Using the Catalogue

The project of gathering and cataloguing the works started in 2014. Invaluable here was the archive initiated by the artist himself (exhibition catalogues, list of collectors, autobiographic fragments, photographs of the works and newspaper clippings going back to the 1950s). His late wife, Viky, ordered and conserved the archive when she was re-locating the studio - we cherish her life-long dedication and commitment to Bitzan’s legacy. 

The list of works is not exhaustive. We are still in the process of locating pieces, all of which will be uploaded after documentation. 

In 2017 a major retrospective exhibition was organized by the Romanian National Museum of Contemporary Art - MNAC Bucharest. About 900 works were catalogued on this occasion. We thank the museum for all its dilligence in promoting the work of Ion Bitzan and are particularly grateful to Cristina Cojocaru, art historian, whom the museum entrusted with the research of the Ion Bitzan oeuvre in view of a printed Catalogue Raisonné. Our thanks are due to museums and auction houses for allowing us to use their photographic material. We owe our utmost gratitude to private collectors, to owners of works, to art historians, art critics and not least to our friends who each and all contributed to our research.

Numbering system

Each work is given a sequential catalogue raisonné number. Editions have a number consisting of two parts; the second part shows how many editions were identified.

Dates

Definitive dates are provided onloy when a work was dated by the artist. Whenever a work is unsigned/undated we opted for circa dates based on the year of first mention in the Archives (for example exhibition catalogues, photographs, correspondence with art galleries, accession numbers, styles, provenance).

Titles

All main titles are in Romanian, except for the works which were publicly presented  for the first time outside Romania – here  we chose the language of the host country. If a newly presented work toured to different countries, all relevant titles are given. Alternate titles are also mentioned when the same work was published in different exhibition catalogues or photographs of the same work exist under a different title in a museum archive.

Images

Photographs are by Marcel Almajanu, Barrie Barreto, Serioja Bocsok, Nelu Coltofeanu, Florin Dragu, Trevor Good, Iosif Kiraly, Achim Kuest, Giampaulo de Luca, Alexandru Marginean, Cornelia Soanca, Octavian Stăcescu. Great efforts were made to provide high resolution images, but we also had to use a number of mobile telephone images taken by owners of the works. In other cases, we had to use images from whatever available sources such as exhibition catalogues, newspapers and various archives. 

Images on the home page have the following credit line: Bogdan Moțoc/1975, Peter Jacobi/1992, Ion Bitzan Foundation Archives.

Un-located works/Present whereabouts unknown

These are works, known to exist, that could not yet be located.