Jerko Fabković
Harlekin ?
oil on canvas
75.7 x 127.5 cm
MG-1592

Jerko Fabković (1901 – 1974) began his painting apprenticeship by attending drawing classes with Otto Antonini and Bela Čikoš Sesija. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb from 1920 to 1926, with a break of two years when he studied art history with Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich. To understand his oeuvre, it is essential to mention that he was born into a wealthy bourgeois family, enabling him to create without exhibiting or selling his works.

“Harlequin” depicts a figure in half profile, lying on his side with an instrument in his hands in an idyllic landscape. Harlequin, a characteristic comic character of the Italian commedia dell’arte, is a cunning and resourceful servant and a symbol of fickleness. Fabković shows him in a relaxed pose, immersed in a dreamy atmosphere created by warm tones of yellow and red shades. The composition of the painting exudes calmness, while hi facial expression reflects melancholy, emphasizing the duality of this figure that evokes laughter and sadness at the same time. Carefully modeled bodies, with an emphasis on their massiveness and purity of form, are reminiscent of the “painter’s gigantism,” as stated by the Croatian art critic Grgo Gamulin, and the apparent influence of Art Deco is present in the elongated limbs and curved lines of some of Fabković’s compositions.

Fabković’s work often explores the themes of gender and sexual identities and norms, which come to the fore much more clearly in the works “Keramičar Kičin as Madonna” from 1941 and “The Hermaphrodite Nude” from 1930. In these works, Fabković shows characters that do not fit into traditional norms, exploring the fluidity of gender identities and strongly going beyond the boundaries of the canon.[1]

 

Text: Marta Radman, curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Marta Radman
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

[1] Gavrilović, Feđa. “Drawings by Jerko Fabković for the Church of St. Blaž.” In: Kontura art magazine, 25 (2015), 128, p. 16–19. Courtesy of the author. The works “Potter Kičin as Madonna” from 1941 and “Nude of a Hermaphrodite” from 1930 are in the private collection of Dr. Josip Kovačić.

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