Grigorescu (editie in limba engleza)

It is the feeling that colours, not the brush. You can colour with a piece of coal, but all the tubes in the world cannot give you the blue of a flax flower unless you have it in your soul. (Nicolae Grigorescu)

This is the testimony of a painter for whom art means revelation, experience, not skill or contrivance. Grigorescu’s paintings have life, because life is what inspired them. In a practical format, easy to browse, the album includes a generous number of illustrations, some of them unknown to the public, being at the first appearance in print. The biographical text accompanying them follows the interweaving of the artistic activity and the most important moments of Nicolae Grigorescu’s life. Through quotations, the artist’s voice almost always accompanies the story, turning it often into confession. And there are also the comments of those who knew and admired him, the pen of the critics or art historians over the years.

SUMMARY

• "A plastically embodied emotion"

• Master Nicu (1838-1861)
  "I am a peasant’s son and proud of it"
  Apprenticeship
  The little "big" iconographer
  The charm of distance
  Church painter

• Journey in search of "colour" (1861-1877)
  Towards Paris, to study
  Entrance to the forest of Fontainebleau
  Experience of impressionism
  Fellow Latin countries
  First exhibitions at home – a controversial artist

• Reporter with a brush (1877-1878)
  An artist in the line of fire
  War in Grigorescu’s colours

• Disappointment and creation (1878-1887)
  Alienation. Refuge in Vitré
  Poetry of the female face

• Last season (1887-1907)

• Chronology

• Bibliography