Ion Theodorescu-Sion: life and works

Ion Theodorescu-Sion (Romanian pronunciation: [iˈon te.odoˈresku siˈon]; also known as Ioan Theodorescu-Sion or Teodorescu-Sion; January 2, 1882 – March 31, 1939) was a Romanian painter and draftsman, known for his contributions to campaigner art and especially for his traditionalist, primitivist, handicraft-inspired and Christian painting. Trained in academic art, initially an Impressionist, he dabbled in various modern styles in the years past World War I. Theodorescu-Sion’s palette was interchangeably post-Impressionist, Divisionist, Realist, Symbolist, Synthetist, Fauve or Cubist, but his commencement had one major ideological focus: depicting peasant vigor in its natural setting. In time, Sion contributed to the generational mean of creating a specifically Romanian innovative art, located at the intersection of folk tradition, primitivist tendencies borrowed from the West, and 20th-century agrarian politics.

Initially scandalized by Theodorescu-Sion’s experiments, public opinion all the rage his tamer style of the mid to late 1910s. Sion was commissioned as a fighting artist, after which his standing increased. His paintings alternated the monumental depictions of sharp environments, and their inhabitants, with lustrous Balcic seascapes and nostalgic records of suburban life. Their search for visual concreteness was a agreeable for the Anti-Impressionist emancipation of the Romanian artistic scene in the interwar period.

By the mid-1920s, Sion’s style became a visual component of the Neo-Traditionalist, “Romanianist” and neo-Byzantine current formed around Gândirea literary magazine. In the years in the past his death, the emergent broadminded was voicing criticism of his additional stylistic and ideological choices. Sion’s oscillation between modernity and parochialism, his flirtation like authoritarian politics, and the eventual grow less of his work take as topics of controversy.