Đuro Tiljak
Still Life, 1930s
oil on canvas
62.8 x 48.1 cm
MG-1296
The meticulously composed Still Life by Đuro Tiljak, painted a few years after his magical Lindens, is strikingly alienated and surreal. Tiljak distils the modest everyday scene into an image featuring a handful of mushrooms and a bowl of apples on the precarious slope of a dilapidated table. Employing a Cézannesque transformation, Tiljak reduces real forms to geometric shapes. He uses thick impasto and modulates colours to highlight volumes. Warm, earthy tones dominate the foreground, while the undefined background is rendered in contrastingly cool hues.
After discontinuing his studies in Zagreb in 1919, Đuro Tiljak enrolled at the Moscow Academy under Wassily Kandinsky. Upon returning to his homeland in 1923, he graduated under Ljubo Babić. Initially, he painted under the influence of the Post-Impressionists and later embraced Magical Realism. He exhibited at the Spring Salons. Following his further studies in Paris in 1928/29, he joined the Zemlja group from 1930 to 1933, basing his compositions on drawing and a limited colour palette. Contrary to his creative dedication to his personal vision, as an art critic during the interwar period, he firmly opposed individualistic art for art’s sake. During World War II, he produced expressive figurative scenes, and later developed colouristic improvisations within landscape motifs that approached abstraction. He also engaged in printmaking. He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and was a member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Text: Lada Bošnjak Velagić, museum consultant 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