, both in the country (Sinaia, Târgu Ocna, Câmpulung-Muscel), and in France (Vitré, Saint-Malo), Spain (San Martin Bridge in Toledo) and especially in Italy (Venice, Chioggia, Naples).

The artist resists traditional interpretations, in which the landscape of the city on the lagoon was only a pretext to analyze the interference of light vibrations, in eternal change on water, on colored walls and in the pure air.

[2] During the interwar period, Francisc Șirato, Nicolae Tonitza, Nichifor Crainic made significant contributions, followed by George Oprescu, Oscar Walter Cisek, Alexandru Busuioceanu, Petru Comarnescu, Ionel Jianu, Lionello Venturi and Jacques Lassaigne.

The art historian Vasile Florea opined that even today the same appreciations are made by those who study Petrașcu's work, without knowing that they do it by rediscovering certain aspects that others have stated decades before.

In support of this opinion are the synthesis studies and monographs published after 1944 by Ionel Jianu, George Oprescu, Krikor Zambaccian, Tudor Vianu, Aurel Vladimir Diaconu, Eleonora Costescu, Eugen Crăciun and Theodor Enescu.

Without subscribing to the theory of geographical determinism supported by Hyppolyte Taine and Garabet Ibrăileanu, who stated the thesis according to which an artist owes to the space where the main features of his creation were born, one can discern in Gheorghe Petrașcu's works.

"[11] In old age, she was evoked by her cousin Ion Petrovici (probably the primary care physician, not Vasile Florea) who said that she was "... a weak and prematurely bleached old woman, funny almost unwittingly and who liked to hum, taking forced breaks only when he was with the world, so that when he was left alone for a moment, he would instantly resume a fashionable area.

Behind the house was the garden with apples and apricots, to its right the barn, the summer kitchen, the cellar, the stable, and the barn; to her left, at a short distance, flowed the water of Bârlad from which a cool breeze always blew ..."[15] The interior of the house was evoked by the same memorialist who remembered his return to Tecuci in 1887, so "... the wall cushions on the two beds, placed side by side in our room in the middle, the white tulle curtains, the heavy iron box on which the beautiful Turkish rug was laid [..], and in the living room, the same six chairs walnut, lathe, the same two sofas, two mirrors two tables.

In 1970, the museum had a collection of 51 works in oil and graphics approaching all the topics raised by the artist: portraits, landscapes, static natures and even an early painting from the cycle of Interiors.

[40] Through temporal symmetry, in 1907, after Cézanne's death in 1906 and starting from his work, Cubism was inaugurated, a current that had extensive artistic consequences in the history of the arts (Misses of Avignon by Pablo Picasso).

[46] If his relationship with the Académie Julian suffered from a reserved attitude, on the other hand Gheorghe Petrașcu lived in Paris in an atmosphere full of effervescence in the community of Romanians who were there.

O. Iosif, Virgil Cioflec, Sextil Pușcariu, Kimon Loghi and Gheorghe Petrașcu, the new group moved its headquarters from Closerie de Lilas to a cafe in front of Montparnasse station.

I recall the past and see around the marble table the nice faces… Petrașcu with his healthy Moldovan humor, rich in anecdotes and cheerful approaches…"[49] In the last two years in which he stayed intermittently in Paris, to finish his studies, the group of Romanians from Closerie de Lilas broke up, because most of them returned to Romania.

[52] The historian Vasile Florea stated that looking through the prism of the experience he gained, helping Nicolae Petrașcu in editing The Romanian Literature and Art magazine.

[53] Thus, the failure to fully realize the demands of the bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1848, corroborated by the unsatisfactory nature of the reforms of the 1960s, led to the degradation of the peasantry situation, which represented over 90% of the country's population.

[60] An important role for Sămănătorism aesthetics was played by the magazine Literatură şi artă română led by Nicolae Petrașcu, which through ideas, feeling and form made the transition from Junimea to Sămănătorul.

He noticed that in art it manifested itself in a sowing spirit, a reaction to the sweetened and tasteless idyllicness of Nicolae Grigorescu's descendants, as well as an attitude to mortified academism in rigid forms.

[64] Unlike Traian Demetrescu, Ștefan Petică or Iuliu Cezar Săvescu, they were willing "to look at life from a contemplative angle ...; they show aesthetic inclinations, often gratuitous delight, not infrequently hedonistic.

From this point of view I must recognize as masters the Venetian Titian, the Florentines Boticeli and Veronese, the Flemish succulents, the Spanish colorists and of course the Impressionists Renoir, Sisley and Pissaro.

"[68] In the opinion of the historian Vasile Florea, the fact that Petrașcu recognized some artists as masters does not mean that he perceived this attitude as an obedient one and the lesson they gave him as a direct, unassimilated influence.

"[36] As a result of such statements and of the work left to posterity, it is found that Petrașcu had an active attitude regarding the universal artistic heritage, selecting both from the great tradition of painting and from the modern phenomena of his contemporaneity.

[73] As a result of the copies he made, echoes of the influence that Corot, Millet, Goya, Daumier, Courbet, Adolphe Monticelli, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, etc., had on Petrașcu's work can be discerned.

The landscapes' topics were taken throughout life, from a geographical area of a size rarely reached by any other Romanian artist, the number of places found by art historians exceeding seventy.

The critic Vasile Florea considered that this fact is not surprising because in those years, the impressionism in music and plastic art was subsumed to the symbolism that was understood as modernism, as opposed to academicism and traditionalism.

[79] Like Olimp Grigore Ioan was Mihail Dragomirescu who commented and stated that Petrașcu was in fact a direct descendant of the impressionism displayed by Grigorescu at the end of his career and that the sincerity of the impression resulting from his work is limited only to visuality.

[81] Virgil Cioflec mocked the chronicler for these opinions,[82] for which reason in 1908, Dragomirescu returned with a more explicit argument "...Here is a painter whose deeply pictorial vision could take him very far, if he would be haunted beyond measure by the manner of impressionism whose leading representative in our country he is.

The intimate nature of the new style brought by Gheorghe Petrașcu is argued, in the opinion of the art critic Vasile Florea, by the continuous increase of the number of works with still lifes, interiors and flowers.

[86] Those familiar with Petrașcu's artistic career know that he was passionate about Byron at one point,[88] while admiring the works of the romantics Delacroix, Titian, Goya, Diego Velázquez and Rembrandt.

"[88][89] The spell of the moon flooding a world of mysterious shadows is not a setting on which Petrașcu projected his melancholy, as it was for the English Lakers, Mihai Eminescu or for Caspar David Friedrich, Leopardi or Chateaubriand, but it was a propensity for the esoteric symbolist.

That is why the statement is revealing that being haunted by the mystery of black "...Petrașcu sometimes brings the brilliance of the precious color, I don't know how deaf, imperceptible goyish pleasure for the ugly".