70. Golf in Balchik [cca. 1925]

The moment of Balchik's discovery will coincide, in the economy of Nicolae Tonitza's creation, with the moment of abandoning the academic school, which considerably limited his linear perspective. The summer of 1933 captures the Romanian artist wandering the maritime lands which will enlarge his pictorial horizon considerably. The summers spent in Balchik will fill Tonitza's canvases with coffee shops, traditional houses, flower shops, windows, verandas, slums or the charming bay of the Dobrogea area. Analytical spirit, the artist will identify new solutions in the illustration of spatial depth and will choose to divide the canvas into so-called "screens". Rocks, sky and sea will follow one another in an extraordinary alternation, revealing close-ups and distances true to reality. Tonitza captures the sea into an immobile, dense and opaque instance. The mirage of the oriental world will give a special rhythm to the creations made in Balchik, and the sinuous arabesques of the lines will appear more and more often in the specific work of this period. The artist captures the atmosphere and the local colour by a considerable reduction of the palette to just a few shades spread over much larger areas. He delineates shapes by colour from the palette with the same skill he demonstrates in drawing. The large areas, realised in oil, enjoys the diaphanous light of the bay, which the artist applies in repeated layers of white. In this work, Tonitza creates a veritable panorama of the space on the Black Sea shore. He admirably introduces black accents, which contributes to highlighting the materiality of the nature represented. The contrasts are reduced to minimum, the human characters are inexistent, and what prevails in his work attributed to this period is the most faithful representation of reality. Thus, the artist will pass the seascape through his own filter and will transpose it onto canvas with the skill of the drawer and the careful use of the painter's brush.

References

Florica Cruceru, Doina Păuleanu, Simona Urziceanu, "Opera lui Nicolae Tonitza în patrimoniul Muzeelor de Artă din Constanța și Topalu" ("Nicolae Tonitza's works in the patrimony of the Art Museums of Constanța and Topalu"), Bucharest, 1979.

Dimensions

width 16 cm, height 35.5 cm

Description

oil on cardboard, signed bottom right, in black, "Tonitza"

Dating

cca. 1925

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