ART HISTORY in ROMANIA Corina Teacă Translated by Matthew

IN SEARCH OF NATIONAL TRADITIONS: ART HISTORY IN ROMANIA Corina Teacă Translated by Matthew Rampley From the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries the three Romanian countries—Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania—rarely enjoyed political stability. The constant pressures exerted by the Ottoman Empire, Moldavian uncertainty regarding Poland, and the development of Tran- sylvania, which was eventually annexed by Austria-Hungary, accounted for the fluctuations of its borders and the history of the Romanians. Until the mid-nineteenth century the territories inhabited by Romanians were politically and culturally divided; Transylvania, culturally heterogeneous with its Hungarian and German populations, maintained close links to central Europe, whereas Moldavia and Wallachia belonged, artistically and in terms of their religion, to the post-Byzantine world, along with Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece.1 One can speak of a growing Turkish influence up to the eighteenth century, when Moldavia and Wallachia came under the direct control of the Ottoman Empire. The execution in 1714 of the voivode, Constantin Brân- coveanu, in Constantinople, ushered in more than a century of rule by Greek Phanariots. Complicated external relations were thus exacerbated by internal tensions caused by diverse aristocratic factions which largely contributed to the fragile social and political conditions. In the nineteenth century, with the rise of Russia at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, the conflict between these two great powers redrew the map of South-Eastern Europe. One by one Moldavia and Wallachia fell under the tutelage of one of these powers. Following the Russo-Turkish war of 1828–29, the two Romanian principalities came under the influence of Tsarist Russia; for several decades they were ruled by Russia, as their protector and by the Ottoman Empire, as the suzerain. In spite of their weaknesses, Moldavia and Wallachia achieved their first stable union in 1859, with the help of France, followed by their definitive separation from 1 On the history of Romania see Ioan Pop, The Romanians and Romania: A Brief History (New York, 2000). 452 corina teacă Ottoman rule after the War of Independence of 1878. Several decades later, in the wake of the First World War, the grand union of Alba-Iulia of 1918 incorporated Transylvania into the Romanian state. The long history of political turbulence and insecurity affected the evolution of cultural institutions. Only with the stable conditions of the nineteenth century could they be set up, and the traditional Romanian world was accordingly dissolved by the growth of Western models.2 From the point of view of urban dwellers the introduction of Western culture had the further virtue of partly levelling out regional differences. Innovation was particularly marked in the spheres of architecture, fine art, education and fashion; in education, in particular, the imitation of the West resulted in new institutions, and even after the first universities were established on Western European lines, the intellectual and artistic elite continued to study at universities and academies abroad, above all in France, but also in Germany, Italy or Switzerland. French, the preferred language in the sophisticated salons and in intellectual circles, maintained its dominant position until the Communist takeover after the Second World War, when Russian, introduced into the school curriculum, competed with other European languages. Despite the ideological pressure exerted by the Communist authorities in the 1950s, Russian did not attain dominance, nor did French continue to be dominant. The disappearance of the Communist regime in 1989 brought in its wake an undiscriminating openness to the West, which led to a plurality of cultures and values circulating simultaneously. The formation of the modern Romanian state in the nineteenth century involved the reduction of the inevitable discrepancies and differences in important areas of social and cultural life. The reform of the education system and the creation of new cultural institutions, such as museums, art schools, or academies, were the index of a series of political decisions with lasting effects. Within this changing context, in which new curricula were being constantly tried out, art history was at first not a great priority in the domain of scholarship. Previous attempts to describe the evolution of the discipline have made a direct connection between its beginnings in the second half of the nineteenth century and the historical view of art, in particular, the romantic cult of the medieval past, echoes of which 2 Lucian Boia, Istorie şi mit în conştiinţa românească (Bucharest, 1997)..

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