Romantic and romance. Different only/ but together
“Romantic is the one who, among the idealist’s attributes, lacks only one: a worthy and secure purpose.” (N. Iorga)
Regardless of the means by which the character of romantism is described, whether he is the young Werther of Goethe and his love for Lotte in “The Sufferings of the Young Werther”, whether it is the long love story between Fusun and Kemal in Pamuk’s “Museum of Innocence” or Thomas Mann’s “Lotte in Weimar”, he is portrayed by an individualized and thorough analysis.
The character of the romanticist has contrasting, antithetic, and complex traits: passion versus reason, grandiose versus decadent, subjective through feeling and fantasy, heroes and monsters having a single stake, and that is the salvation of love. It was Plato who tied the love of beauty. Irremediably.
Love is a romantic attitude, it names countless phenomena, a word not at all equivocal, by which one can distinguish an emotional fauna of the most varied. Whether it is a love for science, for women or for other passions and concerns, it comes to a practical order, to an expression, to a series of actions to which we submit our ordinary existence. Romantic and romance transform into reality the story‒world of the past, offers another perspective on love in relation to time.
Romantic and romantic. Different only/ but together is an instrumentation of two different characters, seen in the light of their loves and described by the characteristics of the exposed objects, which allow us to guess the story, the identity of the characters and the romantic atmosphere between them.
The exhibition highlights a part, far from the world, of a couple, He and She, and their romanticism, the harmony, intimacy of the common space, the marriage between active and passive, between feminine and masculine, bohemian and authoritarian… We can say that it results in a mirrored space with a middle area that becomes common and polarizing.
It is a representation of the differences between what exists outside the doors of the home and behind them, it is the space where there are objects that have been collected, objects‒evidences of love, is the coexistence of a magistrate with an artist, of two different characters in the light of the concerns that characterize their personality.
It is the meeting of two different identities, who find a common scene – a small universe, where the “different”, i.e. the contrast, brings them together. Through play, through mornings, shared dreams, through expectations, desires and melancholy. All this is revealed by Her playful corner of the workshop and boudoir, by His space preceding the beginning of his authoritarian functions, and their space of retrieval and meeting, unseen and known only to them…
Therefore, that corner away from the eyes of the world is the endeavor of joining unique objects from the Pre-Romanticism and Romanticism, style furniture, paintings ‒ nudes, still natures, gallant scenes, costumes, decorative objects, games, brushes, colors, books, etc., as well as objects involving common activities resulting in the intimate atmosphere of the space.
Curators: Cristina Vasiliu, Loredana Mocanu ‒ Heritage and Centralized Register Office