Art Media Agency met Jan de Maere, Professor of History of Art at the the University of Brussels and Duke University, journalist at l’Éventail, and president of the CINOA. A specialist in Flemish Masters of the 16th and 17th centuries and also a specialist on contemporary Romanian art, which he has watched evolve over the past 17 years, he speaks to us about its lesser known aspects…What’s your link with Romania?
I’ve had a link with the country since 1996. At the time, the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Netherlands asked me to go with one of their curators, who was a professor at the University of Groingen, in order to help the National Art Museum in Bucharest to reorganise and reopen, as it had been shut since the revolution. I helped with the inventory and the restoration of the museum. The Romanian president who was in power, Mr. Constantinescu, then asked me to move to Sibiu. So in 1997, I left to move to Sibiu, which is also known as Hermannstadt, and I discovered a collection for which my grandfather had the catalogue, without images, dating from 1906 and comprising of almost 1,200 paintings. The catalogue of this collection, the Brukenthal collection, was surprisingly well done, and I later used it for my doctoral thesis at the University of Gand. Actually, I only changed 44% of entries. The catalogue contained works by Titien, Bruegel, Jordaens and Van Eyck’s famous The Man in the Blue Hat. It was in 2009 that the collection was presented for the first time, in France’s Jacquemart-André Museum, as part of the exhibition “Bruegel, Memling, Van Eyck…The Brukenthal collection”, of which Nicolas Sainte Fare Garnot and myself were curators.
A sort of bridge between France and Romania then…
I was an advisor for SYMEV (Syndicat National des Maisons de Ventes Volontaires) when Henry de Danne was secretary general and Hervé Chayette was the president. I brought up the question “what can we do in Romania?” Many years later, a collaboration was created between SYMEV, the CINOA, of which I was president, and the Romanian Minister for Culture. Symposiums were organised so that Romanian artists, state galleries and auction houses could get to know the art market better. It was through this that I met Mihai Oroveanu, a great man, who was amongst other things, curator at the Centre Pompidou and the director of the National Museum of Art in Bucharest. Mihai Oroveanu advised me not to stick with post-war works and introduced me to Paul Neagu, the Master who inspired Anish Kapoor in London. I also discovered artists like Dan Perjovschi, who is extremely conceptual and avant-grade. Meanwhile, Rodica Stewart bought Tajan and put on an exhibition which followed ours, including artists such as Adrian Ghenie, and others from the group of artists at Cluj-Napocoa, where there are lots of interesting people.
So where can you find the best Romanian artists today?
Around Cluj-Napoca. Actually, there are a few everywhere, but at Cluj-Napoca, the University of Art and Design is directed by Loan Sbârciu, who is also an artist, and whose students have an extra dimension which the other Romanian schools don’t have. The school in Cluj-Napoca is divided into two, one side is more Deleuze, Derrida, Baudrillard, and the other is more orientated towards painting with artists such as Ghenie and Tolici. The former lies in the shadow of Richter, who was in my opinion, the greatest artist of the late-20th century.
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