Vasile Kazar

Vasile Kazar (30 July 30, 1913, Sighet - March 21, 1998) was a graphic artist, draughtsman, and illustrator, one of the most important Romanian contemporary artists.

Vasile Kazar was born into a wealthy family of Hebrew intellectuals, which allowed him after graduating high school in his hometown to continue his studies in Baia Mare, Budapest, and at the Academie Grande Chaumière in Paris. He began his career by providing illustrations in the early 1930s for such left-wing magazines as Stânga and Cuvântul liber. In 1932 he had a one-man exhibition in Cluj, and in 1937 he published in Oradea the album Pita de mălai (Corn bread), which includes 12 drawings of the peasant life of Maramureş; these were dramatically detailed, showing the influences of Pieter Bruegel I and of Japanese prints - works that will be exhibited next year to the Contemporary Art Galleries in Paris. In 1944, he was deported to a Nazi concentration camps where he lose parents. Holocaust survivor, from 1950 until 1976 he was a lecturer, then professor at the Department of Graphic Arts of the Institute "Nicolae Grigorescu" in Bucharest.

Vasile Kazar brings to his work one of the most authentic testimony about a dramatic destiny assumed lucidly. From the late 1940s until c. 1958 he tried to conform to the aesthetic and ideological precepts of Socialist Realism, but in the early 1960s he reverted to the expressionism that had characterized his work of 1945-7, producing drawings that displayed a dreamlike touch in their scratchy line and biomorph imagery. He developed this style in the 1970s and 1980s in such series of drawings as Apparitions at the Old Court and From my Bestiary. He subsequently evolved a very subtle use of color, which became much harsher. He leaved behind a valuable work that includes cycles of illustrations, such as those for "Duin elegies. Sonnets to Orpheus" by Reiner Maria Rilke, "The Old Court Kings" by Mateiu Caragiale or for the poems of Catullus, hundreds of drawings which are the pride of private galleries and collections around the world. In 1992 Kazar donated 103 drawings, 7 prints and 6 sketchbooks to the Museum of Art in Bucharest. He left by legacy a small museum in a house of the eighteenth century, with antiques and textiles, in Vadu Izei, Maramureş, which became today a Memorial Museum.

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Iosif Iser

Iosif Iser (May 21, 1881, Bucharest — April 25, 1958, Bucharest) was a great Romanian painter and graphic artist.


He studied painting in Munich under Anton Azbe and Johann Herterich. After a period in Romania (1905-1907) he went to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Ranson and mixed with the avant-garde of Montmartre, including Brâncuşi and Derain. Returning to Bucharest in 1909, he organized the first exhibition of modern art at the Athenée Palace.


During World War I he fought on the Moldavian front, but he continued to paint, including military personnel. His work in this period was influenced by that of Cézanne; it was geometric in spirit, but figurative, and it concentrated on representations of the exotic physiognomies and the spectacular landscape of the Tartars of Balcic, a small port on the Black Sea. The best-known of these is the Tartar Family (1921; Bucharest, N. Mus. A.), which in its stylized volumes shows the influence of Cubism.


He has participated in 1926 at the Berlin Secession exhibition, and the '30s is present in many personal and group exhibitions in Paris, Bucharest, Brussels, The Hague and Amsterdam, the most remarkable event being the retrospective in Bucharest in 1936, when he exposed 431 works. Iser is one of the founders of the artistic group "Art", together with George Petraşcu and Ştefan Popescu, all awarded with the Grand Prize at the International Exhibition of Paris in 1937.


Iser's work was also influenced by literature and by the performing arts. He specialized in re-creating the environments of ballerinas and harlequins (e.g. Harlequin and Dancer, 1929; Bucharest, N. Mus. A.). He lived again in Paris from 1921 to 1934, and after his return to Romania he remained faithful to his established themes. After the WWII, the artist was present at several group and personal exhibitions in New York (1948), Moscow and St. Petersburg (1956), Vienna (1957), Venice Biennale (1954). In 1955, he was elected a full member of the Romanian Academy.