They are peasants with the utmost in sophistication. They farm instinctively, but are suspicious of machinery. They speak a language like Italian but the majority of their words are Slavonic. They are superstitious but religious at the same time. They are astutely intelligent, but refuse to be intellectual. They submit to invasion but preserve their identity. They support great wealth and extreme poverty. They produce striking beauty yet can live in filth.
As a collective personality, the Romanians are Oriental in their souls although Latin on the surface. Their patience is almost unending but they are quick to explode in argument; they are peace-loving yet would disintegrate without controversy. They are passive but strong in their resistance; spontaneously adaptable, still difficult t influence. They are romantic but never escape from reality.
They are charming yet cruel in their ridicule, warmly emotional but calculating, generous yet concentrate on the ‘main chance.’ They are opportunistic but lose interest after they have gained the advantage; they seize the moment, still adopt the long view.
The Romanians are a people of colorful contrasts and extreme extremes, born in classic times, ravaged by barbarians, indentured to the Turks, dominated by the Byzantines, the Greeks, dictated to by the Hungarians, Poles, Austrians and others, seduced by the French and not recognized as a country until 1878. Yet they emerge with a character that defies this confusion, that is definitely, emphatically, unmistakably Romanian. This character was born of a Dacian shepherd and a Roman lass, whose progeny became dwellers with nature itself, epicureans with earthy values and a tough constitution.
It developed in composition and grew in strength under the invasions of waves of barbarians. Slavs were added to the original Dacians and the Roman colonizers. Christianization was extended in Wallachia and Moldavia by the Byzantine Church and intrigue was introduced as a science by the Greek ruling emissaries of the Sublime Porte. With the intrigue came the Greek culture of the mind – the analytical clarity of the Mediterraneans – which evaporated as Greek, as it was quickly absorbed as Romanian. Following this permeation came the magnetic seduction by Paris and the synthetic adoption of French-Western artistic values, by those classes who would afford to visit the “Rive Gauche” and return.
Today you find the cult of the mind imbedded as an element of character in all classes second only to emotional spontaneity as a national characteristic. The Greeks were more successful than the French because they came to Romania and did not make Romanians come to them, and because their main influence was middle class and thereby could infect those classes both above and below them. The French appealed to aristocracy; the upper and wealthy classes of Romania went to Paris yearning to prove themselves by Gallic standards, perhaps eventually to return to the country of their birth to demonstrate their cultural acquisitions.
It was 1947. The Soviets were stationed in Romania under the auspices of the Allied Commission.
Donald Dunham wrote his doctoral dissertation for Professor George Oprescu, who, at the time, was secretary of the International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. The subject of his dissertation, Rumanian Profile: A Study of National Character as Reflected in the Visual Arts, dove-tailed with the assumptions of the European nation-state. It was submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Letters on May 20th, 1948. Dunham introduced it as follows:
Rumanian Profile is a study of the character of the Rumanian people as reflected in their visual arts. It is based on the contention that man is better analyzed by his artistic achievements than by his behavior, that the history of art in many respects is a more exact commentary on a country than its political history.
Dunham provides a brief history of the Romanian nation and then begins to examine the relationship between a people and their national arts. He looks at the artistic traditions of the Romanian elite as they developed under Greek-Byzantine influence (particularly in architecture) and under French influence during the 19th century (particularly in painting). He explores parallels between the Romanian national painter Nicolae Grigorescu and the American expatriate James Whistler. Dunham contrasts the elite traditions with the peasant traditions, using embroidery as the medium for describing peasant art.
While Dunham deals richly with the artistic traditions of Moldavia and Wallachia, he does not touch upon the traditions of Transylvania. Dunham excuses this on the grounds that Moldavia and Wallachia, the original provinces of unified Romania, "possess the essential ingredients while the other areas are culturally on the periphery". However, in a conversation with Ernest H. Latham, Jr., Dunham suggested that the real reason for this exclusion was that his status as an American diplomat in the postwar period made it impossible for him to get permission to travel to Transylvania and other regions. He didn't want to write about architecture and art which he was unable to view in person. In this sense, his dissertation failed to adequately portray the relationship between the Romanian "national character" and its artistic traditions.
Despite its limitations, Dunham's dissertation is remarkable in the fact that it was "the first American doctorate conferred in Romania", according to the roundtable convened with that title by the Association of Friends of the United States in June 1995. It exemplifies the role of history as inculcator of national values and creator of national identity. Dunham's appreciation for Romanian people and culture might sound a little expansive to modern ears, but it is an excellent historical document.
An excerpt from his dissertation dealing with Wallachian architecture and Byzantine influence is available online courtesy of Plural magazine. The excerpt quoted at the beginning of this post is also available from Plural.
