Concept

Corneliu Baba

Summary
Corneliu Baba (korˈnelju ˈbaba; 18 November 1906, Craiova – 28 December 1997) was a Romanian painter, primarily a portraitist, but also known as a genre painter and an illustrator of books. Having first studied under his father, the academic painter Gheorghe Baba, Baba studied briefly at the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest, but did not receive a degree. His first public exhibition was in 1934 in the spa town of Băile Herculane; this led to his studying later that year under Nicolae Tonitza in Iași, finally receiving a diploma in Fine Arts from the Iași Academy of Fine Arts in 1938, where he was named assistant to the Chair of Painting in 1939 and a Professor of Painting in 1946. 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. The following year he was suspended without explanation from his faculty position and moved from Iași to Bucharest. Despite an initially uneasy relationship with communist authorities who denounced him as formalist, Baba soon established himself as an illustrator and artist. In 1955 he was allowed to travel to the Soviet Union, and won a Gold Medal in an international exhibition in Warsaw, Poland. In 1956, Baba accompanied The Chess Player and two other paintings shown at the Venice Biennale, after which the paintings traveled on to exhibits in Moscow, Leningrad, and Prague. 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. The same year he received the title of Emeritus Master of Art. By this time, his earlier problems with the communist authorities appear to have been smoothed over. In the next decade, both he and his paintings were to travel the world, participating in exhibitions in places as diverse as Cairo, Helsinki, Vienna, and New Delhi, culminating in a 1964 solo exhibition in Brussels.
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.