Fair Maidens: The Feminine Ideal from Nicolae Grigorescu to Ion Grigorescu?

Fair Maidens: The Feminine Ideal from Nicolae Grigorescu to Ion Grigorescu configures
the faces of the feminine ideal in Romanian art, from the mid-19th century to the present.
Seen from different perspectives (social, political, archetypal, erotic), the feminine ideal is the
boiling point of various stages: it is a daydream or, on the contrary, the deadlock of a
daydream. The ideal mediates between the name that indexes the woman and the status /
situation that it reveals, between the exceptionality and the anxiety induced by this
exceptionality. Mother, lover, model or photo model, peasant, lady or matron, polyvalent
comrade, fairy or harridan, icon and pagan totem, feminist activist or a beauty without body,
pornographic nubile and digital alter ego, the feminine ideal has proliferated with modernity
through a process of successive mythicizations, demythicizations and mystifications. These
are some of the hypostasis of the fair maidens, the girls from dreams or nightmares -
emblematic representations that have historical fluctuations and which are communicating in
a joyful way, being regenerated in a contradictory move, sometimes even in an outrageous
manner. The two artists called Grigorescu, Nicolae and Ion, are bridgeheads for two
paradigms: the exhibition does not begin with Nicolae Grigorescu and neither ends with Ion
Grigorescu. But both of them coagulates the dreams of femininity from their periods, from the
peasant archetype of the Romanian rural eternity to that of the everywoman „engraved” in a
Pop-Art and voyeurist-psychoanalytical style. Both of them offer feminine marks that could
be considered common, seemingly neutralized by their position in society (compared to the
noble lady of Nicolae Grigorescu's precursors or to the cerebral woman, claiming for her own
identity of Ion Griogrescu’s followers). The stakes of the exhibition are precisely the
influence of these models on the Romanian art, from the middle of the 19th century to the
present. In the Romanian literature, this would correspond to the ideal of Eminescu's sylphide
and to the ideals of the feminist activist, targeted by events such as "Sofia Nădejde" literary
prize for women writers, launched in 2018.
A blockbuster doubled by a theoretical study, the exhibition will be accompanied by the
bilingual catalog that explores the visual flares of femininity, as it was fantasized in the
modern Romanian visual culture.