literary and artistic community. Lucian Boia writes about his seductive "legend", which fused an "imaginative and generous intellectual" with a "con artist" who "lived life as he saw fit". Art historian Corina Teacă notes that, like Félix Fénéon, Bogdan-Pitești was in fact fabricating his own myth: "every part of his public image was a removable mask." The art institutions he helped establish were, nevertheless, reputable. According to Paul Cernat, his influential circle was "an excellent medium of transmission for the modern spirit, an informal institution and one of the first coagulant factors for [Romania's] first post-symbolist modernism." Writing earlier, Theodor Enescu proposed that, like own group, the Știrbey-Vodă Street salon and Macedonski's circle were the only trend-setters active between the decline of Junimea society (ca. 1900) and the establishment of the modernist literature magazine Sburătorul (1919). Cernat additionally notes that, while the writer Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești was "neglectful and improvident" when it came to preserving his own works, those essays and prose poems that survived have a genuine value. Such judgments were also passed on his topical art essays. Art historian Petru Comarnescu writes that Bogdan-Pitești's "critical intuitions" were superior to those of fellow collectors Zambaccian and Ioan Kalinderu; critic Nicolae Oprescu also assesses that, without Bogdan-Pitești, Ștefan Luchian would be lost to Romanian art. The Romanian art environment cherished, then despised, its anarchist patron. In his moments of glory, he received homages from many of his writer friends, as notebooks and albums compiled especially for him. At a later date, all sides of the dispute were united in expressing criticism for at least some of Bogdan-Pitești's deeds. According to Galaction, he was a "hajduk", who "robbed away and gave away." Zambaccian portrayed him as one "created from a mold in which the evil and the good genius were present in equal measure. [...] Cynical and suave, generous on one side, a con artist on the other, Al. Bogdan-Pitești relished the abjection that he served with cynicism". As Teacă notes, both Zambaccian and sculptor Oscar Han were among those forever "seduced" by Bogdan-Pitești's duplicity. In 1970, Han wrote: "we cannot judge [him] under common law. He remains an absurdity." While nationalist journalist Pamfil Șeicaru dismissed him as "a scoundrel", Macedonski argued that Bogdan-Pitești was "a wonderful prose writer and an admirable poet". Benjamin Fondane, the modernist poet-philosopher, praised Bogdan-Pitești as a man of exquisite taste, concluding that: "He was made of