Ion Grigorescu. ”American art has left so many tracks, acknowledged or not.”

 Ion Grigorescu, b. 1945, artist

American art picked a moment for itself when the soul of the Romanian artist was open towards the scene of the Greats, was bolstered by the Party's granting freedom of form, and had the "freedom" afforded by the lack of "stars" in socialist Romania. 

I don't remember and can't see why I'd prefer precise data to fictional data; for example, in 1968, an exhibition of British painting left a strong impression on me so I got a 5 mark in school, I was in fifth grade, on the verge of failing, and loved pre-raphaelism. Only for a year. 1969 saw American art and the American president come to Romania. I can't remember the artists either, but I can still picture some of them: Warhol and his pop cans (and Jasper Jones's Ballantines), Lichtenstein's raster, Rauschenberg and his photographs on canvas. My "monumental art" classmates found a technique that proliferated throughout the school: we put gas all over magazine pages with color images, then we press them onto canvas, paper, anything – typographic ink was thus transferred, slightly faded, but very Rauschenberg. I haven't kept any of these transfers, they were too clearly sourced from someone else, but our professors found a way to make the stylistic jump on the occasion of the President's Homage. 

The Americans have the figure of Kennedy too (Rauschenberg) and in one of the American exhibition catalogues (1964?) there was a portrait of the president on one of the first pages with no author listed, in gouache, a difficult technique that yields great results, a perfect likeness, but done by hand, real art! As far as communication goes, it was like Stalin smoking a pipe, meaning jovial, not a 5-meter electoral portrait, but I think this American officialism that seems quasi-normal and untainted by any Cult would end up activating popular republics' appetite to surpass "the rich". The classic portraits of the '50s and '60s of Executive Committee members, or Marx, Engels, Lenin, in principle, visionaries of the future, were cold and expressionless figures that showed the painters' fear of stepping out of line. Mao, Saddam, etc. would expand the surface, the gestures, the smiles. And Romanians, oh, Romanians love an upstart! The Appearance and Disappearance of the Image would suit them just fine, they are like budding flowers and we pollinate them. Their shift from action painting to pop art is so democratic (an unnoticeable pleonasm), and for the newcomers and the uninitiated it can go the other way around (maybe it's The Disappearance and Appearamce...).

American art has left so many tracks, acknowledged or not – I'll copy down a dream from October 19 2010: "An Anglo-American exhibition, Mr. Gherasim inevitably picks whatever shows up on his computer, some XIXth century stuff or photographs, copies? Every work is chosen as if it were for its own good and for the good of the whole, so they get along with one another, and the comparison can be drawn as far as a pole vault. I'd buy myself a pole, even though I have no practice with it and the others grab it from very high up. The bar is very high, it's set for them."

After a night's sleep, a Scandinavian breakfast. Open buffet. Helen Frankenthaler is a very good-looking artist, she lays down on the floor to work, she lets the paint drip. "There are no rules, ignore them!", "Every canvas is a journey in its own way". And she smiles. I used to hear these slogans all the time from my colleagues in the engraving workshop. The decree states that art is easy, but engraving is hard, with many steps, somewhat dirty and dangerous. Everyone is happy that somehow something comes out of this workshop. 

I liked Robert Rauschenberg because his paintings encompass a lot of things, among which the photographs catch the eye. I paint an eagle too (in 1972), the disheveled Bed shows up in Homage to Bacon, 1979, scraps of writing, images that transpire from journeys in painting, prints in Rapid Sports Club, 1973, the choreography in Merce III from 1953, in Trăisteni, 1976, putting something other than canvas on the chassis or putting the canvas on something other than a chassis, all of these are sources that my memory has assiduously erased. 

We find Louise Nevelson in Geta Brătescu's later self-portraits, in her love of cupboards full of collages and furniture with human expression, for makeup, hairstyling (anything covering the head), sculptural costume (between installation and body art), smoking, exposed hands; love or horror, seeing as we're talking about an elderly person. 

George Segal really looked like Doru Covrig, but they were also similar in their use of molds and their passion for photographic situations and cold, frozen, anti-sex-appeal humor. 

Before Bacon, Willem de Kooning taught me to reconstruct figures, postures, nerves, out of essential strikes of the pencil or brush.

American art seemed to us like a candid phenomenon, while its conflict of priority it was waging against European art was obscured, especially regarding action painting, demanding a written effort from critics and historians, while artists criticized it (the conflict) by showing conceptual and body art. So what we saw when Nixon visited and when the American library opened was already classic and outdated. 

The Ceaușescu government had a different perspective on culture: France, Great Britain, the USA, they were the naïve rich we could extort things from, while Prague under the Warsaw Pact was an opportunity to show concern for the outside world, a kind of internationalism which, as time went on, became less necessary as Ceaușescu found his capitalist vocation, leading and whipping the economy into shape. 

From his consultations with artists, he understood that we have "our own forces", which was obvious in the Americans' case as they made op art free of chromatic rules, out of "pure exaltation", not to mention the far more punchy strains of dada. On the other hand, Ceaușe

scu and his newer cultural leaders on the Old Continent were taking issue with modernism, palace art being outmoded, academic at most, maybe leaving room for a Felicien Rops in the bedroom. The Artists', Writers', Composers' Union had already received instruction from Moscow and had opened the doors for folklore (an Anglist term) by way of another kind of American art – Mexican muralism, a so-called expression of the "Mexican people". The "fortuitous" formulas, the ones that were paid for, were the Bitzan Șetran collective's and Bălașa's and Mărgineanu's central American pop art, which marked a devolution toward primitive art, just another form of adulation of the Leader, the Cântarea României formula, the influx of gifts and free art; however, none of the formulas seem to have been especially satisfying, they didn't excite Romania's President, I think they ended up as (educational) efforts, in vain.

 Ion Grigorescu, Dialogue with Ceaușescu

I wonder if he kept volumes like Works, Homage (or She, Scientific Works) in his home or just in his Office. And as far as the gifts and trophies go, it was a known fact that they were generously destined to be given to the people in future museums. 

The change in the Party line had an effect on this generation, my generation, stimulated by American art – it either led to isolation in the workshop, to emigration (Doru Covrig), or to some other activity (for example, the conception of the XX Century magazine) and the beginning of writing. American artists were presented with quotes, mostly oral, and few and far between. We became writers not read by the general public, with texts neglected by critics (Geta Brătescu, the Studio series, Covrig's Biodiversity Workshop in Marna, texts by Urmuz about birds and insects, my Diary). 

Of course, there was also a group of artists, not a generation, who didn't love American art or wasn't enthralled by it, who managed to leave the country shortly before, to Venice: Ion Nicodim, Paul Gherasim, Octav Grigorescu, George Apostu, less nostalgic, impassioned by continental art.