Ștefan Bertalan and the magnetism of creation

During the post-war period (1960-1980), Timisoara was characterized by a cosmopolitan atmosphere where the intellectual elite were fully living the effervescence of creation; innovative thinking is generated on intellectual and artistic level, highly marked by unconventionality.

Great names like Ștefan Bertalan, 111 Group (founded together with Roman Cotoșman and Constantin Flondor), Sigma Group (founded together with Doru Tulcan, Constantin Flondor, Lucian Codreanu, Ion Gaita and Elisei Rusu), become reference points for the avant-garde artistic movement in short time, providing an alternative understanding and a new definition of the world resorting to the grammar of shapes, industrial aesthetics, marketing, industrial geometry, complementary colours, design, descriptive geometry, bionic study.

The intimacy with Eduard Pamfil’s thinking, the founder of Banat’s psychiatry, but also poet and musician, an intellectual that has brought an enormous contribution to the reform of the intellectual environment of the post-war Timisoara and to the promotion of the liberal thinking and of the European behavioural reflexes, is supporting him to approach new experimental areas to discover another range of colours of the eternal research[1].

The permanent references of the two groups, 111 and Sigma, have been: Nature, Nature-Number, the process of shapes’ evolution, anthropology. Most of the innovating ideas were due to Ștefan Bertalan.

”The maturity of the Sigma Group artists has been revealed by the tentative to coagulate the cultural discourse and to research-solve the social urban tissue. Starting from the interest point of the bionic group, Ștefan Bertalan and his group have become acquainted with the role of the scientific research and its relation with art. Shortly they become the searchers of mechanisms in living systems, suggesting the new paths to follow in arts, architecture and technical sciences.”[2]

The presence of Ștefan Bertalan’s works at Biennial of Nürnberg in 1969 is attesting the existence of a Romanian constructivism, transient from geometrical to organic constructivism, proving also an inimitable presence of the Romanian art in an international arts exhibition, and a real synchronisation on European level of Ștefan Bertalan and Sigma Group’s studies and creations.  

„Bertalan is a knight of anticonformism. All aspects, gestures, speeches that could end comfortably and placidly are avoided, even it wouldn’t be totally unbearable for him… everything he does is marked by this characteristics, namely to be a construction aiming to something, maintained by the continuous tension of the lack of complacency “[3]

The exhibit presents exceptional works like boards, drawings, paintings, objects, pictures – signed by Ștefan Bertalan, as well as some of the best students of the great artist: Ion Andreescu, Vlad Gaivoronschi, Corneliu Vladimir Butnărescu and Sebastian Schon.

[1]Victor Neumann, ”Bertalan: europenitatea artei românești. O expoziție retrospectivă la Muzeul de Artă Timișoara, Revista Observator Cultural, nr.550/2016.

[2]Victor Neumann, ”Ștefan Bertalan și spiritul Timișoarei postbelice”, Revista Orizont nr.1/2016

[3]Ion Nicolae Anghel, Cartea cu Pamfil, Editura Amarcord, Timișoara, 1996.