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This thesis investigates how modernism manifested itself in applied arts and design in interbellum Bucharest, expanding the field of enquiry of the avant-garde outside two-dimensional production. The framework utilised is underpinned by two recent approaches: from art history, the concept of ‘circulations’ developed by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel; and from the field of performance studies, Erika Fischer-Lichte’s new aesthetics of performance. The narrative thread is provided by the activities of the artist M. H. Maxy in the realms of design and performance, yet he is not always the protagonist. The first half of the thesis recovers the history of the Academy of Decorative Arts, a private venture founded by designer and pedagogue Andrei Vespremie and later joined by Maxy and his wife Mela Maxy. Through newly uncovered archival material, it provides a close reading of the Academy’s curriculum and workshops and establishes its links with the Schule Reimann, a pioneering Berlin-based design institution. The second half of the thesis focuses on Maxy’s work in stage design and reveals the trajectories of his innovative collaborators: the Vilna Troupe, Dida Solomon and Iacob Sternberg. Examining a range of theatrical productions, it highlights the experimental visions, intricate performances and iconoclastic endeavours of these practitioners, which ran the gamut of ‘high’ to ‘low’ art and blurred the boundaries between modern life, modern commerce, and the theatrical stage. Overall, this thesis brings to light the rich artistic life of modern Bucharest, a heretofore peripheral location in histories of art, and highlights practitioners whose contribution to the European interwar avant-garde have been obscured by the gaps between disciplines or national narratives. It challenges the categories of ‘avant-garde’ and ‘modernism’ and their restrictive usage, advocating for a more inclusive and transnational approach that eschews binaries and normalises cross-cultural and cross-media slippages and collaborations. The funding for this thesis was supported by, "Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities (SGSAH) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Doctoral Training Partnership Award; German History Society DAAD Award; Catherine and Alfred Forrest Trust Fine Art Bursary; Elizabeth Gilmore Holt Scholarship; Santander Research Mobility Award"

The Western European culture in the 18th century builds an impressive reference framework for the intellectual life in Central and Eastern Europe, where the ideals of the Enlightenment had spread rapidly mainly by means of translations of secularized works from all fields of knowledge. Among these, one should mention a series of historical writings that give account of the great monarchs of the time. In the following study we try to illustrate the concept of “cultural translation” by analysing a historical text about Catherine II of Russia. The Moldavian manuscript illustrates the process in which ideas and concepts have circulated in the European space: it is an Austrian (Habsburg) portrait of a German princess that managed to be crowned empress of Russia under debatable circumstances. This portrait written at the court of Joseph II in 1877 was translated in the same year in Greek and through this intermediary entered the Romanian speaking soil, where it was translated a year after. The circulation of ideas and conceptions respectively misconceptions can be illustrated in then textual mutations that occurred during this cultural transfer process from East to West and then to East again. The ideological and political intent of the text can be also seen in the self-aware translation that aimed to bring plusvalue to the Enlightened discourse of its original text.

The Romanian literature of the 18th century is witnessing a remarkable metamorphosis, whereas step by step the Enlightment’s ideas penetrate the Romanianspeaking soil and through various mechanisms replace the medieval order in society, politics and arts. In this time of the Enlightment the small popular book “Bertoldo” from the late Italian 16th century was adapted in French and then in German and through the German intermediary reached Transylvania at the end of the 18th century (Hermannstadt, 1799). In the centre of our analysis we place the concept of “cultural transfer” and that of the “cultural translation”, concepts that help us illustrate the adaptation strategies of the foreign material and the integration principles of the Enlightment’s ideals on the Romanian soil. Working with eloquent examples from the “Bertoldo”-text in a comparative manner we will try to bring to light the interaction of the poetical and ideological functions of the translations from German and its role in forming and shaping a new kind of Romanian cultural and literary sensibility.