Aurel Popp

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Aurel Popp was a Romanian painter, sculptor, and graphic artist associated with the second generation of the Baia Mare School. Trained in Budapest, Italy, Vienna, and later in Paris at the Académie Julian, he combined academic discipline with an openness to European modernism. His early exhibitions in Budapest were well received, and study trips across Europe further enriched his stylistic vocabulary. The experience of the First World War proved formative, inspiring a body of work with pronounced social and anti-militarist themes. In the interwar period, he co-organised the Collegium Artificum Transilvanicorum exhibition in Cluj in 1921 and later exhibited at the Official Salon in Bucharest. Although connected to the Baia Mare colony, he developed an independent practice in Baia Sprie, around which a circle of painters gathered. Popp’s oeuvre, spanning painting, sculpture, and graphic art, is distinguished by its focus on the human figure and by its balance between rigorous structure and expressive line. He remains an important figure in Romanian modern art, representative of the cultural intersections between regional identity and international modernism.