Tag: 1931.

Vjekoslav Parać, Café “La Coupole”, 1931

Vjekoslav Parać
Café “La Coupole”, 1931
oil on canvas
46 x 60.8 cm
MG-1690

In 1931, Vjekoslav Parać vividly captures the dazzling atmosphere of a contemporary metropolis with a flickering scene from the Parisian café “La Coupole”. The young artist had already, in Zagreb, left behind the influence of Cézanne, while this frozen moment proves that instead of relying on Picasso or the surrealists, he trusted solely in his own eye and brush. Parać records his immediate experience of the café atmosphere in Paris with freshness and spirit, using free and shimmering colors without constriction. Using small, dancing brushstrokes reminiscent of Renoir’s style, Parać achieves a true and lively scene, infused with gentle irony.
Vjekoslav Parać (Solin, 1904 – Zagreb, 1986) obtained a degree in painting in Zagreb in 1926 in the class of Ljubo Babić. As a recipient of a French government scholarship, he honed his skills in Paris from 1929 to 1931 under Friesz and Lhote. Among the several Croatian artists he encountered in Paris, Juraj Plančić, who passed away in 1930, particularly influenced Parać. Alongside early Impressionist influences, Parać’s body of work is characterised by a compositionally measured realism of the Mediterranean artistic circle. During World War II, he joined the partisans, and in the post-war period, he was the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Split. From 1950, he lived in Zagreb, taught at the Academy of Fine Arts, and actively created, primarily focusing on simple compositions with strong use of color. Thematically, Parać’s most important works depict scenes from his homeland, Dalmatian landscapes, the lives of peasants, maritime history, and still life. He also created fresco paintings, drawings, prints, and stage designs.

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

Jerolim Miše, Noon at Koločep, 1931

Jerolim Miše
Noon at Koločep, 1931
oil on canvas
61 x 71 cm
MG-1160

Noon at Koločep is one of Miše’s best luminous Dalmatian landscapes from the 1930s in which he idealizes Dalmatian daily life. In scenes of intense colour schemes as a specific feature of his Dalmatian homeland, and in line with Ljubo Babić’s idea of ‘our expression’, Miše emphasises the ideal harmony of man and nature, that is, the human contribution in the original landscape. Introducing authentic motifs of ordinary drystone walls, stone roads and karst vegetation into his Mediterranean visions, Miše creates a prolific landscape oeuvre that fully meets the expectations of the middle class, as well as contemporary critics.
In 1911, Jerolim Miše published such a severe piece of criticism of the work of his professor Menci Clement Crnčić that he got expelled from the College of Arts and Fine Crafts in Zagreb, so he later studied in Rome and Florence. Having been influenced by Ivan Meštrović, Miše’s early painting is close to the linear Art Nouveau style. In the late 1920s, Miše is influenced by French painting and contemporary German Expressionism and he paints markedly geometrised forms in the spirit of New Modernism and Magical Expressionism. As a member of the Group of Three, he participated in the formulation of “our expression”, and after having used intense colours and liberated gesture in the 1930s, he later paints mostly intimist still lifes and landscapes in muted colourways. In the last decades of his life, he painted realistically. Miše taught at the Academies of Fine Arts in Belgrade and Zagreb. He wrote art criticism and theoretical discussions, poems and short stories, and he also worked as a graphic designer. He was a member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts.

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

Antun Motika, My Studio, 1931

Antun Motika
(1902-1992)
My Studio, 1931
oil on canvas
54×65 cm
MG-1649

Antun Motika painted his My Studio painting in 1931 during his study stay in Paris. Having absorbed the works of impressionists and post-impressionists, Motika came to the realisation that painting is, like any other art, an expression of the artist’s personal experience. The interior of his studio does not emanate dark and depressing connotations the way interiors do in the work of his contemporaries. On the contrary, Motika was, according to art historian Nina Šepić (1957), amongst the first to have introduced white as a dominant colour to Croatian painting. His compositions exude lightness and lyricism, which is evident in the relationship between his colours, lines and forms. He built his interiors with the help of brushstrokes “thrown” onto the canvas, preferably in watercolour or gouache.
Antun Motika was born in 1902 in Pula. He enrolled in sculpture studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb under Prof. Rudolf Valdec in 1922, but in 1923 he decided to switch to painting. After having graduated in 1927, he continued his studies at Prof. Ljubo Babić’s master classes. In 1929 he started teaching drawing at the Mostar Gymnasium, where he remained until 1940. In parallel with the beginning of his teaching career, in 1930 Motika travelled to Paris for a ten-month study stay. In 1940 he was transferred to Zagreb to teach arts (ceramics, textiles, photography) at the School of Applied Arts and Design, where he remained until his retirement in 1961. In 1954 he started frequenting glass workshops on the Island of Murano near Venice, where he created glass sculptures. He held his first solo exhibition in Zagreb in 1933, after which he was invited to exhibit with The Group of Three. Because of its daring rejection of the dogmatic framework of Socialist Realism, his 1952 Archaic Surrealism exhibition provoked violent reactions with Croatian critics and is today considered to be of special cultural significance. He received the 1970 Vladimir Nazor Lifetime Achievement Award given yearly by Croatia’s Ministry of Culture, and in 1974 a retrospective exhibition of his work was set up at the National Museum of Modern Art.

Text: Zlatko Tot, intern 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

Nicholas Roerich, Command of the Master, 1931

 

Nicholas Roerich
(1874 -1947)
Command of the Master, 1931
oil on canvas, 80x124cm
MG-739

Nicholas Roerich is a versatile Russian artist who conveys his ideas that glorify man and nature through painting, theatre, and philosophical and mystical discussions. He received a broad-based education early on, and studied law, archaeology, art history and painting. His idea on the international protection of cultural property in war and peace is known as the Roerich Pact. In early 20th century, in addition to painting, he worked as a set and costume designer – he was hired by Sergei Diaghilev, and he collaborated on the ballet The Rite of Spring with Stravinsky. Towards the end of World War I, he moved to America and from there he travelled to Tibet and India many times to study ancient cultures in line with the Rousseau-Enlightenment idea on the original condition of pantheism. He ascribes moral value to art. Roerich is a painter of symbolic landscapes, and his most common motif are the mountains – he is known as a master of the mountains – with the frequent absence of the human figure. If the human figure does appear, as in the painting Command of the Master, then it is Geser Khan, hero-God of Tibet and Manchuria shown form behind, in contemplation, as he looks over the nearby bluish slopes. Mountains symbolise eternity and immutability, a state of total consciousness and mental discipline. He achieves a kind of New Age character of images-symbols of subjective peace and eternity with large surfaces of colour, enclosed by contour lines, and by avoiding the projection of depth of formal elements that would contribute to foreshortening. In New York, Roerich founded a museum dedicated to his work, which today operates as a centre for the study of Roerich’s achievements, not only in art but science, spirituality and peace-making. Together with his wife Helena, he founded Agni Yoga, a doctrine of Living Ethics in line with the Neo-Theosophical religion.

Text: Dajana Vlaisavljević, 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

 

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