Tag: 1924.

Vladimir Becić, Vera and Mira, 1924

Vladimir Becić
Vera and Mira
1924
oil on canvas
70 x 65 cm
MG-2348

The joint portrait of his daughters, Vera and Mira, is a paradigmatic example of Magical Realism, where Vladimir Becić accentuates the metaphysical essence of the scene. Becić captures the liveliness of the girls, who have stilled themselves to pose for their father’s affection, by shaping them as softened ‘cubist’ volumes, which he arranges harmoniously within a sparse and undefined space.

Vladimir Becić (Slavonski Brod, 1886 – Zagreb, 1954) began his artistic education at the Crnčić and Čikoš school in Zagreb and continued it in 1905 at the Munich Academy under Hugo von Habermann. It was here that the European line of our modern art, known as the Munich Circle, took shape, comprising Becić, Kraljević, Račić, and Herman. He furthered his studies in Paris and, from 1916 to 1918, served as a war artist and correspondent on the front lines. After the war, he established the first art colony in the country in the idyllic Bosnian town of Blažuj. From his return to Zagreb in 1924 until his retirement in 1947, he taught painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1930, together with Ljubo Babić and Jerolim Miše, he founded the Group of Three. Embracing the poetics of “pure painting,” the Group of Three pursued a mimetic approach and colourism as their stylistic and morphological ideal. With the advent of World War II, Becić’s impulsiveness mellowed, and his tonal palette narrowed. In the final years of his career, he returned to his youthful artistic ideals, adopting an openly Cézannesque style in his paintings.

Lada Bošnjak Velagić, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

 

Vladimir Varlaj, An Orchard in the Countryside, 1924

Vladimir Varlaj
An Orchard in the Countryside, 1924
oil on canvas
57,5×73,4 cm
MG-1050

In An Orchard in the Countryside from 1924 Vladimir Varlaj expands the Cézannesque and Expressionist methods that distinguish the work of the Prague Four group of painters (Uzelac, Trepše, Gecan and Varlaj), marked by a ‘return to order’ and a consistent reduction of details to basic structures defined by a simple drawing and a sequence of planes. In the spirit of the poetics of Magical Realism, Varlaj expresses his personal vision of the world by subordinating real landscapes or vedutas to the rule of absolute balance. He replaces descriptive colours with symbolic ones and natural with inner lighting.

Vladimir Varlaj started his education as an artist in Zagreb with Professor Tomislav Krizman, and finished the High School of Arts and Crafts mentored by Emanuel Crnčić. In 1917 he returned from the Eastern Front disabled, and in the following year he went to visit his friend and painter Milivoj Uzelac in Prague. Not a single painting of Varlaj’s exists from the period preceding his first appearance at the 1919 Spring Salon in Zagreb. Besides the Spring Salons, from 1921 to 1927 he also regularly participated in exhibitions of the Group of Independent Artists initiated by painter Ljubo Babić. Varlaj’s anthological series of landscapes and vedutas of an accentuated plasticity and exceptional suggestiveness was interrupted by a serious illness as early as 1934. The still lifes he painted later seem to be his way of bidding both painting and life farewell. He died in 1962 without having had a single solo exhibition held.

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

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