Paul Neagu; sculptor, painter and performance artist
Hyfler/Rosner
Paul Neagu
Influential sculptor, painter and performance artist
21 June 2004
http://www.sculpture.org.uk/image/325020140705
http://www.pinkink.net/newart/neagu.htm
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/eventseducation/criticalencounters.htm
It is always difficult for an artist to move from one
culture to another, and to re-establish or develop a career
in a new country is never easy. This was particularly true
of those who came to work in the West from Eastern bloc
countries during the Communist era.
In the late 1960s Paul Neagu was already beginning to make a
name for himself as a young artist in Romania. In 1968 and
1969 his work was shown in mixed exhibitions of Romanian art
in Prague, Zurich, Paris, Turin and Hamburg. When he moved
to Britain in 1970 he was barely known here. However he
quickly began to make a reputation with his dynamic
performances and paintings and his secret and intriguing
three- dimensional objects. Within five years, he had a
one-man exhibition at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art
in Oxford (1974) when Nicholas Serota was its director. This
was followed by further major shows in London at the ICA
(1979) and the Serpentine Gallery (1987).
Neagu's work was first shown in Britain by Richard Demarco,
who did more than anyone to introduce contemporary Eastern
European art to a British public in the last three or four
decades of the 20th century. Demarco had been deeply
impressed when he visited Neagu's studio in Bucharest in
1968 and exhibited his work at his Edinburgh gallery in
Melville Crescent in 1969, and again in 1970.
Two years later Neagu was included in the historic
exhibition of contemporary Romanian art which Demarco
presented at the Edinburgh Festival in 1971. By then Neagu
had already left Romania and, after spending some time in
France and Scotland attempting to come to terms with
"cultural shock", had moved to London. Here he was to live
and work for most of his subsequent working life, although
after the change of regime at the end of 1989 he spent some
months each year in Romania where he bought a small house
and studio in the countryside.
Although known mainly as a sculptor in Britain in later
years, Neagu always worked in a variety of mediums - and
often across mediums - producing paintings and drawings as
well as three-dimensional works, and especially
performances. During the last decade or so of his life,
ill-health prevented him from realising new performances,
although he continued to plan and conceptualise these, and
to draw and paint extensively. Neagu's performances of the
1970s were intimately linked to his sculpture and painting,
and would often take place in front of or in conjunction
with his own works as if they were "props", in a most
dramatic and athletic manner. Such performances demanded an
absolute fitness and physical tone of which he was intensely
proud.
Although in latter years he could no longer give public
performances, the performative remained an important element
in his work, which often resembled the apparatus for - or
relic of - a performance. Much of his earlier three-
dimensional work incorporated perishable materials such as
gingerbread or mamaliga, the Romanian version of polenta.
Not surprisingly, these works have changed considerably in
character over the intervening years (as of course he must
have realised they would) - or in some cases have survived
only in photographs.
While Neagu's work was international in its ambition and
reception and he exhibited in Japan and North America as
well as widely in Europe, it remained closely related to the
traditions of Romania. He continued to make paintings,
drawings and prints which were generally less abstract than
his sculptures and more directly related to the human form,
using organic, cell-like motifs. Like many 20th-century
Romanian artists - and particularly those who grew up during
the Communist era - he was able to move easily and
unselfconsciously between figuration and abstraction.
When, in 1968, he had been awarded a scholarship to visit
other Eastern European countries (East Germany,
Czechoslovakia and Hungary) Neagu was already 30, and this
was the first time he had left Romania. Although he made the
decision in 1970 to remain in the West he retained many
links with his contemporaries - in particular with the
painter Horia Bernea with whom he had a two-man exhibition
at the Demarco Gallery during the Edinburgh Festival in
1970.
It was not until 1978 that Neagu could visit Romania again,
after obtaining British citizenship in 1977. But he was
frequently in France where for some years he had a house and
where he would also meet visiting Romanian artists there in
connection with exhibitions or on fellowships. (The
historically strong intellectual and artistic links between
Romania and France continued even under Ceausescu's
Communism.)
Every Romanian artist working in the second half of 20th
century inevitably had to come to term with the example and
cultural legacy of Brancusi. Although Brancusi's work
remained important for Neagu, the fact that he worked mainly
outside Romania during the last 35 years helped him to come
to terms with this. For the centenary of Brancusi's birth in
1976 he exhibited a series of drawings in which he analysed
in graphic form many of Brancusi's major sculptures such as
the Endless Column and the Torso of a Young Man. In Neagu's
later work, the continuing use of repeated elements and
simplified symbolic forms revealed something of what he had
learned from Brancusi.
Although born in Bucharest, from the age of nine Paul Neagu
was brought up in Timisoara, a handsome Austro-Hungarian
city in the Banat close to the Yugoslavian and Hungarian
borders where his father was a shoemaker. The family were
Baptists and this set Neagu somewhat apart from other
contemporary Romanian artists who would frequently draw on
the iconography of the Orthodox Church even in their most
abstract work. As a boy he learned shoemaking in his
father's workshop and, after leaving school at 15, worked in
a power station and as a topographic draughtsman for
Romanian railways.
His experience as a draughtsman is apparent in his
paintings, drawings and prints. Neagu's knowledge of the
craft of shoemaking can be seen in the materials like
leather and wood which he employed in the boxes and
object-like works he produced in Romania in the late 1960s
and during his first years in Britain. It is possible to see
the energy which crackled through his paintings, sculptures
and performances as related to the invisible force of
electricity with which he had worked as a young man. The
total immersion he had in his work, often at the expense of
his own health and emotional life, could be linked to his
Baptist upbringing.
Neagu originally wanted to study philosophy at Bucharest
University, but this was not possible for someone from a
religious background in Communist Romania, although he was
accepted in 1960 as a student at the Bucharest Academy of
Fine Art. He always retained his interest in philosophy and
wrote at length about his own work in a metaphysical and
sometimes mystical manner which was not always sympathetic
to contemporary British taste.
Between 1975 and 1976 Neagu had a studio in a building in
Shaftesbury Avenue. Instead of working there, he opened it
as a gallery where he showed his own work and that of other
artists, including Joseph Beuys. This has become relatively
familiar in the London art world in recent decades, but then
it was innovatory - based on what was a common practice
among artists in Eastern European countries under Communism.
It was during this period that Neagu invented the Generative
Art Group, an imaginary group of artists and writers whose
different members expressed different aspects of his
artistic persona, exhibiting works under their names and
that of the group as well as his own, as in his Oxford show
of 1975.
From the mid-1970s Neagu increasingly devoted his energies
to sculpture and was drawn into the world of "British
sculpture". However, he remained something of an outsider in
this world and some of his admirers came to regret that the
diversity of his work was not truly represented in
exhibitions in later years - at least not in Britain.
In contrast to the smaller box-like objects of his early
years, much of his later sculpture was on a larger scale.
For many years he worked on a long series of sculptures
based on tripod-like forms which he called "Hyphens" - one
of the first of which was shown in 1975. These were
constructed of wood (the traditional material of Romanian
sculpture) or fabricated from box-section steel. Another
long series was the "Stars" or "Starheads" (mainly realised
in steel), in which one point of the star was often left
open. Sometimes these were combined, or metamorphosed into
new hybrid forms.
Many of these works were conceived on a monumental scale for
particular sites, although only a few of these large
site-specific public works were realised. Although there is
a version in Milton Keynes, the work for which Neagu won a
competition for a prime site outside Charing Cross station
in London remained unrealised because of bureaucratic
complications. In the 1990s he was able to undertake two
monumental public sculpture commissions in Romania, in
Timisoara and Bucharest, both of which commemorate the 1989
uprising.
Neagu also produced a series of more introspective and
private sculptures in which he employed repeated
standardised geometric elements such as industrial ball
bearings. In these he explored the resonances resulting from
the juxtaposition of such serial elements and the devices
used to display or "frame" them - usually made from
manufactured materials such as iron bars or wooden laths, or
organic materials like grass or leather.
While the use of standardised elements evoked production and
repetition, the way these were arranged and juxtaposed
suggested elements of play and change, or at least the
possibility of change. In contrast to Neagu's large
monumental sculptures these works were designed to be looked
down at from above, rather than viewed from a distance,
although they are not strictly floor pieces and are mounted
on plinths.
From the 1970s Neagu taught in the sculpture department of
what is now Middlesex University (formerly Hornsey College
of Art) and then at the Slade. His teaching and example
inspired many subsequently successful artists who were his
students, including Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Tony
Cragg, Rachel Whiteread and Langlands & Bell.
Neagu was often his own worst enemy when it came to showing
or promoting his work, although he had several exhibitions
in London dealer's galleries - most recently at Angela
Flowers. Two years ago a substantial number of his best
works (mainly from the 1970s) were purchased by the Tate
Gallery, and last year these were put on display at Tate
Britain close to the work of the younger British artists
whose work he had influenced and inspired. Paul Neagu: nine
catalytic stations, a major study of his work by Matei
Stircea- Craciun, was published in 2003.
Although dogged by chronic health problems in the last 15
years of his life, Neagu devoted himself entirely to his
work. In the late 1980s, he contracted a kidney disease and
after some months on dialysis he had a kidney transplant in
1989. The effects of a stroke he suffered in 2001 were
probably made worse by his insistence on discharging himself
from hospital after three days. The resulting aphasia
deprived him of most of the heavily accented but fluent and
animated English he had acquired after over 30 years in
Britain, although he could still speak a Romanian
interspersed with French and a few words of English that
could be understood (albeit with some difficulty) by fellow
Romanians.
But the vitality of Neagu's work remained undiminished. The
drawings and paintings he continued to make in large
quantities during his final years evoke the vigour and
freshness of the early works he made in Romania in the late
1960s and after first arriving in Britain.
Paul Overy
Paul Neagu, artist: born Bucharest 22 February 1938;
married 1965 Sibila Oarcea (marriage dissolved 1970), 1997
Monica Omescu (marriage dissolved 2001); died London 16 June
2004.