Born in
Craiova, Taru graduated from the city's
Carol I High School. He first became noted as an artist in the years after
World War II, when he affiliated with the
communists and socialist realists who received official endorsement from the
Romanian Communist Party. Art critic cited his name among young artists who needed affirmation and found it through political compromise, the "hardcore" group "who illustrated, through their attitudes, their iconography and implicit philosophy, the benchmarks, the aspirations and the
utopias of a system that had an imperative need for artists to promote its doctrine and provide it with symbolic credentials." In the context of the
Cold War, Taru became especially known for
stereotypical political cartoons, such as those targeting
Wall Street business or wealthy peasants known as
chiaburi (the equivalent of
kulaks). The latter were especially controversial, since they coincided with the
forced collectivization and the murderous campaign targeting the rural elites. During the 1950s, Taru also created a regularly published comic strip, built around and named after its main character, the
dwarf Barbăcot. The decade coincided with a slump in the history of Romanian comics: while exercising ideological control over the comic strip scene, the authorities reputedly preferred to invest in
animation, viewed as a more effective means of spreading propaganda. In this context, Taru's survived as one of the comic strips most familiar to the general public during communism (alongside those created by
Ion Deak, ,
Puiu Manu, ,
Dumitru Negrea,
Ion Popescu-Gopo, and
Lívia Rusz). Pînzaru-Pim contends that, as a result,
Urzica was among the publications most likely to bypass
communist censorship with
șopârle (lit. "lizards", or pieces subtly criticizing the regime in a seemingly innocent context). One of Taru's cartoons, "mocking the youth for their slavish imitation of Western culture", was highlighted in a secret
CIA report from 1970. An area where Taru's contribution has traditionally been seen as superlative was that of book illustration. According to his entry at the
National Museum of Art, Taru was one of the local artists "who consolidated the prestige of book illustration as an autonomous genre, enriching the concept of 'illustration' with more complex functions than the mere visualization of a literary sequence or a poetic state." Recalling her introduction to the genre as a child, graphic artist Arina Stoenescu lists Taru, alongside Rusz and
Val Munteanu, as one of three most memorable artists to have been associated with the state-run children's book publisher
Editura Ion Creangă. Among the noted drawings produced by Taru in this area were his 14 pieces for a 1959 edition of
Childhood Memories by the 19th century
Romanian literature classic
Ion Creangă, and his illustrations for a 1986 translation of
Miguel de Cervantes'
Don Quixote (the second Romanian edition of the book to feature original illustrations, after the 1976 version by Val Munteanu). ==Estate==