Yvonne Hassan (1925 – 2016) was a sophisticated and plurivalent intellectual and artistic personality, known both as an artist and, at least during her lifetime, especially as an art historian and professor at the “Nicolae Grigorescu” Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest. Her fundamental intellectual training took place at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bucharest, specialising in aesthetics and art history. Her art was relatively poorly known during her lifetime, but the retrospective exhibition organized by the National Museum of Contemporary Art brought to the public’s attention, for the first time, numerous works, demonstrating both the assiduity and the conceptual and technical elegance of Yvonne Hasan’s creative approaches.

The collages composed by the artist lean towards intellectualism, but stop each time in the territory of a well-tempered delicacy. The context flows calmly and decently into her works, mundane trifles are handled with expert, chiselledaesthetic sense. The art he has worked with remarkable discretion proposes refinement as a sought-after quality, but not artificial, as a somewhat surprising, somewhat naturally established emergent property.