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oil on cardboard, 60 x 48 cm, signed upper right, with black, "N. Tonitza"
Nicolae Tonitza believes that art's role consists of training the human psyche and educating its sensitivity. He is concerned with drawing, graphics, but also painting. His preference for drawing is thoroughly explored during the Munich school years, but he would acquire pictorial qualities following his enrolment at the Paris Academy of Art. He learns how to use colour to his own advantage and acquires the necessary knowledge, in order to help him assign space and form in favour of chromatics. As far as graphics are concerned, he adopts the attitude of the accuser who is ready to expose, at any cost, the antinational character imposed by the bourgeoisie. However, in painting, he would focus on rendering the elements that fill them affectively in a positive way: the woman, the child, the home, workers, flowers or landscapes. Tonitza is the artist who contemplates extensively, before transposing his thoughts on canvas. The painting style he adopts represents the result of a thorough study and a continuous exercise of harmoniously combining shapes and colours. He prefers to work from memories, only after completing a preliminary study of the real element. He executes a painting of a sentimental nature, similar to the one of French impressionists, so that he would never be able to associate with Academist ideas, which were rather flat and void of any emotional aspects. Childhood appears both as a symbol and as a central motif of his creation. Portraits of children are executed starting from 1924 in particular. The three year period which he spends with his family in Vălenii de Munte enhances the persistence of the playful in his creation even more. His own children would act as models for a significant part of his work. He often paints a single face, other times two faces, but his rarest works are those including three children faces. Feminine faces are dominant, especially those of his daughters. His son, Petru, would serve him as a model for a series of portraits where he is assigned other identities. He would become, in turns, "The Florist's Son", "The Young Clown", "The Little Merchant" or "The Young Shepherd". Tonitza would not stop at representing his family environment, but he tends to extend his gallery of children's portraits, by taking over painting commissions both from his acquaintances and from the public. He often places his models on a neutral background. He uses a few brightly coloured accents, by sometimes assigning his very young muses various accessories: a coloured bow or a patterned ribbon. He focuses on accents of light and on the chromatic aimed to render emotional states. In the execution of children's portraits, he would particularly linger on rendering the eyes - sad or wondering eyes, daydreaming eyes, scared eyes, or those eyes directly gazing at the observer. He sketches the perfectly round pupils, sometimes placing a small dark patch, other times a green or a blue patch. His muses' eyes are lively and suggestive, ready to follow and to remain ingrained in the eyes of the public. Children's eyes have helped Nicolae Tonitza develop an almost synthetic painting manner, successfully rendering his characters' nostalgic innocence and contemplative state.
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