Bread Line

In 1919 Romania had just come out of the First World War on the winning side, and its cities were hungry. Much of the country had been occupied, the harvests wrecked, and in Bucharest people stood in long queues for bread. Tonitza painted one of those queues. He knew the war from inside it, having served and spent time as a prisoner, and he came home with a lasting anger about what ordinary people were made to bear. That anger runs through his work of these years, in paintings and in the sharp drawings and articles he published in the press. He admired the German-language printmakers Kathe Kollwitz and Frans Masereel, who put the poor and the grieving at the center of their art, and you can feel that debt here in the stooped, patient figures. Tonitza is loved in Romania mostly for something gentler, his portraits of children with large dark eyes. This queue for bread comes from the same eye turned on adults waiting in the cold.