Marcel Iancu: a dance floor and a battlefield

For the editors ofArhitectura Magazine, the year 2022 was marked by the complex personality of Marcel Iancu - architect, painter, publicist, graphic designer, scenographer, Dadaist, modernist, visionary - a personality that is not to be found in exhibitions or publications.

In addition to the exhibition "Iancu Unleashed", which the Union of Architects presented at the 9th edition of Art Safari, we decided to end the year with an issue dedicated to the most prominent representative of the Romanian avant-garde.

No, we didn't want to pay homage to him, we wanted to get to know him, to understand him, and that's why the magazine begins with a text signed by Marcel Iancu himself - a disturbing autobiography, a painful x-ray of a recent history that we don't usually talk about when we analyze his work. This text, this revelation of a historical context unfavorable to art and free expression, and a life torn between two countries, runs through the texts of all the other authors who become in solidarity with him, humanizing, understanding and explaining him. By reading these texts that accompany him throughout all his achievements in Romania and Israel, the portrait of the "total man of art" gains detail, nuance and color.

It was necessary to explain why the period 1922-1941, which we have exhibited and which illustrates the architect's work in Bucharest, is similar to the fracture of Marcel Iancu's destiny and represented "a dance floor and a battlefield".

We have structured this bilingual issue in two parts: the first part lists all the buildings designed by the Iancu brothers in Romania between 1922 and 1941. For all these buildings we have presented archive images from the years of their realization and current images showing the precarious state of these buildings and the need to protect them. All the buildings have a QR code attached which, when scanned, opens the Google Maps application which can be used to generate a route to visit all the buildings. Alongside the images and plans is the text of Ana Maria Zahariade, which puts each building in the context of the period and the work of the Iancu brothers, pointing out each step on the path of modernism. Also new is the presence of a new building attributed to Marcel Iancu, an individual dwelling designed for Marcel Juster on 5 Dr. Mihai Mirinescu Street in the Cotroceni district.

Like a red thread, each year is accompanied by quotations from Marcel Iancu's architectural essays, courageous, visionary texts, polemical with the ideas of the time, reminiscent of the Dadaist episode of the author's youth, with the strength of the journalist and the courage of the humanist visionary, with the vehemence of the avant-garde.

A collection of texts that place Marcel Iancu in the political and social context of his time is the second part of the magazine.

Anca Sandu Tomaszewski writes with the fervor and dynamism of someone who knew Iancu closely. Her text makes us see Iancu the tireless believer in ideals when all the avant-gardists were tired, in the midst of the horrors of the war that had passed and the war to come, she evokes Iancu the humanist who struggles to bring good to people through art.

Alexandru Beldiman talks about role models and training in a personal context and then in the context of the branch. Thus he recalls for us the policy that UAR has pursued, starting with the 1990 exhibition - "Bucharest. The State of the City", in an attempt to recover and reconsider our interwar culture. This UAR approach, which began in 1990 and materialized in exhibitions accompanied by catalogues and research programs on the trends of the modern avant-garde movement, defined our place in the European context, brought it back to the present, made it known to the world and to ourselves. We joined this series of exhibitions after a profound reverence for our predecessors and taking up the baton from them.

Andy Arif presents in detail how we realized the exhibition "Iancu Unleashed" at Art Safari 9th edition, at the Dacia Palace in Bucharest, open from May-August 2022. We were invited to exhibit Iancu's architecture which we presented through a mix of elements of his work as architect, journalist and painter. In the short time we had at our disposal we went through a whole process of gathering materials which for us at the magazine was a real journey through time and among contemporaries passionate about Marcel Iancu. We thus discovered a whole world in which we loved to lose ourselves, conquered by the fervor of avant-garde and modernist ideas, by the mix of the arts, contaminated by the idea that you can change the world through them.

Studying Marcel Iancu has been an opportunity to meet interesting people, passionate about all aspects of his life, who have been inspired, contaminated with enthusiasm and nonconformism. We brought them together in the pages of the magazine: architects, teachers, collectors, writers, art historians, journalists. Each contributed a memory, a thought or a study to this portrait.

I saw many of them again at the launch of the magazine, which took place at our home, Calderon 48, a few days before Christmas. The launch had something of the atmosphere of the exhibition and of the magazine - the authors, and not only them, wanted to share with the large audience their admiration for Marcel Iancu and especially how they approached his work.

Also on the occasion of the Art Safari exhibition I met the German writer Jan Koneffke who, together with TVR2, made a movie about Marcel Iancu for the German-language program. As he himself says, this movie is a recess for modernist Bucharest as a whole, which has fallen into oblivion and, above all, mutilated and abandoned.

Nicolae Lascu writes about the journalistic work of Marcel Iancu, who waged an assiduous campaign to popularize his own ideas and those on which he based his approach, ideas that animated the world of European architecture. In this field too, Marcel Iancu remains a visionary, and no other Romanian architect at the time was more vehement and prolific in propagating the modern movement.

Over the years and during his courses at the UAUIM, Augustin Ioan proposed visual semiotics projects to his students based on the "Formal Alphabet" published in Contimporanul in 1924 by Marcel Iancu, a scholarly game as an exercise in a course on "Methods of architectural morphogenesis in the horizon of complexity". The students deconstruct this altfabet into "letters" with which they form "words"/forms that by assigning scale become architectural objects. A game and an exercise that would certainly have excited the author of the alphabet.

Noemi Meilman talks about the different ages and places where she met Marcel Iancu and how a photograph from Ein Hod has accompanied her everywhere for the past 15 years. Nicolae Lascu talks about Ein Hod and Marcel Iancu's work in Palestine, Tel Aviv and the Janco-Dada Museum.

Ana Maria Zahariade, almost 30 years after the research on Iancu that she began on the occasion of the centenary, remembers the moment when she saw a disturbing painting by the author, "Ball in Zürich", painted in 1915. This painting seems "a metaphor for the avant-garde, for the feverish, experience-seeking feverishness that unseen obstacles transformed from youthful effervescence into a dramatic struggle". With this sense of gloomy premonition, Ana Maria Zahariade revisits Marcel Iancu's work from a critical perspective that does not glorify but humanizes.

Towards the end of the review, we return to the words of Marcel Iancu written in 1979-1981, in an unpublished correspondence with Lucian Boz, now published for the first time through the kind permission of its owner, Cristinel Popa, who also owns the DADA Gallery in Bucharest. In these letters, Iancu expresses, even after 40 years, his longing for Romania and his regret that he was unable to continue his work as an architect.

Also to close the circle, the end is the end of the line, because as Iancu himself said: in art "everything in art starts from line and color as absolute values, just as music starts from sound". "The Memory of Line" is the title of Adrian Buga's article in which the author, like an archaeologist of memory, starts from the moment when, as a young man, he discovered Iancu and takes us to the moment when he came to see how much Iancu's daughter's hands resembled those of her mother, painted in a picture by her father (Marcel Iancu). The author draws for us these short lines that link generations, bring together people who have never met, creates forms, art and trails that close the circle of a world that can only survive through art and beauty.

At the end, I would like to repeat the mantra that all the authors of this issue say: Marcel Iancu remains a free and nonconformist spirit. And I would add that this spirit revives in each one of us when we are inspired by artists like Marcel Iancu.