89. Lucreția Indoors in Târgoviște [1938]

Gheorghe Petraşcu

1872, Tecuci, Galați - 1949, Bucureşti

Selling price

EUR 35.000

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Session

Thu, 14 December 2023 19:00

Gheorghe Petrașcu will be particularly concerned with the specificity of his own home and will reveal, through a long series of canvases dedicated to the motif, aspects of his studio in Bucharest or Târgoviște or aspects of his family life. In 1911, he married Lucretia Marinescu (who became Petrașcu), and from 1912 onwards, the young woman will crown the artist's works with her presence more and more often. Placed in the midst of nature, on the seashore; captured admiring a painting, lying on the bed, sitting on the sofa or reading the newspaper, Lucretia will become the leitmotif of Gheorghe Petrașcu's life and work. The artist works directly from colour, giving the pictorial matter a particular consistency, a mark of his personal style. The succulent and shining paste reveal Monticelli, and the structures made in Cubist manner indicate Cézanne. An admirable drawer, like Luchian, Petrașcu focuses on outlining fluid forms, undeniably highlighted by the use of light effects. The artist has imparted an extraordinary expressiveness to chiaroscuro, which he has almost scenographically adapted in an attempt to capture the atmosphere in his studio adorned with shades of black, white, and reddish accents. Both his wife Lucretia and his children - Picky and Mariana - will begin to appear more and more often in Petrașcu's work. The artist's interiors become a modest record of everyday life and at the same time a leitmotif of his mature work. He captures the image of the home in its intimacy, with the diaphanous silhouette of the wife installed on the couch and thus animates the atmosphere of the interiors with the illustration of the human motif captured in static poses or in moments of relaxation. A closer look at his entire work reveals a recurring set of elements with affective value. From the traditional black carpet, framed by coloured tufts (the chromatic mastery is revealed here by the shades of red, green or white), to the ever-present sofa, armchair or the unmistakable wall of paintings. The artist narrows the wide frame to a detail plane, cutting out the non-essential parts for his canvases and keeping only a fragment of the wall in the background. The wall covered with paintings also becomes a central motif in these works, but Petrașcu does not venture into a miniaturist journey, but sketches briefly, at times recognizably, his early works more in the form of patches of colour. The calm atmosphere and the light evenly distributed over the surface of the work converge in the end to concentrate the motif in a cumulus of elements that compose the whole work.

References

JIANU, I., 'Gheorghe Petrașcu', 'King Michael I' Royal Foundation, Bucharest, 1945. OPRESCU, George, 'Gheorghe Petrașcu', Meridiane Publishing House, Bucharest, 1963. DRĂGUȚ, Vasile, 'Reîntâlnire cu pictura lui Petrașcu' ('Re-encounter with Petrașcu's painting'), in Revista Muzeelor, no. 2, 1973, pp. 116-120.

Dimensions

width 47 cm, height 39.5 cm

Description

oil on canvas, signed and dated bottom right, in black, 'G. Petrașcu, (1)938'

Dating

1938

PROVENANCE

Valentin CeauÈescu collection.

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