Vivid magazine, no.31 February 2001 - Romania through international eyes

A REVOLUTION IN COLOUR
THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ART
TRANSFORMED

A REVOLUTION IN COLOUR

In May 2000, Vivid reported on the grand reopening of the European Gallery of The National Museum of Art of Romania, an event that was attended by the President of Romania as well as the directors of such world-class institutions as The National Gallery in London and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Next month The Museum takes another major step forward with the renovation and reopening of the Galley of Romanian Modern Art, in the North Wing of the National Museum.

The square in front of The National Museum of Art of Romania - Piata Revolutiei - is about to earn its name a second time. But this time it won't have anything to do with popular protests in the streets. Rather, the revolution in the making is taking colourful shape within the museum itself. One might call it a palace revolution whose boldness is sure to challenge the imagination, the conventional taste, and perhaps even the tolerance of the art-loving public.

Over a year ago, when work on the European Gallery was well advanced, Roxana Theodorescu, General Director of The National Museum of Art, played with the idea of painting the walls of the exhibit halls in bold colours. She discussed this with her building contractors at the time, put the short time remaining, lack of available funds and the need to look abroad for the appropriate quantities and hues of quality paints forced her to postpone the idea. But only for a time. Being a resolute woman -and good museum directors nowadays have to possess not only aesthetic taste and creativity, but also business initiative and managerial skills - Ms Theodorescu resurrected her idea during the renovation of the museum's North Wing, which would house The Gallery of Romanian Modern Art.

Blue it was…

"I woke up one day convinced that the Brancusi collection should be in blue," she recalls. She explains that given the worldwide fame of the Romanian sculptor, and the fact that he spent most of his career abroad; the museum actually has a rather limited collection of his works. She was concerned that, being few in number and consisting of very different materials, the sculptures would make an overall poor impression, below the expectations of foreign visitors who may have seen the Brancusi retrospectives in Paris and Philadelphia in past years. So, blue it was.

Thus, with this first bold stroke of the brush, a collector of paintings had now become a painter herself. "Of course, if one room is blue, you can't leave the rest white", she explains. And so the colour scheme, and Roxana Theodorescu's enthusiasm, began to spread throughout the museum.

Codruta Cruceanu, Public Relations Director at the museum, explains that Romanian Art has never before seen displayed publicly in a colourful environment. When the North Wing of the Royal Palace, situated diagonally across from the Athenee Palace Hotel, was first renovated in the early 1960s - the palace had sustained extensive bomb damage in the Second World War - its rooms were painted in a conventional white, typical of most 20th century museums. One would have to visit buildings such as Peles Castle or the music rooms of the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu to find colourful exceptions. The Anastasiu Simon Museum in Bucharest, demolish in the 1960s, had fabric-covered walls providing coloured backdrops to the artwork displayed there. Otherwise, exhibition rooms not only lacked personality but were distinctly cold and sterile feeling.

On a gloomy evening just before Christmas, Vivid visited the museum and saw the exhibition rooms that were undergoing extensive renovation. Looming cavernously like Hollywood film sets - the Works of Art were of course not yet in place - one could appreciate the amount of building work which was necessary. Visitors to Bucharest in the early 1990s will recall the dreadful appearance of the palace. The building had been shelled by tanks in 1989, and the resulting fire completely destroyed The Auditorium in the North Wing, melting the ceiling panels which separated the top floor from the roof. Smoke had circulated throughout the building, damaging walls and paintings.

Workmen had to be employed to strip the walls, in some cases down to the brick, and to reapply plaster and paint. The woodwork throughout the museum was in a similarly deplorable state: Mahogany doors and their frames, which had been burned or shot at, were in a similarly deplorable state and required complete refinishing. By January this year (2001), a second visit to the museum was far more revealing: the first coats of vivid color had been applied to the walls, and artificial illumination had been installed to supplement the skylights. Numerous works of art were being brought up from storage and were standing expectantly against the walls pending selection. One could now begin to form a first impression of the marriage between the artwork and its decor.

The master builder

The man behind the renovation is a 53-year-old Dutchman named R.Peter Oostveen. A former medical student, Mr. R.Peter Oostveen came to Romania amidst the violence of 1989 to deliver humanitarian assistance. At the same time The National Museum of Art of Romania was being shelled, he was busy repairing people at a local hospital. Now, after establishing a local construction company called Drosa in 1994 and performing various building projects including the Dutch Embassy, ING and Citibank, he is having the time of his life repairing an entire Museum.

Mr. R.Peter Oostveen came to be involved in the Museum when he was asked to help with the furnishings in the South Wing's Gallery of European Art. His team is responsible for the elegant wooden cloakroom and the gift shop in the entrance area. He currently has about 20 workmen on-site and a workshop in Pitesti, which employs over 80 people. They are working in high gear to build everything from doors and gallery partitions to the wooden bases on which many of the sculptures will stand. He is particularly proud of the workmanship - exclusively Romanian, his emphases - which has gone into the design and reconstruction of the mahogany and nut doorways and benches, which were rebuilt in their original styles. The benches and chairs were paid for by donations from the Association of Friends of the National Museum of Art.

"This is a very special job because you need a lot of taste, improvisation, and colorization", according to Mr. R.Peter Oostveen, who cheerily admits that he has no specialized training in renovating Art Museums. The work is so multi-faceted, however, that in the absence of a prohibitively expensive army of project specialists, the work is perhaps perfectly suited for a versatile type like Mr. R.Peter Oostveen, who in a previous career flown F- 104 Star fighter for the Royal Dutch Air Force.

He explains that the existing space, though large, is not easy to manage. First there is the colour scheme, which progresses from red (Aman, Grigorescu, Andreescu) to beige (Luchian, Pallady), ochre (Paciurea), grey (avant-garde), blue (Brancusi) and back to grey (inter-war period) before arriving at the starting point, a semi-circular stairway with red and beige walls at the top.

Then there is the lighting. All the rooms in the gallery have thermo pan skylights supplemented by artificial illumination, and combining the two has been a real challenge. Romania has such varied natural lighting over the course of the year, according to Mr. R.Peter Oostveen, that the appearance of the artworks changes with the season. True art lovers will therefore want to visit the Museum several times a year to appreciate its collection in, literally, a different light.

Finally, there is the flow of visitors between the rooms that has to be taken into consideration; and, of course, the actual selection of the works, a task in which Mr. R.Peter Oostveen has been closely involved. And he loves it: "Every day is a creation".

Fewer is better

Mr. R.Peter Oostveen is quick to emphasis that the project's success is really built on teamwork. He has high praise for the staff at the museum, and enjoys a unique working relationship with Roxana Theodorescu. Anyone who has met them will agree that both are decisive individuals who know how to get things done. Though they welcome the involvement and active suggestions of the curators and other professionals on the museum's staff -- and the opinions are many - they make sure that discussions lead to decisions and then action. Deadlines are taken very seriously at the museum.

Roxana Theodorescu has an eye for getting the overall presentation "right" and has insisted on a stringent selection of artworks to avoid cluttering. There are 10,000 individual objects in the collection, and only about 600 can be put on display at any one time, so her curators are understandably keen to fill the rooms with as much art as possible. She believes the rule "fewer is better" will ensure a qualitatively more effective display.
Visitors will be able to join Theodor Aman (1831-1891) On the Terrace at Sinaia, which depicts the local aristocracy lounging in this summer resort within view of the famous monastery up the hill and the Bucegi mountains beyond. Aman was a successful genre painter whose works provided a visual documentation of the Romanian elite over a century ago.

There are works by Andreescu, dating from both before and after his sojourn in France, where in the course of three years (1879-1881) he associated with members of the Barbizon school. Following a collection of paintings by Pallady, the next gallery is dedicated to Paciurea and his various chimeras, mythical creatures combining women' heads with the bodies of animals. Another smaller room nearby contains the plaster model of a Byzantine-style tomb monument produced by Paciurea; the original, cast in bronze, stands in Belu cemetery.

Never before seen

Another exciting aspect of the collection, according to Rodica Matei, Deputy Director of the museum, is that a number of works have never before been displayed publicly. These include Pascally's portrait of the artist Simonidi; Grigorescu's Gypsy Woman from Chergani, whose mildly lascivious smile seems to anticipate with relish the crowds who will soon view her; and, in contrast, Teisanu's portrayal of a Woman with Mask, suggesting that the coming surge of public attention may prove too much for her.

Then there is the art that has not been displayed for over fifty years because it failed to conform to the canons of socialist correctness. Stoienescu, who left Romania after World War Two, was only selectively displayed. His portrait of King Mihai is one example: the young monarch looks slightly troubled, as though sensing the tragedy which would befall his kingdom. Then there is the sculptor Demu, whose work of Icarus crashing to earth will be on exhibit. Demu's own career in Romania suffered a similar plunge: though very much in favor in the 1950s, when he was commissioned to do a statue of Stalin, he defected to South America a decade later and displays of his works were banned thereafter.

As we left the museum, we were reminded of a story which occurred last year: an American working in Bucharest rented the upstairs apartment in a prewar house from an elderly couple living on the ground floor. Wishing to add a personal touch to his new home, he arranged - with the hesitant approval of the owners - to have the rooms painted: blue entrance hall, yellow bedroom and salmon-pink living room. The painting was well underway when the owner appeared one day, took one look at the variety of colors and remarked that it reminded her of a gypsy dwelling.

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