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Damaged Paintings from Romanian Museums, on Stamps

From the original Art on Stamps archive

Damaged Paintings from Romanian Museums, on Stamps — original stamp illustration

On the paintings displayed on the right you can see the impacts of bullets. The stamps of a rather inferior quality, as compared with the stamp on the left side, This stamp on the right was issued by the same country 22 years earlier, in 1968. This masterpiece of Romanian art was painted by Stefan Luchian and represents Old Nicholas, the Cobza (Zither) player. Scott numbers: 2000 and 3620. In the meantime the painting was restored and is exhibited at the National Museum of Arts in Bucharest, Romania.

I'm sure that one day, eventually with the help of international specialists, all these wonderful works of art will be restored and that I'll have the pleasure to show you them in their original state.

All in all an impressive set, acting as a memory flash and revealing a short piece of recent history that has shaken one more country in the tormented Balkan Peninsula.

This wasn't for the first time that Romanian masterpieces or their legal holders suffered. In the year 1956, after 39 years, the government of the former USSR returned to Romania works of art that were evacuated in 1917 during the WW I by the Romanian government. Among these works were also the paintings of the renown Romanian artist Ion Andreescu. Unfortunately, when they come back, the Romanian specialists discovered that many of these paintings were replaced by fakes . Of course nothing could be done against the great "friend" and "liberator" from the East. Source: Ioan Andreescu, p.9. ALCOR EDIMPEX, June 1997, ISBN 973-97901-4-3. Actually, this hasn't hindered and has even encouraged the Romanian communist government to requisition, during the mentioned 45 years of dictatorship, numberless works of art from their legal, private owners.

Roughly 10 years after their issue, the first five values of the set were overprinted and surcharged with a new value of Lei 1700. This value corresponded in the year 2000 to the fee for a domestic letter. The old face value was covered by a black image of an easel, in the "tradition" of all recent overprints of the Romanian post.

Romania, 2000. Shot Paintings, overprinted.

To cheer up the things, during a trip to Romania I let cancelling a whole set on a letter. I have chosen a date that tells something to me, that of September 19, 2000, the day of my birth anniversary. The clerk at the postal office No. 45, on the Brezoianu Street in Bucharest, has done it with a lot of professionalism and even with an obvious pleasure when I have told her why have I chosen that very day. Please notice that the value of Lei 5 wasn't surcharged, because it was already out of stock, due to its limited printed quantity of only 250,000, as compared with 800,000 to 3,000,000 pieces for the other stamps of the set. The image above shows only the upper part of the cover, that has in its bottom part other two stamps, in order to attain the value of Lei 12,300, the price of an air mail letter sent from Romania to Switzerland. Actually a quite high price for the year 2000's income of most Romanians.