Petru Comarnescu

Who was Petru Comarnescu?

Petru Comarnescu was a Romanian literary and art critic and translator.

Born in Iași into a family that was related to the metropolitan bishop Veniamin Costache, he studied at the University of Bucharest law, philosophy and philology before going in 1931 on a two-year scholarship to the United States of America, where he received a PhD in aesthetics from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, with a thesis entitled The Nature of Beauty and Its Relation to Goodness.

Together with Mircea Vulcănescu and Alexandru Christian Tell, he started the Criterion association and magazine in 1934.

Before the Second World War he published in several Romanian newspapers, for example Adevărul, Adevărul literar și artistic, Azi, Stânga, Arta, Excelsior, Da și nu, Ulisse and was an editor at Vremea, Rampa, Revista Fundațiilor Regale. Between 1944 and 1949 he published in Bis, Agora, Timpul, Arcades, Națiunea, Universul.

Between 1949 and 1960 he was not allowed to publish under his own name, due to political reasons. The only exceptions were monographies about painters or sculptors: Octav Băncilă, Abgar Baltazar, Viaţa şi opera lui Rembrandt van Rijn, Nicolae Grigorescu, Ştefan Luchian.