Rolul intelectualităţii artistice de formaţie europeană în viaţa cultural-spirituală a Transilvaniei în perioada dualismului austro-ungar
The Role of the Artistical Intelectuality of European Formation in the Cultural-Spiritual Life of Transylvania in the Period of the Austrian-Hungarian

Summary/Abstract: After the 1848 Revolution and up to 1918 too, the artistic intelligentsia was the less numerous branch, but the most heterogeneous, where the social stratification criteria interfere with the occupational-professional ones, and also with those which belong to the domain of phenomena specific to arts (such as genres, talent, opportunities) hard to be quantified. We do not have the possibility of giving exact global numbers regarding the dynamics of the professional subgroups, because even the official counts of the population in 1880, 1890, 1900 and 1910 are confuse in the classification of some intellectuals from this category after their statute (professional men, state or private employee). So, for example, painters and musicians with a double socio-occupational statute (that is drawing teachers and respectively, music teachers) were included by the census takers into the category of didactic intelligentsia, and not the artistic one. On the other hand, a great number of the figures are questionable by their exaggerated or minimized proportions. Here is such an example, which regards a professional group belonging to the artistic intelligentsia. In 1900, the official statistics from Hungary registered the presence of 2000 actors (out of which 1000 were actresses) in the regions of Saint Stephen’s Crown. For Transylvania, at the same date, there are registered only 156 actors, distributed from an ethnic point of view as it follows: not one Romanian, 121 Hungarians, and 35 Germans. The census takers of the dualist Austrian-Hungarian authorities arbitrarily classified the representatives of cultural-artistic intelligentsia in 1910, too, registering in Transylvania 76 men of letters and artists, 12 private scholars and writers, 44 editors and publicists, 11 painters, 12 sculptors, 12 singers, 46 musicians, 216 actors. This time too, the plastic artists and musicians, with a double professional statute, were included into the didactic intelligentsia, even if owing to their creations and performances they ought to be grouped into the artistic intelligentsia. The intellectuals from this professional group – painters and sculptors, actors and musicians etc. - distinguished themselves through a secular mentality penetrated by a European dynamism. Some of them, with political democratic – republican beliefs, carried on an “extra-professional” activity, characterized by a pronounced social activity, militating for the abolishment of the old feudal remains, for the development of national culture, for the national emancipation of the Romanian Transylvanians.

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