Ion Minulescu

Best remembered as a symbolist poet, Ion Minulescu was Romania’s minister for the arts throughout much of the interwar period. As well as supporting Romanian artists through his government policies, he was a patron of the avant-garde and amassed a vast art collection, which is still on display in his memorial house museum in Bucharest.

In 1900 Minulescu was sent by his family to Paris to study law but instead became interested in the artistic life of the city, in particular in literature and the French Symbolist movement. He befriended the painter Demetrios Galanis, a well-known artist from Pablo Picasso’s circle who made a portrait of Minulescu that was exhibited to some acclaim at a 1903–4 salon in Paris. Minulescu returned to Bucharest in 1904 and became a renowned modernist writer and poet, as well as the editor of Revista celorlalți (The Magazine of the Others) in 1908 and Insula (The Island) in 1912, both symbolist periodicals and Romania’s earliest vanguard publications. In 1908 he wrote the manifesto “Aprindeți torțele!” (“Light the Torches!”) to protest traditional currents in art and also authored an article on the Futurist movement. Minulescu collaborated with artists from the start of his career, striking up partnerships with Lucia Demetriade Bălăcescu, Iosif Iser, and Corneliu Michăilescu, who illustrated his books over the years.

After the First World War, Minulescu returned to Paris on several visits and became closely acquainted with the Romanian avant-garde circle in the city, in particular Victor Brauner, Benjamin Fondane, Tristan Tzara, and Ilarie Voronca. Through them, he was introduced to French literary circles. The poet Lucien Fabre called Minulescu “one of the greatest European poets” and the Surrealist writer Joseph Delteil gifted him several of his volumes, which he inscribed with dedications to the Romanian poet. Minulescu also formed a close friendship with Constantin Brancusi and was one of his earliest supporters in Romania, writing about Brancusi’s work in the avant-garde magazine Integral in 1924. By the mid-1920s, Minulescu had become a well-established cultural figure in Romania and was offered several posts in the Romanian government, serving as minister for the arts (1922–40) and director of the National Theatre in Bucharest (1926). One of his best-known achievements as a government official was the creation of annual salons to support artists in exhibiting their work.

Minulescu traveled widely in Romania and abroad, visiting antiquarians, flea markets, and rural artisans, and returning home with rare books and art objects for his growing collection, which included everything from baroque polychrome sculptures and glass-painted Orthodox icons to Persian miniatures, Egyptian and Syrian antiquities, Japanese prints, and, of course, modern art. Despite his established status by the 1920s, he was a great supporter of the new generation of Romanian avant-garde artists, promoting them through the official salons he organized and collecting their works. One of the most celebrated items in Minulescu’s collection is a portrait of himself painted by Brauner in 1924, the year of Brauner’s first major exhibition in Bucharest. Minulescu also regularly commissioned portraits of his wife and daughter and engaged Hans Mattis-Teutsch to design the ex libris for his books. It is also likely that Minulescu received many of the contemporary works in his collection as direct gifts from the artists with whom he socialized and whose work he championed in his official capacity.

Minulescu’s collection contains many works by Romania’s best-known interwar artists, including Nina Arbore, Alexandru Ciucurencu, Cecilia Cuțescu-Storck, Oscar Han, Max Herman Maxy, Corneliu Michăilescu, Theodor Pallady, Margareta Sterian, and Nicolae Tonitza, among many others. A significant number of works in the collection were by women artists of the period, including sculptures by Céline Emilian and Brancusi protégé Milița Petrașcu. Minulescu was also a patron of the Academy of Decorative Arts, Bucharest’s first modern design institution, and his collection furthermore contained many items made in the academy’s workshops, including Cubist-inspired bindings for Minulescu’s own poetry books.

In 1934 Minulescu and his wife, the poet Claudia Millian, moved into a modernist apartment building; together they arranged their home to display the collection, which by now contained about three hundred artworks. After Minulescu’s death in 1944 and the subsequent regime change in Romania, Millian opened the apartment to the public as a memorial home to prevent it from being taken away from the family by the communist authorities. At present, the Ion Minulescu and Claudia Millian Memorial Home belongs to the National Museum of Romanian Literature, thanks to the donation made in 1991 by Mioara Minulescu, the couple’s daughter. The interiors have been preserved largely as they were during Minulescu’s life, thus maintaining the integrity of the collection and his artistic vision.