OCTAV BANCILA. ALBUM - CRISTIAN BENEDICT

I think that artists should not increase the number of the parasitic well-to-do. On the contrary, I consider that an artist's task is not to work for the pleasure and entertainment of the bourgeoisie, but to have in view a higher aim, to instruct, thrill, and influence in a certain direction..."
belong to the painter Octav Băncilă, who, to the journalist's question: "Are you, then, a tendentious painter?" he also replied: "I certainly am. And I always prefer a painting with social significance."
These words an excerpt of an interview taken in 1916 This opinion, so straightforwardly and courageously expressed, characterizes, better than any other words, the personality of an artist who knew to place his art in the service of the most advanced ideas of the epoch he lived in, bringing forth a new, revolutionary spirit in Rumanian painting at the beginning of our century.
- The works which most strikingly condense Băncilä's fighting spirit and which were considered as dangerous by the bourgeois-landlord regime - have only been set in their true light after our country's liberation, thanks to the concern of the people's democratic system, being considered as a most truthful reflection of our people's fight for freedom.
Băncilă asserted himself with all the vigour of his talent in the first decades of this century, in a period of great social upheavals. The development of monopolistic capitalism in Rumania, the general technical-economic backwardness blended with the existence of feudal remnants, as well as the penetration of foreign capital in economy with the aim of plundering the country's wealth by western monopolies, led to an increased exploitation of the working masses in towns and villages, to the sharpening of class contradictions and, consequently, to great social movements, materialized both in the organization of the developing Rumanian proletariat and in the peasant risings culminating in the year 1907.