Elena Popea

Place: Brașov

Born: 1879

Death: 1941

Biography:

Elena Popea was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian Modernist painter whose influences included Impressionism, Expressionism and Cubism. Her favored subjects were landscapes, floral still-lifes and scenes of people at work or attending events. She was born in Brașov, Romania in 1879 and died in Bucharest in 1941. Her father was a secondary school teacher and her uncle was Bishop Nicolae Popea. She studied philology in Leipzig and painting in Berlin. Later, she enrolled at the Münchner Künstlerinnenverein, an art school for women in Munich. After that, she spent some time at the artists' colony in Landsberg am Lech, where she took private lessons from Angelo Jank and Caroline Kempter. Her début came in 1905 at the 'Expoziția națională', organized by the Asociația Transilvană pentru Literatura Română și Cultura Poporului Român (ASTRA), in Sibiu. More exhibitions followed in Bucharest and Cluj. During World War I, she lived in Paris, where she had showings at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume and the Salon des indépendants. In 1922, she returned to Paris to study with André Lhote at his new academy in Montparnasse. She generally spent her summers painting in the vicinity of Brașov or Cluj, and the rest of the year travelling; wandering as far afield as Scandinavia, Scotland, Spain and the Middle East, with each trip resulting in a new series of canvases. She is known for her paintings 'Peasant Woman with Wooden Pail' and 'The Old Bridge'.