The Chimera of the Earth

This bronze comes from the late 1920s, when the Bucharest avant-garde was gathering around the magazine Contimporanul and its enthusiasm for Constructivism. Paciurea, then in his fifties, was modelling creatures out of myth. The art historian Ioana Vlasiu has noted that his Chimeras puzzled people when they appeared, because the Symbolism behind them already felt like the previous century.

The Chimera of Greek legend was a lion with a goat's head rising from its back and a snake for a tail. Paciurea kept the lion paws and the coiled snake's tail and gave the creature a woman's head instead. Critics of the day read this one against its sister, the Chimera of the Air, whose upward forms suggest flight. Here the body is short and stout, its belly flat on the ground, and the museum describes it as a beast unable to break away from the earth. Only the face tips upward, on a thick, muscular neck.

It is a small piece, about half a metre long. The dates 1927 to 1928 are those of the model, and when this particular bronze was cast has not been recorded.