Lili Pancu was a Romanian painter whose career spanned seven decades, bridging the interwar, socialist, and post-communist periods of Romanian art. Educated at the Bucharest School of Fine Arts under Cecilia Cuțescu-Storck, Jean Steriadi, and Ipolit Strâmbu, she developed a refined pictorial language that balanced structural rigor with atmospheric subtlety. After graduating in 1933, Pancu became active within the vibrant artistic circles of Balchik and Bucharest, debuting in 1936 at Sala Mozart. Her early works, shaped by plein-air practice and the chromatic luminosity of the Dobrujan landscape, reveal affinities with the lyrical realism characteristic of the interwar generation.

The political rupture of 1947 temporarily curtailed her public activity, but from 1955 onwards she re-entered the artistic circuit through the decorative arts section of the Artists’ Union. Her postwar production reflects a nuanced adaptation to the ideological constraints of the period while preserving a personal register of observation and formal coherence. During the 1960s and 1970s she travelled extensively, producing sketches and paintings that document a cultivated curiosity about the visual structures of other geographies.

In her later years, Pancu continued to pursue compositional harmony and chromatic restraint, reaffirming a painterly discipline grounded in observation rather than ideological rhetoric. Her oeuvre—spanning nearly an entire century—embodies a rare continuity in Romanian art, marked by endurance and the discreet persistence of a modern artistic conscience.