Roman Greco (1904-1989)
Born in 1904 in Porcesti, a poor, isolated village in the Carpathian mountains of Romania, Roman Greco is the eldest of three in the family of a shoe maker. His father decides Roman will succeed him and teaches him the job; but he is not an easy child and he has the odd idea of wanting to be an artist ! As soon as he can, he cuts himself off to draw or paint, on paper, cardboard, wood, walls… One day, the village priest suggests that he decorates a little, local church with frescoes and biblical characters, which he achieves with success.
Henceforth acknowledged as an artist and more confident, he hurries to Bucaresti in order to go in for the yearly competitive exam at the School of Fine Arts; that, against the will of his family and the priest.
He comes top of the class and starts a two year curriculum. In the second year, the school organizes a competition offering registration at the School of Fine Arts in Paris together with a year's grant. Again he comes top of the class and leaves Romania a few months later.
Excited by life in Paris, he falls in love with la Butte Montmartre and decides he will not go back home, but in order to survive, he has to take seasonal (often odd) jobs like sandwich board man, walk-on in some theaters, porter in the food markets, and for a few coins, he draws people’s portraits at the’ Place Du Tertre’ next to Le Sacré Coeur. After about a year and a half of hardship in seedy hotels, sometimes sleeping under the bridges, he finds friends in Montmartre who help and put him up in a spare room they have. He does not paint much because the equipment is expensive, so he decides to set himself up as a leather tanner (thank you daddy !) and makes all sorts of fancy leather goods. He gets married a few years before the war, becomes a French citizen, sells a few of his paintings but keeps working at his leather trade to survive.
Little by little, he becomes a figure of ‘la Butte Montmartre’, a regular visitor to ‘Le Lapin Agile’ where he comes across Emil Cioran whom he had made friends with when they were at the School of Fine Arts in Bucaresti, their friendship will last until Roman’s death in 1988. Among his close friends are Bernard Lorjou and Auguste Frémaux with whom he works and shares galleries for their exhibitions. He keeps painting until the late seventies,and many of his works are selected for "le salon d’automne" , the Paris yearly painting exhibition.
His relatives have told us that he was always reluctant to sell his paintings and agreed to part with them only when they were short of money; as a result he kept piling them up in his studio rue des Cloÿs, so many of them, that one could hardly get into the place.
Since his death, all these works have been moved from one attic to another, until they were almost forgotten, or worse, lost and destroyed; “Almost” thank God, we have found them, dusted them up, sometimes mended them and showed them to advantage because they deserve it.
Here they are.
Alain Blondot - December 2019