(b Baccealia, Bessarabia [now Bakchaliya, Moldova], 28 Feb 1926). Romanian painter. He studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Bucharest (1945–52), and from 1954 undertook several study tours in Italy and France. He established his reputation between 1954 and 1959 with landscapes and portraits that were subtle in colour and showed the influence of Ion Andreescu, Camil Ressu and Dumitru Ghiata (e.g. Landscape at Grozavesti, 1954; Suceava, Distr. Mus.). From 1965 he concentrated on large-scale official commissions, which he painted in a style unaffected by the accepted academic views of the time, and that were contemporary while still having thematic and stylistic elements from earlier periods in Romanian art (e.g. Epitaph, 1967; Bucharest, Mus. A.). The constructive synthesis of his forms and volumes is based on a continuous dynamism of planes and linear rhythms, originating from the Cubist decomposition of forms, and from the Neo-classical mode between the two World Wars, especially that practised by Picasso and Jacques Villon. In his large historical compositions, which in their rhythm and use of colour show the influence of Art informel, he evoked the Revolution of 1848, the peasants’ uprising of 1907, and the representation of Michael the Brave, a great symbolical figure of Romanian national history. He used a wide range of greys, with scattered lagoons of fading opaque yellow or of sombre or matt reds. In a series of still-lifes (Fruit Dishes) painted between 1970 and 1972 the subject is absorbed in the lyrical metaphor of the lines and colour nuances, recalling the visual subtlety of Ben Nicholson. Between 1959 and 1978 Almasanu worked on a number of monumental decorative compositions, such as a fresco for a Youth Cultural Centre in Bucharest (1959) and a project for murals at the National Theatre in Bucharest (unaccomplished). From 1986 to 1990 he lived in California, concentrating on landscapes and still-lifes, often containing flowers.