Nikola Reiser
Composition, 1968
Mixed media on canvas
41 x 56 cm
MG-2818

Nikola Reiser (1918–2010) was a prominent painter of intimism. He initially enrolled in art history studies but left, finding the program predictable and dull. From 1939 to 1943, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (under Vladimir Becić). During World War II, he joined the Partisan resistance movement, where he drew extensively, documenting wartime events and creating a visual war diary of his friends and comrades. He continued his studies in 1945 under Oton Postružnik and later attended the Académie Julian in Paris (1949–1950). Reiser’s artistic credo was simple: “I loved beautiful things, and I painted them.”
His body of work revolves around four recurring themes: portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and nudes—often painted from memory. He was influenced by the French Post-Impressionists, particularly Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. In his portraits, he used minimal means to render facial features, emphasizing the subject’s personality. His landscapes and still lifes reflect a freer expression through surface reduction and dissolution.
His watercolour nudes—painted in a technique he appreciated for its unforgiving nature—are sensual, achieved through summarised forms and delicate tonal gradation, sometimes approaching abstraction. In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Reiser explored Art Informel materials and collage, distancing himself from the figurative world without entirely abandoning it, always in search of his own visual language.
Composition II, from 1968, reveals a (neo-)Fauvist component, where forms serve merely as pretexts for a vibrant interplay of colour and shape with a subtly intimist undertone.
He was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (1969–1983) and, alongside Ljubo Ivančić, led the Master Workshop (1978–1985). Reiser became a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1986 and received the Vladimir Nazor Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998.

Text: Željko Marciuš, Museum Advisor, National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb