Painter Ion Țuculescu
Ion Țuculescu was a brilliant self-made artist, but also a scientist.
Eugen Cojocariu and Ion Puican, 23.03.2025, 14:00
Ion Țuculescu was a brilliant self-made artist, but also a scientist.
Painter Ion Țuculescu (1910-1962) was born in Craiova, the capital city of Dolj County, in southeastern Romania. He was born to a family of intellectuals. He did not attend an art school, as he did not see himself as having a particular talent for painting. He graduated from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the University of Bucharest in 1936 and took his PhD in medicine in 1939. He had his first personal exhibition in 1938 at the Romanian Athenaeum, an exhibition financed with his own resources. After this, he was noticed and participated in various group and personal exhibitions or in the Official Salon of 1941 and 1945. Ion Țuculescu became a legend in the spring of 1965, with his unforgettable posthumous retrospective at the Dalles Hall in the capital Bucharest. He practiced medicine only as a military doctor during the war years (World War II) and was an avid scientific researcher and biologist, at the Romanian Academy. He divided his life between painting and scientific research.
Art critic Erwin Kessler used two expressions in relation to the painter Ion Țuculescu: “I will explain. National cultural hero means that from 1965 to 1972, Țuculescu was exposed and overexposed by the communist regime in all the major cities of the country. After Bucharest, the exhibition was taken from Constanța to Craiova, from Craiova to Timișoara, Târgu Mureș, Iași, Cluj, Brașov, everywhere. A national legend had already been created. The following year, 1966, 80 works by Țuculescu from the same exhibition were presented in the National Pavilion of Romania at the Venice Biennale. After that, until 1972, as I was saying, the exhibition was taken to the United States, San Francisco, Washington, Columbus in Ohio, then to Europe, London, Paris, Oslo, Warsaw, Rome. He was framed as a hero. After this international enterprise, Țuculescu was brought back to the country, where he remained one of the greatest names in painting. Essays, plays, classical music pieces were dedicated to him, so he entered the Pantheon. That means hero. Curatorial aggregate is what you see when you visit the exhibition, a machine, not just an exhibition. That means that we put pieces that normally shouldn’t fit together. Ethnography pieces, documentary pieces, we made a scientific research laboratory. And the immersive part, as they would say now, but it’s actually interactive, is that on the microscopes that we have there, with the collaboration of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Bucharest, on those microscopes you can see, we can all see, exactly the protozoa taken from Lake Techirghiol that Țuculescu studied. ”
Erwin Kessler gave us some more details about what can be seen in the commemorative exhibition Ion Țuculescu – The Amateur Genius at the Art Safari Pavilion. “The Amateur Genius” is a phenomenal exhibition that brings to the public the most complex and complete version of a unique, unparalleled creator: “We have 120 works by Țuculescu, paintings. We have photography, over 50 other pieces, period films, I mean, radio recordings, … Music, classical music. … We have carpets, Oltenia carpets, obviously, the ones that were a major source of inspiration for Țuculescu, starting from 1942-43 until the end of his life. So we have a whole series of objects that demand in a different way … different interactions and they are all inside the same mechanism.”
At the end of our discussion with Erwin Kessler, he wanted to mention the following about the painter Ion Țuculescu, an artist who worked during a dark period, that of the communist regime in Romania: “For any man who wants to be free, he must know that during that period of total lack of freedom, Țuculescu was the only artist who painted only what he wanted, how he wanted and painted with his eyes on eternity, without looking at the present, which was a present of oppression.”
Țuculescu was a self-made artist with an extraordinary work force. He painted fiercely. His painting provokes, disturbs. He was an artist discovered and truly appreciated posthumously. The painter Ion Țuculescu remains an important landmark in contemporary art in Romania. In an article published in 1965, the painter was quoted as saying: “I wanted to leave people a work full of love of life.” In reality, Țuculescu’s work is the unique product of a genius, who could not be included in any artistic trend or movement. (EE)
