The Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca

The Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca holds an extraordinary valued heritage of Romanian and European paintings, sculptures, graphics and decorative art from the 16th to the 21st centuries. It was founded in 1951, starting from an existing fund of art objects, collected since the 19th century: a small part of the curiosity collection, metal work, pieces of furniture and European fine art, previously belonging to Muzeul Ardelean (The Transylvanian Museum) and above all, the collection known under the name of “Pinacoteca Virgil Cioflec” (The Virgil Cioflec Pinacotheque), a prestigious Romanian modern art collection which still constitutes the valuable core of this museum’s patrimony. The institution runs from the year 1956 in the Bánffy Palace, a former headquarter of the governor of Transylvania (1787-1822), widely appreciaded nowadays as the most representative secular baroque building of the city and a landmark for the eighteenth-century architecture in Romania. The fact that the monument belongs, stylistically, to Central European baroque does not exclude the presence of specific features: moderation, weight, equilibrium, features determined by the local tradition of the art of building, characterized, till late in the 18th century, by Renaissance attributes. The place that represents the storey of the palace is destinated to the National Art Gallery, which is the permanent exhibition of the museum. Taking into account the characteristics of the patrimony and its richness in value (Theodor Aman, Nicolae Grigorescu, Ion Andreescu, Ștefan Luchian, Theodor Pallady, Nicolae Tonitza, Nicolae Dărăscu, Camil Ressu, Aurel Popp etc.), the present formula of the National Art Gallery offers a coherent presentation (both chronological and stylistic) of four centuries of national fine art with a characteristic emphasis on the artistic phenomenon in Transylvania. The artists are represented in the gallery by the most important of their works, having in view both the revealing of the characteristic aspects of the multi-culture specificity in Transylvania and suggesting of the complex relations between the art in Romania and the main tendences and streams of the European one. By including fully consacrated values into the synthesis of national post-war art, created in Transylvania and especially in Cluj, the museum remains receptive also to the creations of more recent date.