Auguste Baillayre – director şi fondator al colecţiilor de artă basarabeană

The beginning of the 20th century was one of the most contradictory and controversial periods of modern European art, which spread artistic values all the way to peripheries, including Basarabia. To be sure, the new styles and trends were not promoted by some mechanical transfers of ideas and concepts, but rather by specific people. Such a person in Basarabia was Auguste Baillayre, whose work and influence left a mark on the main stages of evolution of the national art between the wars. The artist was born on May 1, 1879 in Besiers, a community in the Pyrenees on the border between France and Spain; he spent his childhood in France (1879–1885), the adolescence in Georgia (1885–1898), went to school in Amsterdam (1899–1902), St. Petersburg (1903-1907) and Grenoble (1913) and became the most outstanding personality of the arts of the time in the Basarabia of 1918–1940. A. Baillayre’s work evolved through three distinct stages, which coincided with his residence in Holland and Russia (1899–1918), in Basarabia (1918–1943) and in Bucharest (from 1943 to his death on December 16, 1961), and reflected his interest in constructivism, impressionism and post-impressionism. The artistic environment in which A. Baillayre evolved is worth noticing – his friends and acquaintances in Russia (brothers V. and D. Burliuk, V. Mayakovsky, M. Larionov, N. Goncharova, M. Chagall, V. Tatlin, A. Lentulov), France (P. Picasso, A. Renoir, H. Matisse). He had remarkable professorial achievements, as he managed to educate a brilliant cluster of artists, such as N. Bragalia, O. Hrşanovschi, E. Barlo, E. Ivanovsky, M. Gamburd and others, who then continued their education in major European centers – Paris, Drezden and Brussels.
This article is just a recovery of the remarkable past Bessarabian personalities, such as A. Baillayre, who this year was 140 years from birth and 80 years from the foundation of the future National Art Museum of Moldova.