Bogdan-Pitești was the subject of fascination in the 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.