14. Maternity [1982]

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14. Maternity [1982]

Corneliu Baba

1906, Craiova - 1997, Bucureşti

Starting price:

EUR 21.000

Not sold

References

"Corneliu Baba", ediţie îngrijită de Maria Muscalu Albani, Fundaţia Culturală Română, Bucureşti, 1997
"Corneliu Baba", Editura Institutului Cultural Român, 2008
Şuşară, Pavel, "Corneliu Baba", Ed. Monitorul Oficial, Bucureşti, 2013

oil on canvas, 60 x 46 cm, 46x60, signed and dated lower left "Baba, (19)82", in yellow

The classicising style that Baba used when painting human figures is defined by the extremely personal manner in which the artist stood out and changed the painting of the second half of the 20th century. With a lesson repeated particularly in the period right after the Second World War, with his social portrait drawings, Baba managed to "collect" an illustrious baggage for the occasions provided by painting human faces. Whether he painted the idyllic, generalising figures that people the masses of people found in his works, or he painted his family and his close ones, painting never omitted the detail that truly gives significance to the work. At the same time, choosing famous themes and reinterpreting them became a manner in which a painter with classical training (and due to his father) could reconfigure the Romanian post-war imagination. Thus, the genre scene is turned into an intriguing social composition (see the scenes with peasants on the fields, and later the Frights), his still lifes are mysterious and symbolistic (still lifes with playing cards), and the classical compositions with characters enter a unique thematic regime. Such is the case of "Maternity", a subject approached by Baba as early as the first part of his career (1935-1950). Baba's Maternities reveal the individual and its intimate universe, approached almost exclusively through the perspective of female subjects. Mother, the ironing lady or the "Dutchwomen" a la Vermeer create easily recognisable typologies that Baba renders universal.

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