Corneliu Baba Collection
Corneliu Baba was born in 1906 in Craiova. He was the third son of Gheorghe Baba, a church painter, and Mathilda Baba. He spent his childhood and teenage years in Craiova and Caransebeș (his father’s town), where he devoted himself to his two passions: music and literature.
In 1926 he moved to Bucharest to enroll at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy. After only one semester, he dropped out of the Academy of Fine Arts, declaring himself discouraged by the teachers and the climate. In 1930 he graduated from the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, where he had the opportunity to attend classes taught by Nae Ionescu, P.P. Negulescu and Tudor Vianu. He spent the following years in Timișoara, where he came into contact with a group of young progressive and protesting artists whose attitudes and artistic approach he soon dissociated himself from. This period was marked by searching and disillusionment, and the desire to go abroad became more and more strong. In 1934 he had his first painting exhibition with his father in Băile Herculane. Here he was noticed by an influential Iași lawyer, Omar Popovici. Through him, he moved to Moldavia and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in the class of Professor Nicolae Tonitza. Although he had left for Iași with the intention of returning in two or three months, Corneliu Baba stayed in the Moldovan capital for 16 years. During this time he completed his studies in painting and then worked as an assistant and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts.
In a 20th century shaken by contradictory ideologies, philosophies and aesthetic doctrines, Baba stubbornly remained within the conventions of language and codes of representation of classical painting considered obsolete. Among Romanian artists he was inspired by Grigorescu and Tonitza, and among Europeans by El Greco, Goya and Rembrandt. His main genres are: the self-portrait, the harlequin-crazy king, social portraiture, landscape and still life. His works can be seen in exhibitions in Tokyo and New York, Beijing and Brussels, Moscow and Berlin.
Among his most important distinctions are the State Prize for Art (1954) and the Prize for Excellence awarded by the Romanian Cultural Foundation (1997). He was a full member of the Romanian Academy, an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Art and a corresponding member of the Berlin Academy. Corneliu Baba died in 1997 in Bucharest.
