Ioan Andreescu

Asked once what he thought of Ioan Andreescu, Nicolae Grigorescu replied: “Andreescu is the greatest artist the country has ever had, myself included. If he had lived, he would undoubtedly have become our great national artist.” (Radu Bogdan, Ion Andreescu, Meridiane Publishing House, 1961).

In 1873, the canvases of the same great Grigorescu, who was to utter these words a few decades later, made a deep impression on the young drawing teacher at the seminary in Buzău and decisively influenced his destiny. Having started out with the modest idea of making a living as a drawing teacher in the provinces, Ioan Andreescu’s inner structure was then resolutely reorganised in order to respond to his artistic vocation. After visiting the exhibition of the Friends of Fine Arts in January 1873 and noticing Grigorescu’s landscapes, which were imbued with the modernity of the French Barbizon School, Andreescu became aware of his talent and decided that he had to paint. Over the next 10 years, his work developed impressively, reaching unimaginable heights that had a profound impact on Romanian art, orienting the creative-artistic act, for the first time, towards a scale of values that placed emotion and expressiveness above surface and academic rigour. Starting with Andreescu, Romanian art will develop its most significant artistic figures, based on the principle of the artist’s freedom to explore his own feelings, creating the conditions for the emergence of peaks such as the works of Ștefan Luchian or Nicolae Tonitza.

The Art Safari exhibition, organised on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the great artist’s birth, undertakes the difficult task of bringing together for the public a significant part of Ioan Andreescu’s most important works, which are scattered in museum and private collections. With a limited known oeuvre of just over 250 paintings, Andreescu is as valuable as he is rare, and a dedicated exhibition is a special opportunity for the public to get to know and deepen their understanding of his remarkable work. Authentic, profound, melancholic, with a harsh, realistic vision of the world, but with an astonishing sensitivity and full of emotion, Ioan Andreescu remains, next to Grigorescu, one of the greatest Romanian artists, and after more than a century his work retains its ability to impress the contemporary viewer.

Major cultural institutions in Romania are joining Art Safari as exhibition partners, lending paintings and graphic works to provide a broader vision of Ioan Andreescu’s oeuvre: The National Museum of Art of Romania, Romanian Academy Library, Brukenthal National Museum, Timișoara National Museum, Constanța Art Museum, “Gavrilă Simion” Eco-Museum Research Institute Tulcea, Arad Museum Complex, Lipova City Museum, “Ion Ionescu-Quintus” Prahova County Art Museum, Bukovina Museum and “Iulian Antonescu” Bacău Museum Complex.

The Ioan Andreescu exhibition at Art Safari provides an exceptional opportunity to see a significant number of the great landscape painter’s surviving works and to consider the artist’s oeuvre as a whole, from his timid early period to the success of his only solo exhibition in 1882, a few months before his death.

Curator: Maria Munteanu
Partners: The National Museum of Art of Romania, Brukenthal National Museum