Romanian arts groups face new funding.

Tradition is deeply embedded in Romanian cultural life, in its music, in its art and in its dance. Until now, however, that tradition has seldom included private support for the arts. But times are changing and not only in Romania. Throughout Europe the once munificent and seemingly bottomless well of government arts funding is drying up and arts groups are learning to meet the new challenge of finding their own way through a bewildering maze of potential sources of support.

The arts in Romania are up to facing this challenge, although not without great effort, as this writer learned during a week-long visit this past summer to present a series of seminars in Bucharest, the country's capitol city. A somewhat frayed one-time beauty, ravaged by World War II and the harsh Communist role that followed, Bucharest, nonetheless, still retains many vestiges of its past grandeur. Symbolic of the duality of its chaotic past and the nine year move towards reconstructing a raptured society is a prominent cultural edifice, Bucharest's National Art Museum. Severely damaged by fire during the revolution that overthrew Romania's tyrannical president, Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, the museum, while maintaining its permanent collection and presenting temporary exhibitions and touring art shows, including one last year shown in four American cities, has never reopened its entire facility. Now, however, the museum, which receives virtually all its funding from the government, has found a new source of support. A first-time "friends" group, which includes Americans and other foreigners living in Bucharest, with business people and the wives of diplomats among those most deeply involved, has embarked on a private funding campaign and hopes to reopen part of the museum's main facility next year.

Other leading cultural organizations in Bucharest, many of whom have relied almost entirely on government funding, also are shifting gears to adjust both to the prospect of diminishing government support and to find support for new projects and capital needs that the government cannot fund. However, the shift is far from routine. Many cultural budgets, for example, are bloated because of exceptionally large and often entrenched staffs, including a number of employees with life contracts. Production costs for performing groups are high because of labor costs, which can be 60 percent of the total budget, and long seasons. The Romanian National Opera, for example, which has its own ballet company, employs a staff of 750, 450 of them artists, while the more-than-a-century old National Theater, has 120 actors on its roster of 450 employees.