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Tuculescu, Ion
(b Craiova, 19 May 1910; d Bucharest, 27 July 1962). Romanian painter. He had his first one-man exhibition in Craiova at the age of 15 but studied medicine before taking up painting again in 1935. He visited Paris in 1937 and travelled through Europe for two years. When he returned, his first works were influenced by the local realist tradition, in which strong Impressionist and Post-Impressionist influences mingled with faint echoes of the avant-garde elements that he had encountered in western Europe. His early paintings comprised mainly still-lifes, depictions of peasant homes and landscapes (e.g. Landscape at Mangalia with Little Donkey, 1945; Bucharest, Mus. A.), and were characterized by savage gestures and colours. A series of paintings of rape fields (e.g. Rape Field, 1943; Bucharest, Mus. A.) showed the influence of van Gogh, while Tuculescu’s series of exotic masks was more clearly derived from the work of Paul Gauguin and Maurice de Vlaminck. After 1946 Tuculescu began to explore Romanian folk art: in a rich series of strange landscapes, popular scenes and simplistic compositions, he combined realistic elements with popular, stylized, geometrical forms to produce striking depictions of an elemental nature. From 1957, in his ‘totemic’ period, he was attracted to pure abstraction. Isolated in his defiance of the dominant and enforced trend towards Socialist Realism, Tuculescu created a world of simple, essential signs, such as crosses, circles and spirals. His last paintings were explosions of pure colour and gesture, representing cosmic visions in which through primeval symbols he sought an abstract, symbolic language of the unconscious (e.g. Suns, c. 1960; priv. col., see Comarnescu, pl. 55).
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