Ion Theodorescu-Sion

Background and early life The son of a Romanian Railways brakeman and the peasant-woman Ioana Ursu, Theodorescu-Sion was born in Ianca, Brăila County, and baptized into the Romanian Orthodox Church. On both sides, his family had origins in Transylvania's Apuseni Mountains and the Breadfield, regions at the time still part of Austria-Hungary; by popular account, some were Moți, that is to say ethnic Romanian herders with a distinctly rustic lifestyle. Ion spent his early childhood on the Bărăgan Plain, but grew up into a passionate hiker of the Carpathian Mountains. In 1894, having attended primary and secondary school in the Danube port of Brăila, the boy left for Bucharest to study at the National School of Fine Arts, and graduated in 1897. he traveled to France. Sion consequently enlisted at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, studying under academic masters Jean-Paul Laurens and Luc-Olivier Merson. Sion was rendered enthusiastic by news of the Revolution in Russia, and was thrown out by his conservative patrons. Between 1908 and 1915, the artist, still heavily indebted to the work of Henri Fantin-Latour, was focused on creating Symbolist compositions with trees. As he took more risks in his experimentation, he began looking to Cubist Georges Braque for a new way of arranging still lifes. Symbolist movement and Balcic colony Sion was received into the innovative and eclectic society Tinerimea Artistică|, as one of its Symbolist recruits, in 1909, and shortly after exhibited his religious-themed portrait '''' (). In tandem, he began hiking through the Carpathian and rural regions of Transylvania. His paintings record a growing interest in lives of its peasant inhabitants (and thus in his own peasant roots), with focus on the Romanian-inhabited areas of Apuseni, Breadfield or Mărginimea Sibiului. Culturally, Theodorescu-Sion also affiliated with a new wave of Romanian artists, who used simple forms, bold colors and clear contours to illustrate mystically charged subjects. Alongside Sion, this group has been said to include Cecilia Cuțescu-Storck, Friedrich Storck and Iosif Iser, followed later by Rodica Maniu and Francisc Șirato. Literary historian George Călinescu describes this moment as having generated "calligraphic painting": "shaped by the contours and by the invention of ceremonial attitudes", and "most often stripped down to the drawing." or with the minor Symbolists Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești, N. D. Cocea and Theodor Cornel. Theodorescu-Sion's first moment in the spotlight was in 1910, at the '''' collective art show, which shocked the public and the academic authors. The group, joined by sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, found itself marginalized inside the exhibit, but received support in the Symbolist press. Building on the conclusions of other researchers, such as Theodor Enescu, literary historian Paul Cernat sees in this movement, called "anti-academic post-impressionism", Romania's first departure from picturesque salon art, as well as a Romanian version of the Armory Show phenomenon. Sion was still regularly present at later Tinerimea salons. In 1912, he was extremely radical, allowing critics of the day to regard him as the prototype Romanian "Futurist" (an expression of shocking newness, rather than an actual affiliation with the Futurist current). In 1913, his featured paintings included a rendition of the Crucifixion and melancholic depictions of solitary shepherds. A year later, he had a personal exhibit (his first-ever) Shortly after the Second Balkan War of 1913, a Romanian administration took over in Southern Dobruja, and the region became of interest to Romanian artists. Balcic (Balchik), once a promising port of export, declined economically, but its vistas and its exotic Muslim inhabitants made it a popular summertime resort and artists' colony. Theodorescu-Sion joined this phenomenon at its earliest stage, and was, with Ressu, Iser, Cuțescu-Storck and others, a "founding member" of the Balcic painters' community. Zambaccian remembered Sion as a talented but peculiar and vindictive artist, who posed as artistic mentor but could not stand actual competition. Co-opted as a teacher at the National School of Fine Arts, Theodorescu-Sion was also one of the founding members of the Artists' Society, a leading Romanian professional association. After the Romanian authorities returned to Bucharest, Sion's work was featured in the Franklin Hall salon organized by Minerva Publishers (1919). He still flirted with socialism, and, as noted by journalist Tudor Teodorescu-Braniște, helped out in the 1920 funeral ceremony of Marxist theorist Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea: "The great old man [...] was being laid down on a bier that a group of socialist painters, headed by Teodorescu Sion, had previously wrapped in red fabric." His wartime conduct and artistic merits resulted in formal recognition, and he was granted high honors—the Order of the Crown (as Officer) and Bene Merenti Medal, both in 1923. During the interwar period, in addition to Tinerimea and Arta Română salons, Theodorescu-Sion exhibited his work at the Atheneum, the Universul newspaper art show, Dalles Gallery and various other venues. Briefly, their plans earned official support during the interval when Victor Eftimiu, a Symbolist playwright and rich art collector, was Minister of Culture and the Arts. In the early interwar years, Sion was also one of the art experts employed in the authentication of paintings by the Romanian classic Nicolae Grigorescu. File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Cercetas.jpg|'''' ("Scout", 1917) File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - La Mărăşeşti.jpg|'''' ("In Mărășești", 1919) File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Piatra Craiului.jpg|'''' (1920) File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Casa taraneasca din Curtea de Arges.jpg|'''' ("Peasant Home in Curtea de Argeș", 1922) File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Miorita.jpg|'''' (1923) File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Portret Lola Schmierer Roth.jpg|''''|alt=Lola Schmierer Roth Gândirea years The 1920s were a new period of synthesis in Theodorescu-Sion's life, as he became the artistic exponent of a neo-traditionalist movement centered on Gândirea magazine. Welcomed there by art columnist Oscar Walter Cisek, and later by editor in chief Nichifor Crainic, he provided illustrations to 1923's Satul meu ("My Village"), by Gândirist poet laureate Ion Pillat. The painter looked favorably to Gândireas quest for a new national specificity in art, or "Romanianism". The authors of a 1970 retrospective, published with Editura Meridiane, describe the period as follows: "From very different perspectives, the magazines Viața Românească and Gândirea [...] militated for the creation of artworks inspired from the Romanian reality; and if, at a later date, Gândirism would bear the imprint of exacerbated nationalism, as one of the carriers for the far right ideology, it is no less true that, in its beginnings, the magazine defined its aesthetic credo by balancing it against art's necessity of expressing a national reality." In an interview with author Felix Aderca, Sion claimed: "The artistic feeling of Romanianism is separated from those of other peoples by a special sensitivity. Discretion applied to delicacy, harmony in a subdued chromatic. All things in union, calm and clear like a midsummer's afternoon." She believes that Sion's passion for depicting shepherds on their seasonal treks, or transhumance, is a symbol for Greater Romania as people meeting over pastures. Re-adapting himself to what critic Tudor Vianu calls "the mountaineer's experience", Sion was resuming his travels deep into the mountains, in both Argeș County and areas of Transylvania. Of all the paintings he presented for the public during the Ileana Gallery Art Show in 1925, the vast majority were landscapes of the mountains, or compositions with shepherds and mountain-folk such as La isvorul Troiței ("At the Troița [Trinity] Spring"), alternating with new Balcic seascapes. There is the occasional still life: Roz și roș ("Pink and Red"), which probably alluded to a poem by Transylvanian author Octavian Goga, impressed Goga and was bought for the state by Ion Lapedatu. Sion returned to the same venue in early 1926, when his exhibited a diverse selection of his newer compositions, and was rewarded with a higher class Order of the Crown. A noted figure on Bucharest's bohemian scene, the painter frequented the artistic-literary club at Casa Capșa restaurant. He sat at the same table with some of the modernist and neo-traditionalist writers (Camil Baltazar, Liviu Rebreanu, Vasile Voiculescu, Ilarie Voronca), and, story goes, was once caught up in a cake fight with the satirist and prankster Păstorel Teodoreanu. Sion satisfied public expectations with portraits of the Bucharest upper middle class and proposed a design for the Vasile Alecsandri Mausoleum. He lost the latter commission to Paul Molda—reportedly, Sion preserved a bitter grudge against the Romanian Academy, who had ruled against him in this matter. File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Compoziţie cu motive romanesti.jpg|'''' ("Composition with Romanian Motifs", 1924) File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Mocani.jpg|'''' ("Mountain Folk") File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Pe malul apei.jpg|'''' ("By the Water", ) File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Barci.jpg|'''' ("Boats", 1927) File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Natura statica cu legume si vase.jpg|'''' ("Still-life with Vegetables and Pottery") File:Ion_Theodorescu-Sion_-_Natura_statica_(Malini).jpg|'''' ("Hackberry Flowers") Final decade Around 1927, Theodorescu-Sion was again concentrating on his murals: his only works at the Official Salon for that year were studies for a wall painting called Șipotul ("Gushing Spring"). Returning to Constanța in 1928, he helped organize an official art show to mark the semicentennial of Romanian rule over that region. He was seen in modernist circles, and contributed to the 1934 exhibit Peisajul bucureștean ("The Landscape of Bucharest"), with paintings dating back to 1919. His work was again featured at a world's fair, the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris. His last selection of works was presented to the public as part of the Official Salon, which opened the same month in Bucharest. Gândirea published his obituary, signed by Crainic, and opening with the words: "Theodorescu-Sion died unexpectedly, in the full summer of his life and of his boundlessly fecund talent." File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Artista.jpg|'''' ("The Artist", 1927) File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Tulpanul rosu.jpg|'''' ("Red Muslin", 1931) File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Maicuta Maria Ciuceanu.jpg|'''' ("Sister Maria Ciureanu", 1931) File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Natura statica cu struguri si mere.jpg|'''' ("Still-life with Grapes and Apples", 1934) File:Ion Theodorescu-Sion - Compozitie pe motive taranesti.jpg|'''' ("Composition with Peasant Motifs", 1936) ==Work==

Experimenter ", ) Theodorescu-Sion was probably the most protean Romanian oil painter. Five years later, Tăslăuanu was to assess: "Mr. Theodorescu-Sion's art [...] doesn't agree with all people on first impression. [...] The primitive and decorative genre, with simple lines and expressive planes, has not won [it] many adherents. His way of seeing and rendering things seen relates him to the modern art of other countries." As noted in 1913 by Luceafărul art columnist G. Duma, Sion took his painting "science" from French academies and "the grand masters", techniques from Synthetism in his religious work, and modern decorative elements in his landscapes. Duma describes Sion's 1913 paintings, especially Crai nou ("New Moon") and the Crucifixion, as a spiritual journey, and concludes: "In vibrant colors, with well-ordered planes, always directing us to the art of the future, the conscious painter Theodorescu-Sion dreams of and puts into song that aria which leads to immortality." Art historians have since disagreed about young Sion's focus on the existential mystery. Mariana Vida calls his early compositions "pathetically Symbolist", but, according to Amelia Pavel, his visions of solitary trees fuse Art Nouveau, "with its twisted lineaments", with elements taken out of Expressionism. Pavel is explicitly contradicted by fellow Romanian scholar Dan Grigorescu: "the tree motif is probably closer to [Sion's] decorative-muralist vision of a hallmark monumentality, with its ethnicist implications". Beyond the Symbolist context, Theodorescu-Sion's primitivism was a form of social investigation. G. Duma was among the early ones to describe Sion as the voice of a specific Romanian sensibility: "Theodorescu-Sion's art is the echo of a people's feelings [...]. It is the atavism of our purest art [...]. The artist creates, and the people he represents lives on through him, making it known to all other nations with definitive characteristics that [...] the sources of its own dreams are coming to light under a creative power. [...] One feels spiritually connected to Theodorescu-Sion, because one finds, buried into his pastures, the labor and suffering of a race that has produced the painter himself." According to Anca Gogîltan, the Tinerimea art show of 1910 was a watershed moment in the relationship between urban modern art and the rural majority of Romania, as both Theodorescu-Sion and Camil Ressu tackled rural life without idyllic conventionalism or moral indignation. She refers in particular to Sion's Transylvanian-themed Arat în Munții Abrudului ("Ploughing in the Mountains of Abrud"), "underlining man's civilizing action" rather than expressing "social critique". Prior to World War I, Gogîltan argues, Sion and Ressu were the visual partners of Romanian agrarianism (or Poporanism), seeking to emphasize, like Mihail Sadoveanu in the literary field, the "dignity", "resilience" and economic importance of the Romanian peasantry. With his trips in Southern Dobruja, his palette became more luminous, as discussed by Tăslăuanu: "In new Dobruja with its effusion of light and warmth, all colors are lighter; countours more imprecise, less defined; the coloring mixture and contrast more pronounced and richer. In the light-steeped atmosphere of Balcic and Deliorman, the artist found subjects that agree with his understanding of poetic color." According to Cisek, this preference hurt Sion's art for the next few years, but began to wear out with the completion of La isvorul Troiței. In the context of Romanian artistic modernity, the parallel evolution of Sion and Iosif Iser has intrigued various commentators. Reviewer Gheorghe Oprescu argues that the resemblance between the two is primarily modulated by Sion's temperamental changes, by his "restless, perhaps less sure of itself, being". Another interwar critic, Aurel D. Broșteanu, writes that Sion (like Iser, but with more rustic influences) contributed to "the assimilation of a pictorial objectivity", and set it out against "amorphous and disorganized Impressionism." Likewise, Tudor Vianu refers to La izvorul Troiței and other works from as compositions of brute volumes, creating organic relationships between the figures and the landscape, an against claims that Theodorescu-Sion had become a neoclassic. Amelia Pavel additionally writes that the mature Sion returned to painting trees, with Expressionist filtered through Derain's pictorial techniques and, more characteristically, with a growing interest in making others discover the rural landscape of Romania. According to the Meridiane authors, his "rhythmic sequencing of volumes" shows a mix of influences distilled from contemporary Constructivism and echoes of the Symbolist master Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. The environment typically depicted in most of Theodorescu-Sion's post-1918 creative periods is that of the mountains, of Argeș and of Motzenland. Vianu proposes that Theodorescu-Sion successfully fabricated himself the mentality of mountain dweller, with broken horizons and human figures seen from up close, with a somber palette that suggests "the coolness and secrecy one finds in a forest canopy." He notes: "one may document the nature of the man who created this painting style with his famous Self-portrait he exhibited [in 1925], where the protruding anatomy of his face, the unibrow, the one eye open and scanning, evoke in truth the very image of an ancestor from the mountains." Sion's polemic with urban life was becoming explicit. As historian Anca Gogîltan writes, one of his Peisaje ("Landscapes"), dating , has "the delicate figure of a peasant woman showing up on the edge of a city, dominated by the modern city as a densely packed background, seemingly a screen of geometric shapes." Still lifes such as Roz și roș, she notes, show that he catered to the public's growing interest in folk art items, depicting rustic plates or ; other works make note of the actual hierarchies of the rural space, showing women thoroughly involved in household chores such as laundering. As noted in 1931 by Broșteanu, there were three deep influences on Sion's still lifes and portraits: the antique ceramic art of Romania, alongside Derain's pictorial vision, and, "unmistakably" so, the post-Impressionist canvasses of Ștefan Luchian. In 1926, he assessed: "It has been said—and many among the artistically illiterate continue to repeat as much to this day—that only Grigorescu's art can ever be Romanian, and that Theodorescu-Sion's painting can have nothing in common with the substance of our soil. [...] tomorrow perhaps, [he] may find himself able to overturn skeptical impressions and theories". Cisek depicts Sion as Romania's "best connoisseur of artistic techniques", with a "sovereign mastery", Contrarily, Nichifor Crainic, who was a Grigorescu aficionado, posthumously described Sion as Grigorescu's one equal; however, he noted, Sion bowed to commissions, and as such never produced an actual masterpiece. while, from another side of modern literature, Victor Eftimiu celebrated Sion as a "cultured" and "refined" figure among the traditionalists. The more radical experimenters, including Sion's student Jacques Hérold, rejected tame modernism altogether, turning to Surrealism; but young neo-traditionalists such as Elena Popea found in it a source of inspiration. Retrospectively, philosopher and curator Erwin Kessler finds in Sion the exponent of "a reactionary Romanian modernism": artistic nationalism, coming at a time when all modern Romanian art was divided along ethnic lines ("the ethnic component of classical modernism played an important role, one that should be explained, not occulted"). Also an antisemite, Crainic contended that Sion's art never made an impression on the art market, since the buyers were "mostly Jewish". Various critics have noted that Sion's works of the 1920s and '30s are generally awkward, The Meridiane study finds some of his works to be "emphatic", noting that Sion "does not reach into the philosophical meaning of folk mythology, retaining only its picturesque exterior." ==Legacy==

Ion Theodorescu-Sion's "premature death" was, according to critic I. Zărnescu, a moment of crisis for Romanian art: "[it] leaves an emptiness in our art, just when he, the man of support and encouragement, was most sorely needed." A 2006 donation of the Lola Schmierer Roth collection also supplemented MNAR's Theodorescu-Sion fund with works he had set aside for his former pupil. Other sizable Sion collections are held by the art museums of Constanța and by the Zambaccian Museum in Bucharest. Still emergent after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, the Romanian art market was ambivalent in its treatment of Theodorescu-Sion's work. Writing in 2009, art critic Pavel Șușară denounced "an unacceptable disagreement" between Sion's status as a "first-class artist" and the low starting prices of his canvasses, as opposed to the "exorbitant sums" fetched by painters such as Sabin Bălașa. That year, his Cele trei vârste ("The Three Ages") was sold for 32,000 lei. Interest in Theodorescu-Sion's work appears to have renewed itself by 2010, when the auctioned Sions fetched prices of the highest range. The avant-garde's polemic with Sion's neo-traditionalism continues posthumously. In 2009, Erwin Kessler organized a collective show with the theme "Pork". Kessler explained that the pig, the staple food of modern Romania's consumerism, stood to replace the sheep as the "totem" of Theodorescu-Sion and Nicolae Grigorescu. The tongue-in-cheek exhibit featured conceptual artworks by Matei Bejenaru, Dumitru Gorzo, Ion Grigorescu, Dan Perjovschi and various others. ==Notes==