Henriette Delavrancea, interior for the villa Popovici-Lupa at Balcic, Romania; drawing on paper, 1934.
Photograph: EAHN

Octav Doicescu, the Romanian House for the New York World Fair; drawing on paper, 1939.
Photograph: EAHN

Paul Smarandescu, the Senate in Bucharest, Romania; sketch on paper; entry for the competition, 1911.
Photograph: EAHN

Octav Doicescu, interior of a room in the resting house for the Yachting Club at Snagov, near Bucharest, Romania; drawing on paper, 1930.
Photograph: EAHN

the space of romanian modernity, 1906-1947
Curator: carmen popescu

The Romanian Peasant Museum, Bucharest
27 October–12 December 2010

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It is a fact that architects sometimes partake in the rather tortuous task of building a national identity. This happened in modern Romania, between the founding of the monarchy (1881) and the expulsion of the last king (1947), when various architectural discourses, such as eclecticism, traditionalism, and modernism, were successively engaged in configuring the country’s most appropriate representations. It is also a fact that the image can be a valuable medium for architectural development, as proved, for instance, in interwar period in Romania, by the influence of multifaceted visual material (magazines, posters, paintings, commercials, postcards, etc.) on both creativity and taste. Architecture and image are therefore key terms in a narrative about the interwoven relationships between habitation, social practices, fashion, aesthetics, (national) purposes, and the like. I believe that Carmen Popescu’s exhibition ‘The Space of Romanian Modernity 1906–1947’ brought these exchanges to the fore.
The exhibition assembled an impressive quantity of various artefacts illustrating the ‘space of modernity,’ such as drawings, decorative objects, paintings, photographs, and fragments of documentary films. The core of this vast display consisted of more than one hundred drawings, never before exhibited, made by three of the most significant Romanian architects: Paul Smarandescu, Henriette Gibory-Delavrancea, and Octav Doicescu. Unquestionably an ambitious project, unparalleled in the last decade, the show involved numerous institutions, among which the Architect’s Chamber of Romania, the art museums in Braila and Constanta, the National Museum of Art of Romania, and the Academy National Library. And last but not least, the venue of this enterprise, symbolically appropriate to the topic of modernity, was the Romanian Peasant Museum, located in the very edifice that once housed the Museum of National Art.

If I were to summarize Carmen Popescu’s curatorial approach, I would stress at least three theses: a chronological readjustment (1906–1947) that somehow attenuates the impact of the two World Wars, while emphasizing other decisive events; the delineation of three major fields—expositions, city, and leisure—pertaining to a ceaseless reformulation of modernity; and the interplay between image and architecture (in my opinion the most interesting part).
For Romanian modernity, the year 1906 has a multilevel significance: it produced the first General Exposition, the founding of the Society of Architects in Romania, the first issue of its magazine Arhitectura (Architecture), and the founding of the Museum of National Art that was supposedly engaged in creating a national artistic language. The other temporal limit—1947—was set by the end of monarchy, followed, in a captive ‘popular democracy,’ by a rigid subordination to the Soviet system. In the same year, the well-known architect and theoretician George Matei Cantacuzino published a book on the aesthetics of reconstruction, meant to guide, in the aftermath of the war, a rational, modern, and ethical rebuilding. The forty years between these two milestones were marked by the recasting of the national style (after 1918), followed by the advancement of the sharpest Modernism (towards 1930), and later by a sort of modern classicism (around 1939), while traditionalism gradually reinvented itself as a form of modernity.

All these developments were framed, in the exhibition, by three domains divided in multiple aspects. For instance, the ‘city’ section was structured according to the daily life rhythm—work, habitation, entertainment, cultural habits, etc.—and ‘leisure’ was geographically divided in seashore architectural programs, mountain houses, and the like. The ‘expositions,’ in their section, were ranged not only chronologically but also according to status (local or international). Without any doubt, the most significant was the General Exposition in 1906 (celebrating, at the same time, eighteen centuries of Latin continuity, twenty-five years of independence, and four decades since the arrival of the future King Carol I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen), as it favoured the national style as the only valid option—hence its privileged space within the exhibition. Symmetrically, the 1939 World Fair in New York imposed the new classicism as official program, supported by King Carol II himself. Taking this section as a starting point, I would particularly emphasize the mise en abîme at work here: the visual memory of highly important past exhibitions becomes an organic part of the present one.

Consequently, the interplay between image and architecture could be taken as the central theme of this curatorial event. Interlaced in its discourse were ‘the architecture of the image’ and ‘the image of architecture.’ One level dealt with the image of Romania ‘built’ abroad (at the international expositions after 1930) through the medium of its pavilions. It dealt, moreover, with the rigorous (architectural) structuring of the visual material. The other level, centred on the image of architecture, included, first of all, the very special historical expressiveness of the objects themselves (especially the drawings), and, more generally, our polymorphous contemporary representation of the architecture from that particular epoch.
Even if image and architecture were the key terms in this exhibition, the ‘text’ that accompanied the curatorial project cannot be forgotten. The marvellous display of artifacts was framed by an international conference entitled ‘(Dis)continuities: Spaces of Modernity 1900–1950’ (26–27 November 2010), organized by the Architect’s Chamber of Romania, the Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas, Leipzig, and the National University of Arts, Bucharest, with the support of the ‘Ion Mincu’ University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest; and by a volume of scholarly essays.

Cosmin Ungureanu
[‘Ion Mincu’ University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest]

Publication connected to the exhibition:
Carmen Popescu, ed., (Dis)continuities: Fragments of Romanian Modernity in the First Half of the 20th Century, Bucharest: Simetria, 2010, 228 pp., 142 illus., LEI 51.23, ISBN 978-973-1872-15-5 (Romanian and English versions)