Theodor Pallady is one of the most prominent names in the history of the Romanian visual arts.
One of the most prominent names in the history of the Romanian visual arts, the painter Theodor Pallady was born in April 1871 and passed away 61 years ago, on the 16th of August. The son of aristocrats, he defied his family's expectations and pursued painting and a more or less bohemian lifestyle in Paris instead of a career as an engineer. Mihaela Murelatos, a curator at the Theodor Pallady Museum in Bucharest, tells us more about this painter:
"Pallady hailed from a Romanian boyar family whose roots went back to 17th-century Moldavia, with his mother coming from a branch of the Cantacuzino family. He was schooled at home for the first years of his life by a French tutor. He then went to a high school in Bucharest and studied engineering and later in Dresden, Germany. In this latter city, he also took painting lessons from the German painter Erwin Oehme who advised him to abandon engineering for painting, which Pallady did, risking alienating his family and having his finances cut off. He then left Dresden for Paris, where he worked in the studio of the Symbolist painter Jean Arman before joining the School of Fine Arts, where he studied under the painter Gustave Moreau. His colleagues included Henri Matisse."
Theodor Pallady returned to Romania and opened his first exhibition in 1904 at the Romanian Athenaeum. He also exhibited in Paris, where he lived for most of the interwar years until 1939, when he returned to his home country definitively.
During his time in Paris, he lived at Place Dauphine, where one of his neighbours was Gheorghe Raut, another Romanian in love with the arts and a former director of the Paris branch of the Marmorosch Blank Bank between the two world wars. A passionate collector, Gheorghe Raut purchased several woks by Pallady which he included in a collection that he later donated to the Romanian state. The collection includes 800 graphic art works plus several oil paintings among which the portraits of actresses Maria Ventura and Marioara Voiculescu.
Although he lived in Paris, to be closer to the artistic community there, Pallady did not distance himself from his Romanian sources of inspiration, which he shared with his friends. Mihaela Murelatos is back with details about Pallady's friendship with Henri Matisse:
"Pallady influenced his friend in terms of the love for the Romanian blouse. La Blouse Roumaine painted by Matisse was heavily inspired by Pallady. Matisse also had an impressive collection of Romanian blouses. Their discussions touched upon the supremacy of the line and colour in painting. Pallady, who had studied engineering and mastered the art of drawing, argued that the line was more important than colour. On the contrary, Matisse laid emphasis on strong, lively colours and believed that, in a painting, colours were more important than lines. Both artists would stick to their point of view and Pallady would say that the line could be associated with the spirit and that the colour was just matter."
Tourists and art lovers can admire the paintings of Theodor Pallady at the Malik House in Bucharest, the place where the will find the collection of the Raut family as well as the current headquarters of the Theodor Pallady Museum.
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