Background
Iosif Iser was born on March 21, 1881 in Bucharest into a Jewish family. They later moved to Ploieşti.
Beginning in 1899, he studied painting at the Royal Academy of Arts in Munich.
Iosif Iser was born on March 21, 1881 in Bucharest into a Jewish family. They later moved to Ploieşti.
Iosif completed his secondary education in Ploieşti and showed early artistic promise. Beginning in 1899, he studied painting at the Royal Academy of Arts in Munich. Iser studied in Paris at the Ranson Academy.
Iosif had his first personal show upon returning to Ploieşti in 1904. He soon moved to Bucharest, where he worked as a cartoonist and caricaturist at the editorial office of the Adevărul newspaper. In 1905, he was part of the Tinerimea Artistică (Young Artists) group exhibit, and in 1906 had his first show in Bucharest.
Iser left for Paris to study and contributed as a graphic artist to the satirical publications Les Témoins and Le Rire.
Upon his return to Romania in 1909, he organized the first exhibition of modern art at the Athenaeum cultural foundation, where he displayed (beside his own work) various examples by André Derain and the caricaturist Jean-Louis Forain. During this period, he contributed to the socialist publication Facla. He collected 50 of his portrait drawings that had been published in Facla in the album Cinzeci de figuri contimporane (Fifty Contemporary Characters; 1913).
Iser discovered the fascinating region of Dobrogea and obsessively portrayed its people and sites in his work. The light and color of the Black Sea played a decisive role in his decision to make painting his prime mode of expression after the 1920s. At that point he moved to Paris for several years, but also continued to exhibit in Bucharest.
In 1926, he participated in the Secession Exhibition in Berlin. Throughout the 1930s, his works were shown in numerous personal and collective exhibitions in European capitals, including a retrospective show in Bucharest in 1936 in which he displayed 431 items.
Despite anti-Jewish persecutions of the 1940s, Iser continued to exhibit his work; in this respect, the group display titled “Light and Color,” which opened in 1943, was quite revealing since Iser was able to participate with two of the most prominent Romanian artists of the day, Gheorghe Petraşcu and Alexandru Ciucurencu. After the war, he took part in collective and individual shows in New York (1948), Venice (at the Biennial; 1954), Moscow and Leningrad (1956), and Vienna (1957).
His style evolved from angular compositions with cubist influences that were typical of the period ending after World War I, to harmonious compositions governed by moderate modernism and expressionism coupled with lyricism. Despite a long stay in Paris, Iser was not won over by the various avant-garde tendencies. His art is milder with lyrical postimpressionist notes more in the manner of Marie Laurencin and Raoul Duffy. Characteristic examples include his Dobrudjan landscapes, indoor scenes, and portraits. He died on April 25, 1958 in Bucharest.
Ballerina
1930Intimacy
1944Laid Back Nude
1941Nude with Book
1909Odalisque
Odalisque in Green
Odalisques Resting
1945Odalisque with Mandoline
1943Pierrot and Columbine
1943The Spanish Woman
1946Tatar Interior
1933Tatar Woman in Yellow
Tatar Woman With Mandoline
1946Tatar Women
The Red Shawl
Tired Dancer
Turks at the Cafe
1937Two Spanish Women
Woman from Muscel
1935Woman in Yellow Chair
1933In 1955, he was elected a full member of the Romanian Academy. Iser was one of the founding members of the artistic group Arta.