Book Review - MONA MOMESCU, EDUARD ANDREI, Risipitorul de talent: Ilie Cristoloveanu, pictor și filolog în România și SUA [The Prodigal Prodigy Ilie Cristoloveanu, an Artist and Philologist in Romania and the USA], Bucharest, Paideia, 2022, 522 p., with ill.

Abstract

Ilie Cristoloveanu (1893-1964), an artist trained in fine arts in the Belle Époque Romania, has recently made the subject of a consistent monograph written by philologist Mona Momescu and art historian Eduard Andrei. The artist’s archive and quasi-complete donation of works (about two hundred paintings, sketches, drawings, portraits), were identified in 2021 at the Romanian National Museum of Art in Bucharest. They came to the museum’s collection after a last-minute decision of the artist’s late wife Olga Cristoloveanu – herself an art lover, a soprano and her husband’s muse – to donate them in 1977 to a Romanian museum, against her husband’s anti- Communist will. Olga Cristoloveanu, a voluntary character, outlived her husband more than two decades and tried to leave his inheritance to Columbia University, New York, where her husband had lived and worked. Eventually, she donated the works to probably the most visible museum in Romania, which now appears to have been a wise decision, as it offered the artworks better visibility and recognition. The volume also includes a consistent corpus of images taken after the main assets of this archive.