Ion Musceleanu
Birth Date
1903
Birthplace
Caracal
Death Date
1997
Occupation
artist
Bibliography
Ion Musceleanu was one of Romania’s best known post-impressionist artists. He was born in 1903 to a family of intellectuals, in Caracal, Oltenia, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest between 1920 and 1926. Among his teachers were Fritz Stork, Dimitrie Paciurea, George Mirea Demetrescu, and Constantin Artachino. After the unification of the three Romanian states in 1918, and the new impetus this gave Romanian art, Musceleanu took study trips to France, Italy and Germany.
His first exhibited work was a watercolour called Case, ‘Houses’, shown in 1930 at the Official Art Salon. He enjoyed plein air painting, and produced many nudes and portraits, expressed in warm tones with a poetic atmosphere, but for him, “a painter spends all his life painting one picture”. Henri Catargi wrote about him as “a remarkable colourist”.
In 1940 he was conscripted, though he still managed to take part in the Official Art Salon exhibitions between 1941 and 1943. After the war he returned to Bucharest and shared a studio with Ion Pacea during the Soviet occupation, when their ‘bourgeois provenance’ made it difficult to find a house in which to live and work. In the 1960s he worked as a drawing teacher at a school in the scenic town of Ramnicu Valcea, where he mainly painted mountain landscapes. Later he returned to Bucharest and worked as a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest.
Musceleanu had a solo show in Moscow in 1966. Before the fall of Communism he participated in group exhibitions in Minsk (1959), France (1968), Berlin, Rostok (1969), London (1972), Washington D.C., Ohio (1976), Athens (1974), Lisbon (1975) and Berlin (1977).
Entry authored by Dr Alex Popescu, Dec 2016
His first exhibited work was a watercolour called Case, ‘Houses’, shown in 1930 at the Official Art Salon. He enjoyed plein air painting, and produced many nudes and portraits, expressed in warm tones with a poetic atmosphere, but for him, “a painter spends all his life painting one picture”. Henri Catargi wrote about him as “a remarkable colourist”.
In 1940 he was conscripted, though he still managed to take part in the Official Art Salon exhibitions between 1941 and 1943. After the war he returned to Bucharest and shared a studio with Ion Pacea during the Soviet occupation, when their ‘bourgeois provenance’ made it difficult to find a house in which to live and work. In the 1960s he worked as a drawing teacher at a school in the scenic town of Ramnicu Valcea, where he mainly painted mountain landscapes. Later he returned to Bucharest and worked as a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest.
Musceleanu had a solo show in Moscow in 1966. Before the fall of Communism he participated in group exhibitions in Minsk (1959), France (1968), Berlin, Rostok (1969), London (1972), Washington D.C., Ohio (1976), Athens (1974), Lisbon (1975) and Berlin (1977).
Entry authored by Dr Alex Popescu, Dec 2016
Geolocation
Collection
Citation
“Ion Musceleanu,” Tyler Collection of Romanian and Modern Art: University of Tasmania, accessed April 19, 2024, https://tylercollection.omeka.net/items/show/904.