The money maker

By Ioana Moldoveanu

18.08.2006

[Certain pictures appearing in the original article have been replaced.]

Mugur Isarescu, the governor of Romania’s central bank, has announced the introduction of a new banknote, the RON 200. The design is by Nicolae Saftoiu, a 69-year-old artist, who drew the portrait immediately after the Revolution, and who is also credited with creating the designs on which all current Romanian banknotes, new and old, are based.

During communism, Nicolae Saftoiu refused to paint the portraits of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu and worked in a shop, making dresses and jewellery with his wife. Sometimes he drew ads for stockings, or wrote in the shop window, “We sell underwear”. “Very seldom did I have a project of any importance to work towards. Because I was never a member of the Communist Party, and was always against them, I basically starved.”

However, he did make one or two compromises: he drew an engraving for a book of poetry dedicated to the Conducator and sold one of his paintings to Miu Dobrescu, an important communist figure. Initially, Dobrescu could not understand the wires and bricks the artist had painted. Those were images from the 1977 earthquake, when his nephew died too, so he tripled the price of the painting. “We had all been bribed by the communists,” says Mr Saftoiu.

A year after the Revolution, when an offer to design banknotes with the National Bank of Romania (BNR) came his way, Mr Saftoiu accepted unhesitatingly. He recalls the day he first met BNR governor Mugur Isarescu – “an extraordinary man” – for the first time. “He welcomed me very nicely, he understood what I wanted and allowed me to set up my own team. I was scared at the beginning, till I realised how things work, but then everything went wonderfully.”

Mr Saftoiu and his team decided to gradually enlarge every banknote by five centimetres width and three centimetres height, and found a common theme for each. On the front side would be a native Romanian flower or plant and a portrait of a famous Romanian, and on the back a symbol, an aspect of popular art that connected with the character on the front. He presented his proposals for portraits but there were many dissenting opinions which, he says, came from the “communist mentality” of the decision makers. They would not accept any historical figure with a beard, for example. Henri Coanda, the great Romanian aviator who invented the modern jet aircraft was unacceptable because he was Jewish; similarly, Nicolae Titulescu, the two-time leader of the League of Nations, the forerunner to the United Nations was knocked back because he was homosexual.

Mr Saftoiu drew innumerable versions of the same portrait, with a pencil, under a magnifying glass. “It was very meticulous,” he recalls. Then followed the discussions about what to put on the back. He had always sought the opinion of his colleagues. He used to say to the graphic designer, “I don’t want to treat you as you treat your computer, like an automaton. Your opinion is important to me.”

It is a long way though from drawing a portrait to seeing it printed on a banknote, and out in the market place. After a commission approved the drafts, they were sent to England, where an English designer was selected to work on them and remake the composition. Then the portrait was engraved. After this, the ink, paper and safety elements were chosen. “I learned not to ask questions about this stuff, to respect the rule of confidentiality. What I was working on was more than secret. I did not even bother to find out about them. Why get involved with aspects that were not up to me?” Besides the security precautions, Romania’s central bank has three signs known only by the people that put them there. “Whoever tries to produce counterfeit banknotes is doomed to fail,” says Mr Saftoiu.

Since his move to the countryside, Nicolae Saftoiu says: “If there is anything at my age that can surprise me, I discovered that thing here, in Lunca Gartii. Recently I watched two birds making love. It’s something amazing.”

At the printing house not one micron can be out of place. Mr Saftoiu doesn’t know every step that is taken in producing the banknotes. There are so many, with more than 100 people employed in the process. Hence his annoyance when the banknotes are criticised. In his opinion, there is nothing spectacular in making money. “It is a method that needs hard work, as in a salt mine. If there are three options, they want the fourth. The relationship between the artist and the client can be difficult,” he complains. A long-time worker at Romania’s national printing office told him that after five years of work only then could he be capable of learning what a banknote is about. “It is very delicate and very complicated.”

He drew his first banknote, the ROL 1,000, on the plane to England, in a hurry as Romania’s currency steadily depreciated against hard currencies. The thousand lei note was eventually printed in Australia, the only country that has the technology to make plastic money. The plates he carried were valued at millions of dollars; it was no surprise that ten security guards accompanied him.

The banknote contained the portrait of the poet Mihai Eminescu; Mr Saftoiu refused to add his signature to it because more than a hundred people had worked on the final version. But even then the communist mentality was still strong. There had been discussions in government circles about the name of the poet. The communist mentality had effect then, too. They baulked at using his real name, “Eminescu”, because Elena Ceausescu had considered it a Jewish name. “I got angry then and I screamed. I told them that maybe they want to use Eminovici (the same name, in Russian).”

He drew many versions for the back of the 50,000 lei banknote; among them were a bear, a butterfly, a deer, and the Voronet monastery. They finally chose the Sphinx, but when the banknotes appeared, the Romanian Athenaeum was on the back. “Somebody from the bank did it, I never found out who. Again, I got angry. They were ridiculing it! I did not want to sign for this change. In fact they did not even ask me to sign and this was the reason they chose another artist to draw the one million lei banknote - someone from Vienna, who doesn’t even know where Romania is. But the concept is still mine.” He laughs ironically when he remembers that the first stock of notes could not fit into ATMs. “That lost them millions of dollars,” he says.

He was asked to design the new banknotes for Romania’s new currency, the RON, and duly presented designs but was never paid. Again, they chose another artist to complete the banknotes using his concept and his drawings. “(BNR spokesman) Adrian Vasilescu suggested I sue. I didn’t, because I worked with an exceptional team,” he says, widening his eyes for impact. “But, my pride as the designer of Romanian money remains intact,” he says.

“I never received a lot of money, because but I never knew how much to ask for. It was after the poor communist period when a million lei seemed so much.” The largest amount of money he was paid was $6,000 for the 500,000 lei banknote, after working on it for two years. At this moment, his pension is RON 306, and he gives the six RON to the postman, to buy himself a beer. When he talks, his eyebrows cover the frame of his glasses. He shows amazing modesty.

Now, he is retired and lives at Lunca Gartii, a tiny village in the Papusa mountains, 20 kilometres from Campulung Muscel. He lives with his wife Cristina, six cats and three dogs in an old, traditional Romanian house. Here he drew most of the banknotes, at a one-metre square table, with several containers full of coloured pencils, lit by a small lamp hanging from the ceiling. He paints; his walls are covered with portraits of saints and landscapes that he gives to others to write stories about (you can see his artwork at www.nae-saftoiu.as.ro). Plants and vegetables grow in his 2,000 square metre garden, and an enticing aroma of newly baked apple pie wafts through his house. The only time he ever comes to Bucharest is to buy materials.