Chiparus: Romanian Art Deco

Lovers of Art Deco style for sure have heard plenty of times the name of Chiparus. But few of them know that Dimitri, or Demetre Chiparus, worldwide appreciated sculptor, was born in the town of Dorohoi, northeastern Romania.

Demetre Haralamb Chiparus (also known as Dumitru Chipăruş; 1886-1947) left Romania to Italy in 1909, where he attended the classes of the sculptor Raffaello Romanelli. In 1912 he traveled to Paris - where he finally settled - to attend the Ecole des Beaux Arts to pursue his art at the classes of Antonin Mercie and Jean Boucher. Chiparus died in 1947 and was buried in Bagneux cemetery, south of Paris.

The first sculptures of Chiparus were created in the realistic style and were exhibited at the Salon of 1914. He was the first to employ an original combination of bronze and ivory, called chryselephantine, to great effect. Most of his renowned works were made between 1914 and 1933.

Sculptures of Chiparus represent the classical manifestation of Art Deco style in decorative bronze ivory sculpture. Collector interest in the work of Chiparus appeared in the 1970s and has flourished since the 1990s.

Source: Wikipedia

Happy birthday, Hedda!

Hedda Sterne is celebrating today her 100th birthday. Born on August 4, 1910 in Bucharest, she is an artist best remembered as the only woman in a group of Abstract Expressionists known as "The Irascibles" which consisted of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others. In her artistic career, she is known for maintaining a stubborn independence from styles and trends, including Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, with which she is often associated.

Hedda Sterne [portraited in the photo by Gjon Mili] was born as Hedwig Lindenberg, to Simon Lindenberg, a high school language teacher, and Eugenie Wexler. Sterne was raised with artistic values from a young age, most notably, her tie to Surrealism, which stemmed from a family friend, Victor Brauner. Sterne was homeschooled until age 11. Upon her high school graduation in 1927, she attended art classes in Vienna, then had a short attendance at the University of Bucharest studying philosophy and art history before she dropped out to pursue artistic training independently.

Hedda married a childhood friend Frederick Sterne in 1932. In 1941 she escaped a certain death from Nazi encroachment during WWII when she fled to New York to be with her husband. In 1944 she remarried Saul Steinberg and became a U.S. citizen. She was involved in many shows and exhibits in New York and practiced her art up until she had a stroke that affected her vision and movement when she was 94.

Source: Wikipedia

Milestone from Chisinau

Lewis Milestone (born Lev Milstein, 1895 – 1980) was a motion picture director. Milestone was born in Kishinev, Bessarabia, Imperial Russia (now Chişinău, Moldova) to a family of Jewish heritage. He went to the US in 1912. Milestone held a number of odd jobs before enlisting in the US Signal Corps, where he worked as an assistant director on Army training films during the war. In 1919 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. After the war he went to Hollywood, where he first worked as a film cutter, and later as an assistant director. His work during the 1930s and 1940s was always easily identifiable by its lighting and imaginative use of fluid camera. He worked extensively in television from the mid 1950s.

Source: Wikipedia

Nobel prize for Literature 2009

Herta Müller is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet and essayist noted for her works depicting the harsh conditions of life in Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceauşescu regime, the history of the Germans in the Banat (and more broadly, Transylvania), and the persecution of Romanian ethnic Germans by Stalinist Soviet occupying forces in Romania and the Soviet-imposed communist regime of Romania.

In October 2009 she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

She was born in 1953 in Nitzkydorf, a historically German-speaking village in the Romanian Banat in western Romania. The daughter of Banat Swabian farmers, her family was part of Romania's German minority. She studied German studies and Romanian literature at the Timişoara University.

Ausländer

Rose Ausländer (1901-1988), maiden name Rosalie Beatrice Ruth Scherzer, was a German and English language poet, Jewess from Bukovina, who lived in the USA, Romania and Germany.

She was born in Czernowitz, at that time the second most important university center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Between 1907 and 1919, she received her education in Vienna and Czernowitz, which became part of Romania after 1918. In 1919, she began studying literature and philosophy. In 1921, together with her friend and future husband Ignaz Ausländer, she left Bukovina and migrated to the US. There, she began writing poems.

In 1927, she returned home to take care of her sick mother. In 1931, she returned home again for the same reason. She left Czernowitz for Bucharest in 1936. In 1939, she emigrated again to the US but came back in the same year in order to take care of her sick mother. There in Czernowitz she published her first book; the greater part of the print run was destroyed by the Nazis in 1941, after they had occupied the city. As a Jew, she had to move into the ghetto. She remained there two years, plus another year in hiding so as not to be deported to the camps. In the ghetto, she got to know the poet Paul Celan, under whose influence she modernised her style. In 1944, the city was occupied by the Red Army. She left the country again, returning to New York. In 1967, she went to West Germany. From then on, she lived in Düsseldorf, where she died in 1988.

Source: Wikipedia

Modernist Ukrainian writer

Olga Kobylyanska (Ольга Кобиляньска) was a Ukrainian modernist writer, born in 1863 in Gura Humorului (Gurahumora), in today's Romanian county of Suceava, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Kronland of Bukovina. She was one of the first female writers to explore feminist topics in Ukrainian literature. She is also considered the most important Ukrainian writer to emerge from the region of Bukovina. From 1891 until her death in 1942 she lived in the city of Chernivtsi (Czernowitz). The only language she knew perfectly was German, which is the language of her first writings. Only when Olga was about 20 years old, she realized, supported by other Ukrainian intellectuals, that writing in Ukrainian is inevitable.

Source: Wikipedia

"There is nothing on earth that can prevent a poet from writing, not even the fact that he's Jewish and German is the language of his poems"

Paul Celan (1920–1970) was the most frequently used pseudonym of the Romanian Jew Paul Antschel, one of the major poets of the post-World War II era. Celan was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernăuţi, Bukovina, then part of Romania (now Chernivtsi, in Ukraine). I

n 1938, Celan travelled to Tours, France to study medicine, but returned to Cernăuţi in 1939 to study literature and Romance languages. The Soviet occupation in June 1940 deprived Celan of any illusions about Stalinism and Soviet Communism stemming from his earlier socialist engagements; the Soviets quickly imposed bureaucratic reforms on the university where he was studying Romance philology, and the Red Army brought deportations to Siberia, just as Nazi Germany and Romania brought ghettos, internment, and forced labour a year later.

On arrival in July 1941 the German SS Einsatzkommando and their Romanian allies burned down the city's six-hundred-year-old Great Synagogue. In October, the Romanians deported a large number of Jews after forcing them into a ghetto, where Celan translated William Shakespeare's Sonnets and continued to write his own poetry. Celan remained in these labour camps until February 1944, when the Red Army's advance forced the Romanians to abandon them, whereupon he returned to Cernăuţi shortly before the Soviets returned to reassert their control.

Considering emigration to Palestine and wary of widespread Soviet antisemitism, Celan left Soviet-occupied territory in 1945 for Bucharest, where he remained until 1947. As Romanian autonomy became increasingly tenuous in the course of that year, Celan fled Romania for Vienna. Facing a city divided between occupying powers, he moved to Paris in 1948, where he found a publisher for his first poetry collection.

Source: Wikipedia

Kerényi

Károly Kerényi (1897-1973), born in Timişoara, now Romania, was one of the founders of modern studies in Greek mythology and one of the most important scholars on Mediterranean Mythology and History of Religions. At the University of Budapest he followed a program in classical philology with a doctorate on Plato and Longinus and aesthetic theory in Antiquity, and read widely. In the following years he taught in Hungary at the secondary school level, travelled in Greece and Italy. He became professor of classical philology and ancient history at Budapest, Pécs and Szeged, until he moved definitively to exile, in Switzerland, in 1943, where he remained for the rest of his life, marginal to any Academic engagement and enrollment. He explored consecutively and in detail, throughout his life, every classical site, known or unknown, of the entire Mediterranean.

Source: Wikipedia

Béla Lugosi

Béla Lugosi (1882–1956) was a Hungarian actor of stage and screen, well known for playing Count Dracula in the Broadway play and subsequent film version. In the last years of his career he featured in several of Ed Wood's low budget films. Lugosi, the youngest of four children, was born as Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in Lugoj, then part of Austria–Hungary, now in Romania, to Paula de Vojnich and István Blasko, a banker. Lugosi began acting on stage in several Shakespearean plays and in other major roles, and when appearing in Hungarian silent films he used the stage name Arisztid Olt. Visit Lugosi's official website.

Source: Wikipedia

Wiesel

Elie Wiesel (born Eliezer Wiesel in 1928) is a Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, the best known of which is Night, a memoir that describes his experiences during the Holocaust and his imprisonment in several concentration camps. Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

He was born in Sighetu Marmaţiei, Maramureş, Romania, to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel. Sarah was the daughter of Dodye Feig, a Hasid and farmer from a nearby village. Shlomo was an Orthodox Jew of Hungarian descent, and a shopkeeper who ran his own grocery store. He was active and trusted within the community, and had spent a few months in jail for having helped Polish Jews who escaped and were hungry in the early years of his life. It was Shlomo who instilled a strong sense of humanism in his son, encouraging him to learn Modern Hebrew and to read literature, whereas his mother encouraged him to study Torah and Kabbalah. Wiesel has said his father represented reason, and his mother, faith. Visit the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.

Source: Wikipedia

Brassaï

Brassaï, pseudonym of Gyula Halász (1899-1984), is considered one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. Halász was born in the Transylvanian town of Braşov, Romania, to a Hungarian father and an Armenian mother. At age three, his family moved to live in Paris for a year, while his father, a Professor of Literature, taught at the Sorbonne. As a young man, Gyula Halász studied painting and sculpture in Budapest, before joining a cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, where he served until the end of the I World War. In 1920 Halász went to Berlin, where he worked as a journalist and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1924 he moved to Paris where he would live the rest of his life. Living amongst the huge gathering of artists in the Montparnasse Quarter, he took a job as a journalist. Halász's job and his love of the city, whose streets he often wandered late at night, led to photography. He later wrote that photography allowed him to seize the Paris night and the beauty of the streets and gardens, in rain and mist. Using the name of his beloved birthplace, Gyula Halász went by the pseudonym Brassaï, which means from Braşov.

Source: Wikipedia

Palade: Romanian Nobel Prize

George Emil Palade (1912-2008) was a highly regarded Romanian cell biologist. In 1974, he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering the vacuole. Palade also received the US National Medal of Science in Biological Sciences in 1986, and was previously elected Member of the National Academy of Science in 1961.

Palade was born in Iaşi, Romania; his father was a Professor of Philosophy at the University and his mother was a high school teacher. Both parents strongly encouraged George to further develop his abilities through higher education at the university. Palade received his M.D. in 1940 from the School of Medicine of the University of Bucharest. He was a member of the faculty of that famous school until 1945 when he went to the USA for postdoctoral studies. There, he joined Prof. Albert Claude at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Read his autobiographical article here.

Source: Wikipedia

Romanian modernist architect

Marcel Iancu (1895-1984), also known as Marcel Janco, was a famous Israeli painter and architect. He was born to a Jewish family in Bucharest. A friend and compatriot of Tristan Tzara, he was among the founders of the Dadaist movement at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. In 1922, he returned to Romania and worked as an architect and painter, having conceived the first Modernist houses in Bucharest. In 1941, he left for Palestine to escape the Nazis. In 1953, Janco established the Ein Hod artists' village near Haifa, Israel. Towards the end of his life he helped found the Dada museum in Ein Hod which bears his name.

Contact us in order to follow, during your visit to Bucharest, the urban itinerary Marcel Iancu, the beginnings of modern architecture in Bucharest, 1929-1938, conceived by Ms Doina Anghel, from the National Museum of Art of Romania.

Source: Wikipedia

Xenakis from Romania

The modernist Greek composer and architect Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) was born in Brăila, Romania. At the age of ten he was sent to a boarding school on the Aegean island of Spetsai, Greece and later studied architecture and engineering in Athens. Xenakis's primary teachers of composition were Aristotelis Koundouroff, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Olivier Messiaen. Xenakis pioneered electronic and computer music, and used stochastic mathematical techniques in his compositions, including probability.

Source: Wikipedia

Fountain pen: Romanian invention

Petrache Poenaru (1799-1875) was a famous Romanian inventor of the Enlightenment era.

Poenaru, who had studied in Paris and Vienna and, later, completed his specialized studies in England, was a mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, teacher and organizer of the educational system, as well as a politician, agronomist, and zootechnologist, founder of the Philharmonic Society, the Botanical Gardens and the National Museum of Antiquities in Bucharest.

While a student in Paris, Petrache Poenaru invented the world's first fountain pen, an invention for which the French Government issued a patent on May 25, 1827.

Source: Wikipedia

Insulin: Romanian discovery

Nicolae Paulescu (1869-1931) was a Romanian physiologist, professor of medicine and the discoverer of insulin. In 1916, he succeeded in developing an aqueous pancreatic extract which, when injected into a diabetic dog, proved to have a normalizing effect on blood sugar levels. After a gap during World War I, he resumed his research and succeeded in isolating the antidiabetic pancreatic hormone (pancreine). An extensive paper on this subject - Research on the Role of the Pancreas in Food Assimilation - was submitted by Paulescu on June 22, 1921 to the Archives Internationales de Physiologie in Liège, Belgium, and was published in the August 1921 issue of this journal. Paulescu secured the patent rights for his method of manufacturing pancreine (his own term for insulin) on April 10, 1922 (patent no. 6254) from the Romanian Ministry of Industry and Trade.

Eight months after Paulescu's works were published, doctor Frederick Grant Banting and biochemist John James Richard Macleod from the University of Toronto, Canada, published their paper on the successful use of a pancreatic extract for normalizing blood sugar (glucose) levels (glycemia) in diabetic dogs. Their paper is a mere confirmatory paper, with direct references to Paulescu's article. However, they misquote that article. Surprisingly, Banting and Macleod received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of insulin, while Paulescu's pioneering work was being completely ignored by the scientific and medical community. International recognition for Paulescu's merits as the true discoverer of insulin came only 50 years later.

Source: Wikipedia

The Romanian fountain of youth

Ana Aslan (1897-1988) was a Romanian biologist and physician. She is considered to be a founding figure of gerontology and geriatrics in Romania. In 1952, under her leadership, the Geriatric Institute in Bucharest was founded.

Aslan's Gerovital H3 concept was introduced for the first time in 1957, in Verona, Italy, on the occasion of the IV International Gerontology Congress. Many scientists from the USA, Germany, England, Japan, Italy, Austria and Romania have studied and confirmed the effects of the Gerovital H3 treatment.

Notables such as Charles De Gaulle, John F. Kennedy, Konrad Adenauer, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Tito, Khrushchev, Indira Gandhi and Imelda Marcos have traveled to Romania to benefit this anti-aging therapy. Other well-known people, including actresses Marlene Dietrich, Lillian Gish, the Gabor sisters, actors Charlie Chaplin and Kirk Douglas, and artist Salvador Dalí have also followed the same path. They traveled to Bucharest, where Dr. Aslan did her research with Gerovital H3.

Source: Wikipedia

Stefan Hajdu

Ştefan Hajdu (1907-1996), also known as István Hajdú or Étienne Hajdú, was a famous French sculptor of Jewish Hungarian origin, born in the Transylvanian town of Turda, Romania. He studied in Budapest and Vienna and, in 1927, established himself in Paris. His works show a certain influence of Brancusi's aspiration towards pure forms, specially after 1950, when Hajdu starts to develop a very personal style, based on the abstractionism that was already present in his sculptures since 1932. Some of his works can be seen at museums in Paris, Essen, New York, San Francisco, Washington, Bucharest, Budapest and Skopje.

Source: Wikipedia

Romanian "Brother Grimm"

Josef Haltrich (1822-1886), a famous Transylvanian ethnograph, collected and published folk tales from the medieval German area called "Sachsenland", in today's Romania. He was born in Reghin, studied History, Theology and Philology in Leipzig and then lived in Sighisoara, Cluj and Bistrita. Compared to the Brothers Grimm, he is one of the most important folklorists of German culture.

Read here (in German) the folk tales collected by Haltrich.

Source: Wikipedia

György Ligeti

The famous Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) was born in the Transylvanian town of Târnaveni, Romania, to a Hungarian Jewish family. Ligeti recalls that his first exposure to languages other than Hungarian came one day while listening to a conversation among the Romanian-speaking town police. Before that he hadn't known that other languages existed. He moved to the important Transylvanian city of Cluj with his family when he was 6 and he was not to return to his birth town until the 1990s. Ligeti received his initial musical training at the Cluj Conservatory. His education was interrupted in 1943 when, as a Jew, he was forced to labor by the Nazis. His brother, at the age of 16, was deported to Mauthausen; his parents were both sent to Auschwitz. Following the war, Ligeti returned to his studies in Budapest, graduating in 1949. In December of 1956, two months after the Hungarian revolution was put down by the Soviet Army, he fled first to Vienna and eventually took Austrian citizenship. Many of his works are well known in classical music circles, but to the general public, he is best known for the various pieces featured in the Stanley Kubrick films 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut.

Source: Wikipedia