Corneliu Baba (1906-1997, born in Craiova) Romanian painter. He studied the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy (1926-1930) and – paralelly – the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest; he studied at the Fine Arts Faculty in Iassy (1934-1938), with the painter N.N. Tonitza. His works were present at the main exhibitions in Romania and abroad (Vienna 1954, 1956; the "Non-Abstract Art" exhibition, Tokio 1964; Berlin 1964; New York 1970; Bucharest 1978; Moscow, Vienna, Leningrad, 1979). He was awarded numerous distinctions; he was a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy (1963), of the Art Academy in Berlin (1964), of the "Tommaso Campanella" Academy in Rome (1970) a.s.o. He was a university teacher in Iassy (1946) and Bucharest (from 1958). The beginnings of Baba’s creation can be defined in relationship with two polarising tendencies that dominated, at the time, the artistic experience. For a deceny (1940-1950), while he was searching for his own way, the artist was confronted with the phenomenon of dispersion and of the disappearance of the image on one hand, and that of the freezing language of neo-academistic, conventional formulae. Baba went beyond those simplifying contradictions, avoiding to accept either trend in favour of another one in which the presentation of reality and the preocupation for innovation of the means of expression are naturally combined. The solution is based on resorting to the great values of traditional painting which we were used to call "a space of classicism". In a series of paintings, - "Return from the Field" (1943), "The Peasants" (1953), "Resting on the Field" (1954), "People Resting"- the painter re-discovers the universe and figure of the Peasant as a symbol of permanence. Subtle polemicist, Baba manages to leave aside the prejudice of the idyllicism and that of the anachronism of the village, casting a light upon a simple mankind, full of spiritual resources. Nothing is anecdotical in his scenes with peasants: the gestures and attitudes of these people belong rather to the daily recurrent rituals of the existence in a microcosm with clear, intangible laws. The surprise Baba’s paintings produced during the first years of the sixth deceny, was one of the truth, of the normality within the dis-shaped conglomerate of rethoric representations, ostentative by their exclamations. Placing himself on the same human plan with the peasants, with so many famous or anonymous people, with the series of the self-portraits, his portraits of steelworkers are images in which the force within the human beings, by its own reality, with no need of any superficial agitation of gesture. His appreciation of perennial values, significant from the point of view of a historical perspective, is manifest in both his subjects and style aspects.
Baba cultivated a strong composition that recalls Renaissance and Post-Renaissance rigours. His figurative material is ordered in stable, geometrical structures. Centered, or displayed in pyramidal settings, the force lines of his characters are closing up harmoniously. The diagonals are used so they would not disturb - by their ascending and descending tensions – the balance of the whole. The image was animated on the premises of stability. He used a dynamic system of lights, resambling the ones in the Baroque painting, stressing the most important figures or body elements. Richly coloured, his paintings preserve areas of darkness, in a permanent dialogue with the lightened parts, as in the portraits he painted of famous artists such as Mihail Sadoveanu, Lucia Sturza-Bulandra, George Enescu, Tudor Arghezi, a.s.o., or as in his Venetian and Spanish landscapes – the two geographical areas had fascinated the artist.