During the relatively unfreezing period of the late 1950s, talents appeared even outside the official institutions. This was a surprising aspect taking in account the Romanian cultural climate of those times.
In 1959 and 1960, painter Sabin Bălaşa was leading a drawing and painting workshop at the Municipal Arts Centre at Cutitul de Argint, near the Crematory. Sabin was himself very young, had just graduated the Institute of Fine Arts, but already known as an interesting personality. Despite his subsequent evolution, his role as a teacher was then very important to us. His drawing lessons were exemplary and he taught us the importance of geometric rigor and solid construction of the drawing, the only ones that can bring solidness, and especially veracity and character, to a drawing.
Among those present on his workshop, a surprising number of odd talents were found which, for different reasons, had not had access to the Institute. The most prominent were Horia Bernea, Serban Epure and Tede Moraru. The first two had been expelled from the Faculty of Mathematics (Bernea) or from the Electronic (Epure) for political reasons. They had fled to technical schools, architecture (Bernea) and electronics (Epure). Serban went to Sabin and Sanda came with me. Sanda was studying architecture, myself electronics, however we were in love and intrigued by painting.
Sanda was of course influenced by her mother. Mrs. Vincenz impressed us a lot by the contact she had with André Lhote’s school at Paris. Acquisitive how we were then to get into the mysteries of modern art, mysteries caught in the glory of socialist realism, André Lhote was an almost obligatory entry point and his landscape treaty was soberly read. It is not known today how difficult it was to access Western painting or even the modern one in Russia or Poland in those glacial times. The Skira monographs were in great demand for those like us who knew Van Gogh rather from reproductions.
However, Horia Bernea had other passions and other goals. His father, ethnologist Ernest Bernea, a student of Gusti, had revealed to his son the beauties of the Romanian village from Poiana Marului, a place that would become the great meeting center for a well-known group today and the beggining of Bernea’s personal work.
The origin of the artistic calling of others is less clear and we will not be able to tell it here. But they all shared the belief of a high image of painting and through painting. A sort of “purer second play”.
That is how we arrived in the summer of 1960 at Poiana Marului together with Horia, Şerban, Letiţia Bucur, Tede Moraru and others. We drew and painted all day long on the heights, causing the comical questions of peasants who did not really understand what we were doing there and asked without wickedness: “You can still do it, can you?” I remember with great excitement one of the paintings painted by Sanda, who proved with great talent. The hills had become brown, green and ocher strips under a grape sky and gloomy as winter mornings, but extraordinarily vivid and authentic. I do not know if this artwork whose memory I can not separate from still exist.
It is known what became Poiana Mărului in the works of Epure, Moraru and others in this group. It was perhaps the first non-affiliated painting movement in post-belligean Romania.
Then our roads broke up. Sanda drove to study architecture, I went to study more sophisticated sciences, but Serban, Horia, and Tede remained unsteady with painting. About Horia we dont have to say anything, Tede has become an well-known painter, expressing his obsessions with extraordinary energy and freshness, Epure created a rare geometric and algorithmic artwork in a far land, called America.
Sanda was addicted to her vocation. With incredible courage and patience, she resumed the hard way of studying to make sure she did not make a dilettante work, an odious word. For an architect like her, painting was a profession with secrets and skills that must be mastered as a gymnast must master lethal jumps or a pianist his notes rather than a society game .
I would like to greet her here, a rare probity of the authentic artist who Sanda Vincenz-Brediceanu became. A true artist we’ve lost too early to whom I wish to pay homage now.
And I would like to thank Peter, the son of Sanda, and Iulia Vincenz, her younger sister, for this exhibition they organized with so much love and care.
Ion Filotti
Bucharest, 18 November 2017