Tag: 1921.

Juraj Škarpa, Anger, 1921

Juraj Škarpa
(1881 – 1952)
Anger, 1921
casting, bronze
60 x 41 x 30 cm
MG-6341

Juraj Škarpa attended the School of Applied Arts in Vienna (1913 - 1914) and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1920, in the class of Prof. Robert Frangeš Mihanović. Influenced by Mihanović, he successfully sculpted female nudes.
He collaborated with Ivan Meštrović on the Račić family mausoleum in Cavtat, after which they permanently parted ways. Stylistically, Škarpa is associated with interwar modernism. He combines Art Nouveau elements with Expressionism, making him one of the few Croatian expressionist sculptors. He created portraits and allegorical compositions in stone and wood, and a significant portion of his oeuvre consists of religious and funerary sculptures.
The sculpture Anger depicts a nude, beastly male figure in motion and contortion. His back is bent, with the right leg stepping forward and the left leg extended backward, both resting on an amorphous mass that flows onto the rounded base, symbolising a pedestal. The face is caricatured with a distressed expression. The right arm is close to the body, bent at the elbow and reaching the chin, while the left arm, with an open hand, is positioned slightly away from the body, lowered, and touching the left thigh. The suggestive movements are driven by intense emotion. The naturalistic modelling and rough finishing accentuate the figure’s expressiveness, raw emotions, and desires.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © Nacionalni muzej moderne umjetnosti, Zagreb

Marijan Trepše, Ilički Square, 1921

Marijan Trepše
Ilički Square, 1921
oil on canvas
100 x 105 cm
MG-3408

Marijan Trepše’s vision of Ilički (today, British) Square in Zagreb suggests uncertainty as a fundamental determinant of contemporary life. The sliding frame without a solid support is dominated by elongated lines rendered in a specific green-ochre colourway and sharp contrasts of supernatural lighting. The square and the streets around it, the buildings, trees and people are arranged like theatre sets and marionettes, so the whole scene appears artificial and keeps us in a constant state of suspense.
Marijan Trepše (1897 – 1964) obtained a degree in painting in Zagreb in 1918. During his subsequent training in Prague, he attended Professor Max Švabinský’s advanced painting and printmaking course. After the war, he was admired among his Prague colleagues for being their closest link to Kraljević’s modern ideas. With Uzelac, Gecan and Varlaj, he formed the informal ‘Group of Four’, and they adopted the novel Cézannesque expressionist artistic concepts thus initiating the new and most important phase of the Spring Salon in 1919. During his training in Paris from 1920 to 1922, Trepše neared the classicist expression of André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. Later on, he painted using emphatically brighter colours and less constrained faktura. In addition to his substantial printmaking oeuvre, illustrations, caricatures and book covers, Trepše also created stained glass windows. As a set designer in the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb from 1925 to 1957, he created as many as 129 stage designs.

Text: Lada Bošnjak Velagić, senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023

Sava Šumanović, A Sculptor at His Studio, 1921

Sava Šumanović
A Sculptor at His Studio, 1921
oil on canvas
91×74.5 cm
MG-1966

Departing significantly from the art scene in Croatia which drew at the time on the legacy of Miroslav Kraljević and the Munich Circle, and which was orientated towards Expressionism, the post-cubist composition A Sculptor at His Studio from 1921 is a paradigm of Sava Šumanović’s ‘new art’.
Sava Šumanović started exhibiting at Croatia’s Spring Salon already as a student at the High School of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb. He socialised and collaborated with painters Milan Steiner and Bogumil Car, and exhibited his work at solo exhibitions as early as 1918 and 1920. His paintings sold well, and he produced illustrations for poet Antun Branko Šimić’s avant-garde magazine Juriš and set designs for the Croatian National Theatre.

Following his first successes in Zagreb, he moved to Paris where he worked at the studio of painter André Lhote. Upon his return to Zagreb, Šumanović was disappointed with the wider public’s lack of understanding of his art, so in protest he signed his paintings in French. Although Šumanović’s key exhibition of works painted in the style of classicised academic Cubism held in Zagreb in 1921 received good reviews by young critics Antun Branko Šimić and Rastko Petrović, Šumanović moved back to Paris in 1925. Inspired by painter Henri Matisse’s powerful colours, he painted large figural compositions. In 1927, inspired by Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry and Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa, he painted The Drunken Ship, which was exhibited at the Salon of the Independents and chosen for the cover of Le Crapouillot, an important contemporary art magazine. Having gotten mentally ill, in 1930 he moved with his parents to Šid. He painted a series of cityscape vedutas, children’s portraits, landscapes and compositions of women bathers and pickers in the vein of Poetic Realism. He worked diligently until his execution in World War II in 1942.

Text: Lada Bošnjak Velagić, senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Ana Janković
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

Vilko Gecan, A Cynic, 1921

Vilko Gecan
(1894-1973)
A Cynic, 1921
oil on canvas
110.5×99 cm
MG-2668

Vilko Gecan’s A Cynic from 1921 points paradigmatically to the specificity of the way that Expressionism was conceived by Croatian artists in the 1920s. The young man in the painting is reading Der Sturm, a German art and literary magazine that played a key role in promoting Expressionism in both German speaking countries and Croatia.

The grimace that distorts the painter’s face beyond recognition, his dramatic gesture and body in spasm were undoubtedly inspired by German expressionist cinema and theatre. Thanks to Gecan having been a big fan of the 1920 German silent horror film Dr Caligari’s Cabinet, the painting radiates anxiety, which is built with the motifs of a sloping floor and an oversized table. In it, everything serves to facilitate expression – besides displaying a dramatic contrast between light and shadow, the composition is unstable featuring manifold perspectives.

Preceded by numerous drawings, A Cynic was first exhibited at The Spring Salon in Zagreb in 1921. One of the drawings was previously published in the avant-garde magazine Zenit published and edited by Serbian poet Ljubomir Micić, who underscored – despite claims that “there is no real Expressionism in our milieu” – the quality of Gecan’s drawings and etchings from his Clinic and Slavery in Sicily series inspired by his difficult experience of World War I.
After having spent three years in captivity on Sicily and after having volunteered to fight on the Macedonian Front, Gecan joined Milivoj Uzelac in 1919 in his move to Prague, where the two were taught by painter Jan Preisler. After his studies in Prague, he lived and worked in Zagreb, Berlin, New York and Chicago. Once he returned to Croatia in 1932, he painted intimist compositions featuring a strong colour scheme.

Text: Lada Bošnjak Velagić, senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Ana Janković
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

Ivo Kerdić, Petar Dobrović, 1921

Ivo Kerdić
(1881-1953)
Petar Dobrović, 1921
bronze
MG-2892-109
MG-2892-110

Ivo Kerdić (1881-1953) was a great Croatian medallist of the first half of the 20th century. In his medals and plaques from the end of the 1920s, the poetics of Art Nouveau started to slowly fade and sculptural qualities started to become increasingly prominent. Kerdić’s three medals dedicated to painters – namely, to Petar Dobrović from 1921, to Vilko Gecan from 1923 and to Vladimir Becić from 1930 – are powerful and holistic portraits of their artistic and psychological values. The reverses of these medals feature synthesised symbolism. Although Kerdić created a large number of artworks of high quality, these medals are the best examples of the creative power of his artistic accomplishment.

Kerdić brought his novel artistic conception to life on a double-sided medal of painter and lawyer Petar Dobrović (1890-1942), which he wrote the following about: “My first medal, which I executed in freeform, is an engraved medal of painter Dobrović, and is one of my most significant works. This medal is purely sculptural in nature without any painterly influence. Yet it works well and looks good as a medal, even as an engraving. The obverse features the figure of the painter with an inscription in a circle: ‘Petar Dobrović’, a figure full of Dobrovićesque self-awareness. Dobrović, a man of great energy and self-confidence bordering on arrogance, is within the frame of the medal and completely dominates it. The reverse of the medal does not lag behind the obverse in quality. Dobrović’s personality is again reflected in the ‘rooster’. Thanks to Dobrović’s medal, I made my way to America, where almost each of the 25 pieces were sold.”

Ivo Kerdić used a similar solution for the designs of his medals dedicated to Croatian painters Vilko Gecan (1894-1973) and Vladimir Becić (1886-1954) as he did with painter Dobrović – the obverse features an extraordinary psychological portrait, and the reverse a characteristic personification and a slogan.

Text:Tatijana Gareljić, Museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art©National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Ana Janković
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

Ljubo Babić, Castilian Landscape, 1921

Ljubo Babić
Castilian Landscape, 1921
oil on canvas, 49 x 64.5 cm
MG-964
The 1920 trip to Spain significantly influenced Ljubo Babić’s creative work. Impressed by Spanish art and culture, but also its magnificent landscape, Babić created a portfolio of prints titled Toledo, a series of watercolours and an oil on canvas dedicated to the Castilian Landscape. Babić conveys the spirit and meaning of Spanish heritage with a detailed construction of space and dramatic light over the fields. On the other hand, Babić will later theoretically explain the idea of ‘our’ expression as specific to Croatian culture, and will provide a painterly elaboration in the cycle Land of My Birth from the late 1930s.
As a painter, set and costume designer, graphic artist, art pedagogue and critic, art historian, museologist, writer and editor, Ljubo Babić was one of the central personalities in the 20th century Croatian cultural life, and his views greatly influenced the general characteristics of Croatian art. He participated in the founding of the Croatian Spring Salon, Group of Independent Artists, Group of Four, Group of Three, Group of Croatian Artist and Croatian Artists. As the first curator of the National Museum of Modern Art, he was the author of its first permanent display shown in 1920 in the Museum of Arts and Crafts. In 1948, he designed the first display of the National Museum of Modern Art’s collection, which represents the complex development of 19th and 20th century Croatian art, for which purpose today’s building underwent extensive renovations.
Text: Lada Bošnjak Velagić, Senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Tekst: Lada Bošnjak Velagić, viša kustosica Nacionalnog muzeja moderne umjetnosti © Nacionalni muzej moderne umjetnosti, Zagreb
Foto: Goran Vranić © Nacionalni muzej moderne umjetnosti, Zagreb
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