Tag: 1923.

Rudolf Valdec, Portrait of Vatroslav Jagić, 1923

Rudolf Valdec
(1872 – 1929)
Portrait of Vatroslav Jagić, 1923
casting, bronze
39 x 29 x 22 cm
MG-625

After having received academic education in Vienna (1890, 1894- 1895) and Munich (1891 -1894), the sculptor and medallist Rudolf Valdec became an accomplished artist and educator in Zagreb. With Robert Frangeš – Mihanović, he was the pioneer of modern sculpture in Croatia and modernist tendencies in the spirit of Secession in Croatian visual arts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Valdec’s public monuments in the form of allegorical figural representations and busts on buildings in Zagreb’s Lower Town, Zrinjevac Park and the Mirogoj Cemetery are an integral part of modern identity of the City of Zagreb.
Rudolf Valdec was an exquisite modern portraitist. The artist added expressive individuality to realistic form, interwoven with Art Nouveau stylization, and connected character with appropriate artistic solutions.
The portrait bust of the Croatian linguist Vatroslav Jagić (1838 – 1923) sits on a thin plinth. The semi-profile view reveals the hollowness of the obliquely cut bust. The physiognomic details are adequately descriptive: the frontal view reveals a closed, full and robust head volume, a serious, wide face, accentuated earlobes sticking out from the head, hair parted in a straight line, thick eyebrows, strong nose, bushy moustache, pressed lips, and wide chin. A ribbon tied in a bow can be seen around the neck, and the coat’s lapel is oval. Art Nouveau decorativeness and stylisation in the treatment of the hair dovetail with the smooth modelling of playful facial surfaces. Art Nouveau melodiousness is present in the agitated surface and treatment of details.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

Milivoj Uzelac, Self-Portrait in front of a Bar, 1923

Milivoj Uzelac
Self-Portrait in front of a Bar, 1923
oil on canvas
93 x 69 cm
MG-1012

With the painting Self-Portrait in front of a Bar Milivoj Uzelac goes a step beyond mimeticism. He arranges the fragments of the metropolitan nightmare like a collage, while the contemporary chaos is emphasised with an oversaturated scene without a unified composition.
The scene is expressionistically engaged and provocative. Despite the artist’s fascination with Paris, this Self-Portrait expresses both an individual and general anxiety of the contemporary moment. The ‘collaging’ of fragments, that is, the new treatment of space and volume connects Uzelac with George Grosz and contemporary German Dadaism, but also with the circle around Micić’s avant-garde magazine Zenit, in which at that very moment Josip Seissel (Jo Klek) was creating his first collages and photo montages.
Uzelac was educated in Banja Luka, Zagreb and Prague. Although he permanently moved to France in 1923, where his later paintings are characterized by a ‘return to order’ and an eternal search for harmony and balance, Uzelac has had a lasting and significant influence on the Croatian art scene. He regularly exhibited in his homeland and maintained close contacts with his colleagues, particularly Vilko Gecan, with whom he was very close both privately and professionally from a young age.

Text: Lada Bošnjak Velagić, senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum Modern Art, Zagreb, 2022.
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum Modern Art, Zagreb, 2022.

Vladimir Varlaj, Red House, 1923

Vladimir Varlaj
Red House, 1923
oil on canvas
74 x 62.5 cm
MG-7098

Vladimir Varlaj’s best-known painting, the Red House from 1923, is actually an emphatically expressionist exception in his oeuvre. The railway station in Moravice stands out from the reality of Gorski Kotar as a disturbing fantasy, achieved with deformations of form and space along the shortened diagonal, intense non-mimetic colours and the juxtaposition of light and dark. Otherwise, the spirit of the poetics of Magic Realism and an affective tension of the Red House, connect Varlaj with the informal group of the Prague Four and the expressionist tendencies of Uzelac, Gecan and Trepše.

Vladimir Varlaj started his art training in Zagreb with Professor Tomislav Kizman, and he graduated from the College of Arts and Crafts under the tutelage of Menci Clement Crnčić. He returned from the Eastern Front disabled by war in 1917, and the following year he went to visit his friend Milivoj Uzelac in Prague. There is not a single extant painting of Varlaj from the period preceding his first appearance at the 1919 Spring Salon in Zagreb. From 1921 to 1927, besides the Spring Salons, he also regularly participated in exhibitions of the Group of Independent Artists founded by Ljubo Babić. Varlaj’s anthological series of landscapes and vedutas with a pronounced plasticity and exceptional suggestiveness was interrupted by serious illness in 1934. The still lifes he painted later seemed to be his way of bidding goodbye both to painting and life. He died in 1962 without having had a single solo exhibition.

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

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