Art Historical Discourse in Romania, 1919-1947

Art historians in RomaniaReview of:Vlad Toca, Art Historical Discourse in Romania, 1919-1947. Budapest: L'Harmattan, 2011, 206 pages, paperback, ISBN 978-963-236-486-5, euro10.00Matthew RampleyRomania remains one of least known and examined artistic territories. The occasional notable publications only reinforce this situation by virtue of their exceptional status.1 The appearance of a study of art historical writing in interwar Romania is therefore a welcome event. While some Romanian art historians, such as George Oprescu, Virgil Vatasianu and Coriolan Petranu, achieved international recognition, most remain unfamiliar figures. This book thus performs a valuable service in providing an overview of the landscape of art historical scholarship in the new Romania that was created after the end of the First World War, up until the Communist coup of 1947.This book considers how Romanian art historians treated broad themes: 'old' Romanian art (by which the author means art prior to the nineteenth century), 'modern and contemporary' Romanian art (in other words, art after 1800), Romanian folk art and European art.A number of striking themes are apparent. As was the case with many of the emerging states of east central Europe, art history played an important role in the construction of ideas of national identity and self-definition. It is indicative of the political mission of the discipline that the most prominent author of art historical works was not a professional art historian at all, but rather the nationalist politician and prime minister Nicolae Iorga. In Romania the concern with self-definition was particularly fraught inasmuch as the state's location between the symbolic poles of East and West was a much debated and contested issue. The drive to modernisation of the late nineteenth century had led intellectuals to seek parallels with western Europe in order firmly to install Romania in the family of European nations. Equally, however, there was a strong indigenist reaction against 'foreign' influence that sought to stress the native roots of Romanian art and culture as well as exploring its complex relations to Byzantium and the Orthodox cultural world.It is a commonplace that Bucharest was known as the Paris of the East and that its cultural elites looked towards the French capital as an artistic and cultural centre, but this book argues that it was Vienna, rather than Paris, towards which Romanian art historians were drawn. Above all this meant Josef Strzygowski, whose work was invoked both as a methodological model and also, in his advocacy of a revised art historical geography, as a source of legitimation of the value of Romanian art.This debt to Strzygowski laid bare a contradictory attitude amongst Romanian art historians; strident nationalism was often coupled with a craven desire for international acknowledgement. Sympathetic external commentators were pulled into petty local disputes, as in the case of Coriolan Petranu, who disputed the Hungarian presence in Transylvanian art and culture on the basis of often trivial formal features.As the product of a major European culture, Romanian art historical discourse deserves much more attention; while it gives an outline of the field, this study is a start. Much of the discussion is schematic. We are informed, for example, that different art historians wrote significant works, but it would be helpful to know why they were significant or how they contributed to the discipline in Romania. It would have been helpful to look at debates on individual works of art and architecture; given that the book touches on the process of canon formation in the early twentieth century, it needed much more analysis of this including, again, discussion in more precise ways of how the canon was formed, the values and concepts that underlay that, and any debates and differences there may have been over this. This book is written in English, presumably to reach as an audience as possible, but as such, it was important to take into account that most anglophone readers will have minimal knowledge of Romanian art, and that therefore much more needed to be spelled out against a general background of ignorance. …