The institute

Preface In April 1990, I handed over the volume The Silent Escape to the Secretariat of the French publishing house La Découverte in Paris. On September the 1st, the same year, the book was in the bookshops. It's my first book and I don't consider it literature.

None of the totalitarian regimes of this century had any particular liking for the modern art trends and made them eventually disappear from the area controlled by them. Too free a manifestation of one's personality meant escaping their power. In Nazi Germany just as

After six years' work in the Sanitary Technical School I was admitted to the History of Art Institute. I was a researcher and I wasn't yet allowed to research the monuments of our medieval art I was so attracted to. Going through the pages of the history magazines

1947. The year of the most despotic deeds of the communist regime come to power in the shadow of the Soviet tanks. The ordeal of the Romanian intellectual elites (and not only) begins. The Slătineanu family find themselves treated like common criminals. The whole family

Virgil Cioflec, later to become a writer and a collector, stands out amongst the moral and financial supporters of the initiators and founders of Artistic Youth Society (December 1901). With some of its founders, Gheorghe Petraşcu, Ştefan Popescu, Kimon Loghi, Ipolit Strâmbulescu

The year 1863 was full of events that had a significant impact on the artistic world of Paris. On the 24th of July, the new rule of the annual Salon, organized in the Palace of Industry, was announced. The rules were perceived as a way of waving the jury, formed only by

click here for Brukenthal Museum An emblem of Sibiu, the Brukenthal Museum is one of the most important abodes of culture that has garnered national and European repute. Since its official opening on February 25, 1803, it laid an indelible mark on the cultural life of the

It so happened that I lived for a while in Polynesia, and this extends the story up to the Antipodes. I had recently come back from the countries of the South Pacific, from the Polynesian islands. I was bringing with me the brain tomographies of a Maori minister, the file

I think I would never have come to love Balkania so much, had I not met Marina Marinescu in Munich several years back. We had been acquainted since we met for the first time in Athens. Florin Marinescu, the specialist in Byzantine history to whom I was talking one day in

In March 1935 (on Thursday, March 21st, more precisely), Sebastian was invited to hold a conference at the French Institute in Bucharest; the relationship between the writer and the president of the Institute, Alphonse Dupront, was one of mutual regard, as we find out from

At the beginning of the '20s, fascism represented the newest and the most catching political phenomenon. Nevertheless, it failed to be a roaring success everywhere and especially at the very beginning. In Romania, the obsession of being permanently synchronized with

The Art Museum Institute for Ecomuseum Research in Tulcea The Tulcea County Museum, established in 1950, was – almost naturally – a heterogeneous structure, whose painting collection contained the works of a single artist: Geo Cardaş, a local painter who depicted