Octav Grigorescu was a Romanian painter, graphic artist, book illustrator, fine arts professor at the Bucharest National University of Arts (at the time Institul de Arte Plastice "N. Grigorescu"Nicolae Grigorescu, unrelated), an important figure in Romanian art. He was the brother of Ion Grigorescu and the husband of the painter Georgeta Năpăruș.Coșoveanu, Dorana, Album "Octav Grigorescu", Ed. Meridiane, 1985
Early life Octav Grigorescu was born on May 22, 1933, to Anastase Grigorescu (b. 1905) and Maria (b. 1906, née Gușerescu), the second among four brothers and one sister. His father, a chemical engineer, had weak eyesight due to an early accident when experimenting with chemicals as a boy. This, together with the number of children of young age, prevented him from being drafted during the war. The family story lets believe that Anastase met Maria when his brother was a law trainee in Octav Guserescu's office (her father). This is where the boy's name comes from. In spite of initially opposing the marriage, the elder Octav went along with what appeared to be a true love story, and the family settled and raised all children in his house located in part of the old town, on Vasile Alecsandri street,The house is registered on the city's architectural landmarks, being built in characteristic neoromanian style by Architect.... which still owned in part by the family. Anastase Grigorescu's family hails from Bengești-Ciocadia, Gorj County, in the province of Oltenia, from a family of landowners who ran a mill on the Ciocadia River. They rose to a degree a local prominence to build a small church in town and sending all children to the university. The economic fate of the family had a downturn before and during the war, so they avoided the immediate bull's eye of the communist revolution, which waged a fierce war on the well-endowed peasantry and so called small bourgeoisie during the initial stages of the Soviet imposed rule.
Anastase's mother side was of Aromanian origin, having settled from south of the Danube in the province via Turnu Severin, and owning a property at Strehaia in the township of Corcova, Mehedinți County. The father's side were local with possible roots over the Carpathians in Transylvania.
On the mother's side, Guserescu was from northern Bukovina, born in Todirești, Botoșani County, in a family of free land-owning peasants (răzeși) who boasted having been granted land by the legendary medieval King of Moldavia, Stephen the Great, after an ancestor earned it in battle. In any case, later on, the artist remembered his grandfather as a dominating, boastful character, with a penchant for bad financial deals and infidelity toward his wife who was an artistic, delicate and inspiring character to the children. Herself addicted to gambling, but very well read and educated, with a passion for romantic novels and a whiff of elegance, coming from a wealthier merchant family with mixed Greek ancestry, she was the favorite of the rest of the family who gradually set the older Octav Guserescu in a sort of domestic exile. Her daughter, Maria, the painter's mother, was not in good terms with her own father. The unconventional, cigar smoking grandfather exerted a "bad boy" attraction on the grandchildren during Octav's middle school years. He let his grandson puff cigarettes a tad too early, a habit that the future painter unfortunately never quit and most likely contributed to his early death at 53. During the short famine following the war and an exceptionally cold winter, the family burned some of the law school volumes, out of need but perhaps in an act of defiance as well. The lawyer had died in 1945.
Octav, together with his brothers, attended what was a boy's only top school, starting with what was at that time the maternal school no. 18, followed in the same building by the Titu Maiorescu High School. He graduated with a baccalaureate in 1951. In some sense the school was a higher education institution, with an elite of very talented pupils with accomplished future careers; social position played a role, but the group was apparently mixed, with children belonging to the royal court intermingled with the middle class. The communist revolution altered this mix, but did not destroy the outstanding quality of the school. His literature teacher was an accomplished, even though traditionalist poet, with interest in art and who encouraged his students to pursue higher grounds. Octav was talented in art, starting to draw endlessly by copying museum postcards, browsing black and white art and travel albums with monuments and renaissance sculptures, found in the house, borrowed from friends or from school. One has to remember that he was fourteen in 1947, a fateful moment for the country, when the king abdicated and the immediate years after the war were marked by severe political upheaval and economic shortages. Yet he disclosed thinking that philosophy was his calling, perhaps due to the stimulating classes of his teachers. All along, a natural interest in literature, especially poetry, was present, and he continued writing all his life, even though he never published his work during his lifetime. The only published poetry volume is Lotofagii, a posthumous artist book printed in a font inspired by his distinctive, Da Vinci - like handwriting, edited by his brother Ion Grigorescu.
Entering the fine arts school in the class of Rudolf Schweitzer-Cumpăna at the Institute, following up with sculpture in Dimitrie Onofrei's class, he finally chooses to specialize in graphic arts with Vasile Kazar. He graduates his M.A. (1958) with a diploma project depicting scenes from the lives of workers from the coal works in Maramures county, as required by the times. He is happy to accept, right upon graduation, being a lecturer in the graphic arts section. Later on he becomes a reader (conferentiar) and keeps his position till the end, in a distinguished career, many students, with a short interruption around 1968–1971.
The sixties His solo debut is in 1959, entering the Artists' Guild (Uniunea Artiștilor Plastici) in 1961; he even served at some point on the steering committee, and was a member until the end. In 1965 he married hir former college fellow and painter Georgeta Năpăruș, and they had a son in 1967.
Between 1955-1984 he traveled extensively, both independently and with support for scholarly activity, for art shows and exhibitions, at the beginning primarily in Eastern Europe: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, German Democratic Republic (1962, 1965, 1974); but later on to Italy, France, Austria (1968, 1969–70, 1977, 1978, 1980); and again U.S.S. R. (1972); Cuba, Spain (1979); Franta, United Kingdom, Greece (1983).Coşoveanu, Dorana, "Octav Grigorescu", Date Biografice, p.43. Ed. Meridiane, 1985
It is in 1968 that he is representing Romania at the Venice Biennale for the first time (the second is in 1980), a turning point in his career. He is noticed by critics and is invited to have a solo exhibition. Back and forth between home and Italy, some of the excitement of his initial success is tempered by the unkind practices of gallerists who confiscate all his work, claiming it is normal to compensate for expenses. It is not clear if he was duped or simply naively misunderstanding the brutal realities of the art trade, being raised in the sterilized vacuum of a country, let's say, without a market economy. He decides to fight, prove himself and at the same time pursue a deep love for Italy, which he regarded as the land of art, an object of desire for the child who used to train his hand sketching postcards from Rome and the Uffizi.
The seventies - after the Biennale The Italian period is marked by extreme creativity and productivity. He settles in Venice for most of the time, but travels to Milan, to Bologna (with shows), Rome and several back and forth ventures to Vienna, a city he liked deeply (Rielke was a leitmotif of his sensibility, and an early German literature and fair knowledge of the language helped), has some longer interludes in Paris, where he meets some old friends, but does not seem to adhere to any place. Possibly the most fateful decision of his career came on the New Year's Eve of 1971 when he lands in Bucharest, with an expired passport, at a time when the regime was considering overstaying an exit visa (in this case by years) simply a crime. A stash of letters to his wife, explaining in part some of his torments in Venice, is lost, and what seems to sum up events is that he might not have felt able to support his new family (his only child was born in 1967) in Italy and his wife, Georgeta, was increasingly feeling under pressure to ask him to return, both because of the authorities which perceived his defection as suspect, harassing her, and her own insecurities.
Disillusionment with the art practices he was exposed to is soon replaced by losing his job at the art institute, where he was demoted to a pay by the hour status, a condition that even though he later overcame delayed his promotion to full professorship. Due to his death at 53, it never happened. In some other sense, he had time to work and the few next years had the consolation of a certain calm of family life. Gradually he re-integrates in the artistic community and tends to work in many directions: etching, drawing, watercolor, book illustration; painting and of course teaching, where he gets attracted by technical explorations, e.g. preparing compounds, foundations and canvasses from scratch using ancient trade books. The paintings become much larger than before, he talks about the dream of painting alfresco vast surfaces in the outdoors. This never happens but he experiments a lot, to the point that he feared occasionally that his works may be vulnerable in time.
Marking the signal of retrenchment to a rigid form of socialism, 1973 brings also a term to the artist's hope that the liberalization seen after 1965 will lead to an end of the regime. The only difference is that a brutal ideology is now serving a personal dictatorship. The major earthquake of 1977 (March 4) moves the political climate another notch to the extreme. The eighties were also a cultural agony, to say the least. It is not that his career was not moving forward; in 1980 he is representing Romania in the National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, for the second time. In a relaxation with the Italian government, it is deemed acceptable by the authorities that he accepts the Order of Cavaliere della Repubblica Italiana, which was an appreciated honor, but somehow came as a belated consolation for his older adventures. It must be said that on his death bed he took with him to the hospital a thick book of short stories by Alberto Moravia, in a testament to his deeply felt affinity with that experience.
The eighties