He attended the St. Gheorghe high school of Bucharest and, at the wish of his parents, joined the School of Bridges and Roads, which he left, moving to the Politehnica of Dresden.
College/University
Gallery of Theodor Pallady
At a young age, his family sent him to Dresden, where he studied engineering at the Dresden University of Technology between 1887 and 1889.
He attended the St. Gheorghe high school of Bucharest and, at the wish of his parents, joined the School of Bridges and Roads, which he left, moving to the Politehnica of Dresden.
Theodor Pallady was an early Cubist artist widely regarded as Romania's most influential 20th century painter. Preoccupied with perfection in his entire creation, Theodor Pallady's art is a universe of emotion.
Background
Theodor Pallady was the son of John or Iancu Pallady, married to Maria Cantacuzino, the older sister of diplomat Neculai B. Cantacuzino. Theodor was born in Iasi and was a child both in Perieni (Tutova), where his parents had an estate, as well as in Iasi.
Education
Theodor Pallady attended the St. Gheorghe high school of Bucharest and, at the wish of his parents, joined the School of Bridges and Roads, which he left, moving to the Politehnica of Dresden. Pallady first studied engineering at the Polytechnic of Dresden durin 1887 - 1889, while taking lessons in drawing and painting with Erwin Oehme, who, recognizing the artistic endowment, advised him to go to Paris. In the French capital he worked in Jean Arman's studio and enrolled at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 1892, he entered Gustave Moreau's workshop. Later he attended his class Puvis de Chavannes, from which he took over especially the fineness of the drawing and the brightness of the colors, without following the aesthetic principles of the academy.
In 1904 Theodor Pallady returned to the country and exhibited at the Romanian Athenaeum and at the Official Salons. He maintained the connection with Paris, where he opened several personal exhibitions until 1940. He exhibited at the Biennale of Venice in the years 1924, 1940, and 1942.
With a complex formation stemming from the rigor of the German school united with the symbolism promoted by Moreau, using the experiments of the Art Nouveau current and his friends who lay the foundation for Fovism, Pallady soon found his own way. His friendship with Matisse, his ties to the spirit of French art, explained the many relationships with what will be called École de Paris.
However, Pallady did not adhere to the aesthetic program promoted by these artistic trends. Aspiration towards a simple architecture, to a linear logic of proportions dominated the art of Pallady, who refused grandilocracy, the sentimentality and picturesque cheapness, making its structural orientation obvious to the classic composition. His controlled sensitivity was doubled by a supreme asceticism of the spirit, in a unit that distinguished it from post-impressionist lyricism.
Pallady's predilection for dead nature denoted the desire to reproduce in a picture a fragment of universal reality, in all its poetry and harmony. The abandonment of the painting of natural landscapes gave the impression of a search for the meaning concentrated in the corola of a flower, in a fruit or in the leaves added to everyday objects. The contribution of Cézanne's painting was not negligible for Pallady's band, but certainly his reflections on the Romanian medieval painting played an equally important role.
For his parisian landscapes, Pallady chose especially the places in the vicinity of the Seine, both to suggest the tremors of light on the surface of the water, as well as to render the plans of a landscape where the houses, the foliage of the trees, the horizontal movement of the river form a perfect range of colors unitary in a coherent image.
Theodor Pallady was undoubtedly one of the most prestigious modern artists, preserving his ambition to be a painter "of all time." At the age of 85, in 1956, he received the title of Emeritus Master of Art, with the retrospective exhibition "Theodor Pallady." Soon afterwards, on August 16, 1956, he went into the world of the righteous.