179. White Roses

In 1935, Nicolae Tonitza arrives in Durău, with 8 students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Iași, among whom he will work 3 summers to decorate the monastery at the foothills of Ceahlău. The present work belongs to this period, being part of a series of floral, decorative panels. Probably, these works strongly related to the actual painting of the interior of the church, where we find, along with the popular motifs of the peasant bark, many flowers, daffodils, petunias, chicory, cornflowers, nasturtiums and dahlias. For Tonitza, the creation of a decorative floral design was not a foreign practice, as this usage can also be found in earlier works. Fixing a plant background in the making of a portrait remains one of the most common methods, giving us the premise to investigate the powerful visuals offered by such an approach. The painting of the small decorative panel reveals us a master of the colour. Tonitza succeeds to reach the much-needed materiality of an ornamental appearance, especially in the case of painting flowers. With the help of a restricted chromatic palette, the tones stand out, while the nuance with which the painter ennobles the painted surface denotes a perfect achievement. Tonitza uses the parsimonious chromatic complex, which makes it easier to highlight the floral motif. As mentioned above, the background is reminiscent of the painted unitary surfaces in compositions with nudes or portraits, but here the decorative necessity is superfluous, so the chromatic volumes are subordinated to the ink, which singularly orders the appearance and finally the atmosphere. In works from the same period as those created in Balchik, which responded to plastic interrogations related to the resonance of objects with the zenith atmosphere, Tonitza innovated in modelling works that responded only to the chromatic information provided by the nearby visual source. The floral panels thus resulted, which even if they remind of the set and decorative backgrounds of the third decade of the 20th century, become a cycle in their own right as the visual finds expression. (I.P.)

References

COMARNESCU, Petre, "N.N. Tonitza", Tineretului Publishing House, Bucharest, 1962 ȘORBAN, Raul, "Nicolae Tonitza", Meridiane Publishing House, Bucharest, 1965.

Dimensions

width 29 cm, height 40 cm

Description

oil on canvas pasted on cardboard, signed upper right, in black, "Tonitza"

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