Background
Teodor Harșia was born on March 8, 1914, in Filipasu Mare, Mures, Romania.
Teodor Harșia was born on March 8, 1914, in Filipasu Mare, Mures, Romania.
Teodor was intermittently attending the School of Fine Arts in Cluj, due to an unfavorable financial situation. Between 1929 and 1932 he studied in Catul Bogdan's studio and since 1933 he has deepened the language of Romanian sculpture at Pinacoteca Virgil Cioflec, open in Cluj.
In Pinacoteca Virgil Cioflec Teodor became acquainted with the works of Grigorescu and Luchian, but also with those of Tonitza and Ciucurencu, who would influence his artistic evolution. In 1950 he became a professor at the Ion Andreescu Institute of Fine Arts, and in 1962 he presented his works at a personal exhibition organized at the Cluj Museum, which marked the artist's "revelation of self-discovery."
The painter's repertoire is made up of rustic inspirational sceneries, or illustrating urban peripheries, static floral natures, popular pottery and fruits, and self-portraits and genre scenes. The artist oscillated, in different moments of his creation, between the preference for urban landscapes and the passion for the rustic environment; from the seventh decade, the surroundings of Cluj attracted attention and inspired him in images in which he pursued the expressive consistency of color. The themes of the gender scenes, which capture the aspects of family life and from which the "Sagittarius" painting is claimed, appear in Harşia's work in the 1950s.
The present work was probably done in the fifth decade of the last century, when the artist began to surprise in his paintings aspects provided by his own family environment, being "animated by the innocence, candor and purity of his two children." The art historian Negoita Laptoiu remarked in the chromatic billboard of the folds representing the genre scenes from this period, the assimilation of the tonite suave palette and the "breathing, when phosphorescent, when the painting of Ciucurencu of the same period." The artist died in 1987 in Cluj Napoca.
Teodor Harsia adhered to the artistic traditions of Socialist Realism.
