Ștefan Arteni Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

In 2005, Arteni was awarded the highest rank in Japanese calligraphy, the title of Shihan, an honorific title used to refer to Master Teachers or masters of a specific style. He is the only non-Japanese artist to earn the title, to date. According to the ancient custom, along with his promotion to the rank of master came the bestowing of a new calligraphy name, Geizan, which translates from Japanese as “Art Mountain”. The name was given to Arteni by Tanaka Setsuzan.

In competitions organized by the Japan Calligraphic Art Academy in Tokyo and the Japan Calligraphy Center in Los Angeles, Arteni was awarded the Japan Foreign Minister’s Grand Prize for Calligraphy in 1996 and 2005, the Silver Award for Kana in 1999, and the Grand Prize for Calligraphy of the Japanese Consul in 2002.

In recent years, he has lectured on and demonstrated calligraphy (Greek, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese), and participated in workshops in New York (1995 and 1996); the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (1998); Columbia University, New York (1998); and Saint Mark Library, General Theological Seminary, New York (1999).

In 1977, Arteni and his wife Myriam, herself an award-winning painter and skilled fine art book-maker, left Rome and moved to New York City, where they established themselves and lived together for the remainder of his life until his death in 2020 at the age of 72, due to a sudden and aggressive form of cancer.

Since 1974, Arteni has authored over one-hundred radio broadcasts and published papers on art history, the manufacture of artist’s materials, the techniques and materials of painting, and aesthetics (phenomenology and systems theory).

In Rome, between 1972 and 1974 he thoroughly explored Italian painting and art and worked for the Romanian broadcast of Vatican Radio as a redactor and art historian. He wrote, produced, and broadcast 61-episode series on Christian Art in Europe. In this time period, he exhibited some of his first works and published some of the results of the research he and Myriam made on materials and techniques of painting, authoring over 40 papers published by the International Council of Museums, on techniques, individual artists, materials and the theory of art. These investigations were presented in the form of scientific papers at various international conferences, and are currently being used in several European teaching institutions.

His early life was profoundly impacted by the communist regime in Romania under Ceaușescu’s administration. Due to the harsh conditions under by the communist party, upon completion of his studies in 1971, Arteni’s parents’ graduation gift was a trip to Paris to study the city’s great museums. However, his parents’ real intentions were to flee Romania and remain in exile. As such, they escaped Romania in 1971 and sought political asylum in Rome, Italy, due to cultural and financial reasons.

After a few weeks, in 1971 at the age of 24, Arteni enrolled in the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, where he studied with Luigi Montanarini and Sandro Trotti, both celebrated painters. On the very first day of class he met Myriam Sánchez Posada, a fellow student from Colombia. They became inseparable and married in 1975. In the words of Arteni, “together we wandered into the labyrinth of art”.

After attending the Nicolae Tonitza High School of Fine Arts between 1961 and 1965, he was denied admission to a Fine Arts program in the state-run university system because his liberal parents were considered politically unreliable by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime. As a result, he studied architecture at the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urban Planning, from which he graduated in 1970.

Ștefan C. Arteni (September 21, 1947 – April 1, 2020) was a Romanian artist, painter, calligrapher, architect, historian, essayist, and translator. His work focused on east Asian calligraphy, as well as secular and religious paintings.

Arteni was born on September 21, 1947, in Bucharest, Romania, to Constanța Arteni and Vasile Arteni, a physician who specialized in otorhinolaryngology. Ștefan grew up primarily in Bucharest, and as a teenager was introduced to eastern Asian characters and letters while watching the movie Harakiri (1962) on his black-and-white family television set. Eastern Asian characters and letters piqued his curiosity and he discovered a passion, deep respect and understanding for the oriental arts, symbols, and calligraphy. In a letter to his close friend Michael Finkenthal, he expressed the impact this experience had on him, and how it influenced his style and later work: