21 Facts About Ion Theodorescu-Sion

Ion Theodorescu-Sion's paintings alternated the monumental depictions of harsh environments, and their inhabitants, with luminous Balcic seascapes and nostalgic records of suburban life.

The son of a Romanian Railways brakeman and the peasant-woman Ioana Ursu, Theodorescu-Sion was born in Ianca, Braila County, and baptized into the Romanian Orthodox Church.

Ion Theodorescu-Sion spent his early childhood on the Baragan Plain, but grew up into a passionate hiker of the Carpathian Mountains.

Ion Theodorescu-Sion was a rebellious student, shaped by socialist ideas, and squandered his scholarship money.

Ion Theodorescu-Sion burned all his belongings except for a copy of Les Fleurs du mal, and traveled to French Algeria, where he probably intended to apply for the Foreign Legion.

Ion Theodorescu-Sion later returned to Romania, but frequently traveled out of Romania on study trips.

Ion Theodorescu-Sion was a staff cartoonist for various Romanian satirical papers, including, and George Ranetti's Furnica.

From his French period, Theodorescu-Sion brought home the echoes of Impressionism, and the more modern influences of Paul Cezanne, the post-Impressionist, and Andre Derain, the Fauve, together with the optical theories of Divisionism.

Culturally, Theodorescu-Sion affiliated with a new wave of Romanian artists, who used simple forms, bold colors and clear contours to illustrate mystically charged subjects.

Ion Theodorescu-Sion was involved on the art scene of Northern Dobruja, commissioned to decorate the Constanta City Hall palace with a series of murals.

Co-opted as a teacher at the National School of Fine Arts, Theodorescu-Sion was one of the founding members of the Artists' Society, a leading Romanian professional association.

Ion Theodorescu-Sion was in Iasi, the provisional capital, where he began collaborating with other war artists driven away by the defeats.

Ion Theodorescu-Sion sat at the same table with some of the modernist and neo-traditionalist writers, and, story goes, was once caught up in a cake fight with the satirist and prankster Pastorel Teodoreanu.

Around 1927, Theodorescu-Sion was again concentrating on his murals: his only works at the Official Salon for that year were studies for a wall painting called Sipotul.

Ion Theodorescu-Sion was seen in modernist circles, and contributed to the 1934 exhibit Peisajul bucurestean, with paintings dating back to 1919.

Ion Theodorescu-Sion's work was again featured at a world's fair, the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris.

Ion Theodorescu-Sion is altogether too preoccupied with technical matters and too superficial in his drawing.

Ion Theodorescu-Sion writes: "the leafless tree [is] a symbol of human alienation, of human powerlessness when faced with the immensity of nature".

Ion Theodorescu-Sion refers in particular to Sion's Transylvanian-themed Arat in Muntii Abrudului, "underlining man's civilizing action" rather than expressing "social critique".

Likewise, Tudor Vianu refers to La izvorul Troitei and other works from c as compositions of brute volumes, creating organic relationships between the figures and the landscape, an against claims that Theodorescu-Sion had become a neoclassic.

Art reviewer Petru Comarnescu suggests that Theodorescu-Sion did in fact live up to the expectation of a purely Romanian art, by going back to the "naturalized Byzantine art" of medieval muralists, particularly so in Sipotul.