Lyceum courses After finishing the high school, Petrașcu had to choose between attending high school in
Bârlad or the real high school in
Brăila, in
Iași or
Bucharest. So, he entered high school in 1889 and graduated in 1892, in his second promotion. In Brăila, as in Tecuci, he was advised to follow the path of painting. In his cousin's library, Dr. Constantin Petrașcu, he found
La Grande Encyclopédie,
Revue Bleue (Revue politique et littéraire),
Revue des deux Mondes,
La Revue scientifique and many Romanian magazines such as
Convorbiri literare. Access to culture was, in fact, facilitated by his brother Nicolae. He had been attending Junimea evenings since 1888. He was an intimate of the artistic circles of the time, which included George Demetrescu Mirea, Ioan Georgescu and
Ion Mincu. The three had just arrived from Paris and together with Duiliu Zamfirescu, Barbu Delavrancea and Alexandru Vlahuță founded the Intimal Club Literary Artistic Circle. The students of the School of Fine Arts were also part of the rebels, as evidenced by the report that Stăncescu made to the ministry. In this way, the students became radicalized, following the example of independent artists and a month before the Exhibition of Independent Artists in 1896, several students entered the hall where the works for the jury were gathered and destroyed them. Petrașcu was not part of this group. The artist had as teacher
George Demetrescu Mirea whom he appreciated and brought praiseworthy words "... admirable teacher, leaving all the freedom to his students, but always talking to them about the essential qualities of a good painting". Of the other teachers
"... I listened because that was my nature: to listen to everyone and to do as I felt." As, in those times, the students were not given grades, but only medals and mentions following the works they did, Petrașcu did not obtain any gold or silver medal in all the five years of school. He was always satisfied with the bronze medal and the honorable mentions. Gheorghe Petrașcu did not follow the teachings that the teachers prescribed for him at both the Bucharest and the Parisian schools. Today it is known that Nicolae Grigorescu was never a professor at Belle-Arte. Vasile Florea considered that the artist made this statement because he truly considered himself a disciple of the master from
Câmpina. Grigorescu showed the Romanian painter a lot of friendship, helped him receive a scholarship and was a good friend of Nicolae Petrașcu who wrote him a biography. Grigorescu and Gheorghe had a lasting friendship also due to the meetings in Câmpina,
Agapia or Paris. From the data that
art criticism analyzed up to the level of 1989, it is not clear if Petrașcu would have seen how Nicolae Grigorescu was painting. The historian Vasile Florea expressed the opinion that it was not necessary for the disciple to witness the way Grigorescu painted to consider the latter as a mentor. The reality was that Gheorghe Petrașcu kept Grigorescu with a living admiration for the rest of his life. Admiration was also doubled by imitation, because the disciple was interested in the fresh creation of the mentor that contrasted blatantly with everything that was taught at that time at Belle-Arte in Bucharest. Petrașcu learned much more from Grigorescu than from any of the other Romanian artists.
Nicolae Grigorescu and obtaining a scholarship in Paris In 1898, Gheorghe Petrașcu graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest. As the school results did not allow him to obtain a scholarship abroad, granted through the school, Nicolae Petrașcu asked Nicolae Grigorescu to contribute to such an endeavor. As a result, Grigorescu spoke with
Spiru Haret, who was the Minister of Public Instruction that year, who responded positively to the request. The scholarship that the ministry granted to Petrașcu, of 1200 lei (1898), was part of the Iosif Niculescu fund. Consequently, on 19 November 1898, Gheorghe Petrașcu sent Grigorescu a letter of thanks from Paris, 29 Rue Gay Lussac.
Moment 1900 in Paris In 1900 in the French capital presupposes an in-depth analysis of the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. The triumph of the innovations presented at the
Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1889 had as its first landmark the construction of the
Eiffel Tower, when iron was first introduced in architecture. The second indisputable landmark was the outbreak of
World War I. Artistically, another landmark was the great exhibition of
Paul Cézanne's work opened by art dealer
Ambroise Vollard in 1895. There is no information or trace left to posterity that the painter left in Munich. The power of attraction of Paris has been steadily rising over the years, so that the notoriety which Munich had enjoyed had declined. Munich's vogue had historically been due to the extinction of
Forty-Eighters echoes and the growing assertion of the
Junimea ideology. Exponents of ideological prosperity were
Ioan Slavici,
Mihai Eminescu,
Ion Luca Caragiale,
Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol and many others. The first to change his orientation was
Alexandru Macedonski who lived and wrote in Paris and then
Dimitrie Anghel from 1893 lived enthusiastically "the new religion of symbolism". Petrașcu was preceded in Paris by Theodor Cornel,
Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești, but also by
Ștefan Luchian five years earlier, and even
Theodor Aman,
Ion Andreescu and
George Demetrescu Mirea in ancient times. Others found Petrascu in Paris. Such were Ștefan Popescu,
Ipolit Strâmbulescu, Kimon Loghi, Constantin Artachino,
Eustațiu Stoenescu, Ludovic Bassarab, the engraver Gabriel Popescu and
Dimitrie Serafim. With Serafim, Stoenescu and Artachino, Petrașcu was a colleague at the
Académie Julian.
Student at the Académie Julian Gheorghe Petrașcu attended the Académie Julian, but without much determination. As is well known, he worked at Stefan Luchian in
William-Adolphe Bouguereau's studio. He also had teachers Benjamin-Constant,
Jean-Paul Laurens and
Gabriel Ferrier. The artist did not have much to learn from these representatives of official Parisian art, especially from Bouguereau who was a champion of
academism. In all the evocations that Petrașcu made, he passed very quickly over the years of plastic training. He stated that he went more to drawing classes
Parisian Bohemia 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. He has established connections with most of the writers and artists mentioned above. From their accounts in which his name also appears, there is a moderate manifestation. A participant in the
bohemian movement through the cafes in
Montmartre, Petrașcu did not have any theoretical subtleties like Ștefan Popescu and he was not a passionate interlocutor like Dimitrie Anghel, but he always had a categorical reply. In Paris, Romanians passed by
the Cluny cafes,
La café Vachette,
the Chatelet brasserie,
La Bullier, similar to the
Moulin Rouge in the
Latin Quarter or the Closerie de Lilas. Petrașcu's presence at such meetings was picturesquely evoked by
Sextil Pușcariu together with
Ștefan Octavian Iosif, Dimitrie Anghel, Ștefan Popescu, Ipolit Strâmbulescu and Kimon Loghi:
"...With his tie tied in an artistic bow, you swore that Petrașcu was coming down from Montmartre, if his word, which was answered by the Moldavian, had not betrayed another homeland". The meetings at Closerie de Lilas were not idyllic, even if Pușcariu found a special charm. He acknowledged that due to the fact that the group of Romanians had become too large, with all kinds of people who were not to the liking of others, it was often not possible to achieve a cohesion and an atmosphere characterized by intimacy. Restricting himself to a group of six people: Dimitrie Anghel, Șt. 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. From here, the group then took refuge in Kimon Loghi's studio, where Turcu (nicknamed Loghi) made tea or coffee. At the Turk's studio, social or political events were debated, especially since Ștefan Popescu, who corresponded with
Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea and Dimitrie Anghel had socialist affinities. Also at Turcu, the discussions around arts and literature became exciting. Here he came into contact with
symbolist ideas, considered by some to be decadent.
Paul Verlaine and
Albert Samain as well as the painters of the
Les Nabis group were on everyone's lips. Petrașcu listened and at the end
"he saved a controversy with a loud and pressing word, like the thick lines and pasty colors he used in his canvases." Here, the poems of Ștefan Octavian Iosif and Dimitrie Anghel were recited before they were sent by Petrașcu to
Romania for publication in the magazine
Literatură şi artă română, whose leader was
Nicolae Petrașcu. These meetings were evoked by Iosif and Anghel later under the pseudonym A. Mirea:
"… We lived in Paris, at that time, a group of young people whom the story had gathered and each brought his own special note once a week, in one cafe or another, and we sat on jokes and stories until late. 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…" The last two years in Paris 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. Of course, these were not all those with whom Petrașcu communicated in the French capital. Among the other characters is the art critic Theodor Cornel, named Toma Dumitriu. He spent his childhood in Iasi and was of the same generation as the artist. Also, an important difference is that he did not belong to the category of those from whom Petrașcu came and he always struggled in insurmountable material deficiencies, he constantly living in a lucid poverty. Because of this, he probably chose the pseudonym Tristis, with which he signed the chronicles he wrote for the newspaper Evenimentul. Cornel had been in Paris since 1896 and was a regular at cafes where, as he stated, one could write
"…the history of Romanianism in Paris". It seems that Petrașcu was in a cordial relationship with Cornel because he was supposed to be one of those who collaborated in publishing bilingual magazines Revue franco-roumaine. As it is known, the magazine was founded by Stan Golestan together with Theodor Cornel in 1901, as an exaltation of ''Le cercle d'accier'', an artistic circle founded at the initiative of Cornel in 1899. The circle brought together French painters Gilbert Dupuis, Bernard Naudin, Bouquet and engraver Victor Vibert. 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. Gheorghe would have been interested in Theodor Cornel's publication, because he appears in the editorial team. On the other hand, in the only few issues of the magazine, Petrașcu has no published article. What is certain is that he remained on good terms with Theodor Cornel. A bizarre thing is that Theodor Cornel, although it is known that he attended the workshops of several Romanian artists in Paris, such as
Constantin Brâncuși,
Frederic Storck,
Nicolae Gropeanu,
Cecilia Cuțescu-Storck, it seems that he never visited Petrașcu because only in 1908, writing a chronicle about an exhibition of artistic youth, stated that
"...today I see for the first time the painting of this artist and what a celebration in my soul!..." It is also known that Petrașcu never exhibited at the Official Salon in Paris. He sent two paintings but was not accepted. and also admitted. He exhibited, instead, at exhibitions in Bucharest with paintings made in Paris in 1900, 1903 and later. In 1902, the artist returned to Bucharest forever. == Tendencies and trends ==