site.btaDecember 5, 1890: 135th Birth Anniversary of Artist Nicolas Taneff

Internationally acclaimed Bulgarian artist Nicolas Taneff was born in Svishtov (Northwestern Bulgaria) 135 years ago on Friday, on December 5, 1890.

Taneff is reputed as this country's best portrait painter and most consistent impressionist. He is also a household name with landscape collectors.

He held 55 solo exhibitions: 28 in Bulgaria and 27 in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Romania and other countries. The best of his 15,000-plus works are owned by a number of public and private collections in Bulgaria and the rest of Europe.

Harassed by the communist regime, his health was severely damaged by torture. He suffered first brain stroke and then paralysis. In 1951 he had a heart attack and remained disabled for the remaining 14 years of his life. Taneff passed away in Sofia on July 23, 1962.

Following is an abridged version of an exclusive BTA interview carried by the Home News Desk as a tie-in with a Taneff birth anniversary exhibition in 2021:

"Nicolas Taneff Knew How to Live Happily in a Perfidious World, Says Curator and Writer Ivo Milev

Sofia, March 12, 2021 (Dahnyelle Dymytrov of BTA) - An exhibition titled "Nicolas Taneff. On the Road" honours the legacy of one of the most prominent, colourful and prolific Bulgarian artists. The event is on until the end of March 2021 at the National Gallery. Through archival documents, sketches and paintings, it traces the geography of his travels.

No other Bulgarian artist has travelled as extensively. It was his way of life - gathering impressions in order to work, exhibit and sell his paintings. Over roughly forty years he toured a significant part of Europe: Paris, Venice, Rome, Milan, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Bonn, Cologne, Hamburg, London, Stockholm, Vienna, Warsaw, Krakow, Prague, Zagreb, Belgrade, Budapest, Bucharest… Yet he never ceased to explore every corner of Bulgaria.

Interviewed for BTA, project curator Ivo Milev (writer, producer and translator) discussed the artist's unusual fate, Taneff the person, his "Parisian" period and his journeys, the months he spent in prison, as well as the concept and highlights of the exhibition.

Nicolas Taneff is said to be the only Bulgarian artist who turned travelling into a way of life. And this may well be proof of his cosmopolitan creative spirit. But is there a downside? Does it distance him from Bulgaria? Does it blur his uniqueness in some way?

Taneff travelled widely from a very young age. While still a teenager, he journeyed across Europe together with his younger brother and reached Paris. He gives the impression of being a rootless wanderer, but in fact this is not the case. He always yearned for a home, for its comfort, and he created one for himself in Sofia. It always drew him back, and he felt at ease in places he could call his own. This was true of his favourite Karlovo. Everything else - the travelling, was indeed a way of life, but more a means of livelihood, communication, networking, education, entertainment. Being highly sensitive, he often found travelling very exhausting.

Why does Paris mark the beginning of his "endless" journey? Isn't that starting point too "universal"? Or when it comes to Paris, love and women, does everything else simply recede into the background…

He ended up there by chance, still a child. He went to study and work at a printing school. He lived there for a long time. It was there that he began to paint, and there that he completed the academy. But afterwards he never returned to Paris for any significant period, nor did he paint there again. Yes, that city probably put him off by being the hub of modern art and the avant-garde. Perhaps it was precisely this destruction of form that repelled him. He firmly believed that art is the human relationship with the external world, a  vital contact that must never be lost.

In Paris the Bulgarian artist had a face-to-face encounter with celebrities like Renoir and Monet. Did these meetings bring him more inspiration, or more influence?

Taneff was introduced to Monet by his friend from the academy, [Pierre] Raingo-Pelouse, who was Claude Monet's nephew. He visited him several times in Giverny. In fact, Taneff himself says that he was in Paris when he was still very young, 15 or 16, and when he began to paint, he painted "impressionistically", without yet really knowing the Impressionists. It is difficult to identify his formative influence. He insisted on an inner, personal, organic development.

After [the communist takeover on] September 9, 1944, Nikola Tanev was branded a "bourgeois artist" and imprisoned for several months. He was later rehabilitated. How did this affect his life?

He was devastated. He was extremely sensitive, freedom-loving, impulsive, used to following his passions and desires. Prison was the very negation of all this. What is more, he was crushed by fear. He knew perfectly well what could happen to him in those times. He did not know why he was incarcerated and never found out. That is why, after his release, he hastened to toe the line, to fit into the new reality, to show loyalty. Of his own accord, no longer very young, he joined a youth brigade and went to paint at national construction sites. He was close to losing his home as well: co-tenants were placed in it, and this forced company tormented him and embittered his life. His painting style began to change drastically."