43. Tatar Woman (Afternoon in Balchik) [beginning of the 30s]

Dimitrie Ghiață’s initiation in the imitative arts occurred rather late, as he started to study drawing and colours in 1908, at 20 years of age. The evening classes, held within the Gh. Lazăr High School, where the Free University was seated, only meant minor drawing exercises with two minor teachers, N. Bran and V. Ravici. He would learn his true lessons later, when he joined Arthur Verona’s entourage and workshop, which closeness would also allow the young painter to earn a scholarship for studies in France. These studies were completed within the celebrated Ranson Academy, in the workshops of Professors André and Lucien Monod. His affinity for painting materialized as of 1915, when our artist met and befriended the new manager of Kalinderu Museum, Jean Al. Steriadi, with whom he worked intensely in the first years of a prodigious career. The forming of the Romanian Art Society, as well as of the entire aesthetic cluster surrounding it, along with his finding of Dobrogea, are perhaps the most important elements coordinating Dumitru Ghiață’s life and career. His stopovers on the shores of the Black Sea start around the year 1920. As was the case for another colleague from his generation, Lucian Grigorescu, Ghiață also discovered and worked around Steriadi, who took his younger colleagues to the places that were most eloquent for painters interested in the unmediated experience with nature and landscape. The specific nature of the places, of Cavarna, Mangalia, Caliacra, and Balchik, is what made Ghiață resonate, and he conceived a new aesthetic pattern, recognizable until the end of his career. Colour, conveyed either through sense, or through the filter of reason and the coordinating line of the composition’s elements, led to the creation of works in which the monumental was also inferred due to the honesty evinced in the treatment of the subject. The sun-bleached houses, rising from the limy soil, the people limited to black ceramic moulds, or the bluish-green sea, are constructed without fireworks, without any simplistic picturesque elements, and they become pictural entities in the works which bluntly present life and experience in Dobrogea. (I.P.)

References

PREUTU, Marina, "Ghiață", Meridiane Publishing House, Bucharest, 1977

Dimensions

width 41 cm, height 32.5 cm, custom 32,5 × 41 cm

Description

oil on cardboard, signed bottom right, in brown, "Ghiață D."

Dating

beginning of the 30s

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

For clarifications regarding the bidding procedure, hammer price costs, guarantee, payment, and collection terms for the winning lot, we recommend carefully reading/re-reading the Bidding Regulations.

For additional information regarding the lot and the auction, please contact the Art Consultants Department.