Tag: 1934.

Vanja Radauš, Female Torso, 1934

Vanja Radauš
(1906 – 1975)
Female Torso, 1934
casting, bronze
58 x 17.5 x 25 cm
MG-1375
Radauš studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb under R. Frangeš Mihanović and R. Valdec, graduating in 1930 from I. Meštrović’s advanced course. He visited Paris several times (1928, 1930, 1931), where he encountered the works of A. Watteau, A. Rodin, and A. Bourdelle. His exposure to Michelangelo’s works in Italy in 1937 steered him towards expressiveness, movement, and drama, which became key features of his sculptural style. From 1940, he taught at the School of Crafts in Zagreb, and from 1945 until his retirement in 1969, he was a full professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.
His social sensitivity and passionate commitment led him to join the Zemlja Association of Artists, where he was a member from 1932 to 1933. The principles of this socially engaged group would remain a permanent influence on both his personal and artistic choices. His works, including figures, portraits, and nudes, showcase expressiveness, dynamism, skilled modelling, and a focus on society’s marginalised members. He left a lasting impact in all areas of sculpture, from medals, terracotta, plaster, stone, wax, and bronze works, to public monuments, such as the Falling (Wounded Man) sculpture from 1938, which is located in the courtyard of the National Museum of Modern Art (A. Hebranga 1, Zagreb).
The powerful female nude is dramatically contorted, almost to the point of collapsing. Her head is tilted back towards the left shoulder and back. The pained expression on her face, coupled with her arms violently severed at the upper arms, intensifies the dramatic and expressive portrayal of existential helplessness.
Text: Tatijana Gareljić, 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

Vladimir Becić Threshing I, 1935, Threshing II, 1934

 

Vladimir Becić

Threshing I, 1935
ink, watercolour
480 mm x 615 mm
MG- 881

Threshing II, 1934
ink, watercolour
479 mm x 621 mm
MG-888

Although these two watercolours are not included among Vladimir Becić’s major works, it is surprising that they have been overlooked by the art public. There are several reasons for this. First, history of art has always regarded easel painting as superior to drawing, watercolour, or tempera. Professional community typically evaluates the quality of an artist’s work through painting. Second, the motifs in these watercolours have also been explored in Becić’s paintings, likely leading researchers to see little reason for further study. Finally, “Threshing I” and “Threshing II” are seldom exhibited or reproduced, which has hindered their visibility to both experts and the wider audience.

Vladimir Becić is a representative of the modernist concept of ‘pure painting.’ Born in Slavonski Brod in 1886, he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1906. In 1909, he moved to Paris, but after exhibiting at the Paris Autumn Salon, he returned to Croatia and settled in Osijek. He served as an official war artist for the Serbian army during World War I, and after the war, he made his home in Blažuj near Sarajevo. It was during this time that Becić developed an interest in depicting rural everyday life. At their core, both “Threshing” watercolours belong to the pastoral genre. In both literature and visual art, pastoral scenes traditionally illustrate the interaction between people and nature, presenting their relationship as harmonious. The application of pastoral themes in Modern art, particularly Croatian art during the interwar period, was marked by regionalism and ruralism, phenomena that emphasised one geographical area over another and elevated rural life above urban living. Considering Becić’s time in the village of Blažuj and his pronounced affinity for the ideology of popular, South Slavic culture, which he expressed particularly strongly since World War I, we can assert that all aspects of this pastoral variant are evident in the watercolours. However, Becić would not be regarded as a modern painter if he did not modernise the scene in some way. Thus, both watercolours feature not only peasants but also a threshing machine used to separate the grain from the stalks.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić, 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

Vanja Radauš, Male Torso, 1934

Vanja Radauš
Male Torso, 1934
bronze / casting
84 x 29 x 21.5 cm
MG-1376

Croatian academic Vanja Radauš (1906–1975) was educated in Zagreb and Paris. During the period from 1932 to 1934, he was a member of the socially engaged Earth Association of Artists, which operated from 1929 to 1935 when the association’s activities were banned by the authorities. He worked as a teacher at the School of Crafts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Vanja Radauš was a distinctive artistic personality. His specific sculpture was characterized by pronounced expressiveness and surrealistic motifs of a bizarre imaginative world.
Radauš’s Male Torso from 1934 was created as a counterpart to the Female Torso from the same year, both housed in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. These are expressive nudes, charged with dramatic intensity emphasised by a painfully contorted posture and body tension. The strangeness and surreal impression are further intensified by intentionally distorted representations of the human figure (the headlessness and absence of arms in the male figure, as well as the identical incision below the shoulder in the female figure, unnaturally twisted body axes, and the heads thrown backward and sideways).

Text: Phd Ivana Rončević Elezović, 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

Željko Hegedušić, Motif from Sremska Mitrovica, 1934

Željko Hegedušić
Motif from Sremska Mitrovica, 1934
tempera on glass
36 x 52 cm
MG-2039

Željko Hegedušić created Motif from Sremska Mitrovica while he was working in the local grammar school. Although he has regularly exhibited, as a guest artist, with the Earth Association of Artists, the founding of which was initiated by his older brother Krsto, Željko did not share the Earth Group’s commitment to realistic description. The focal point of the composition is a group of prisoners walking through the city in the company of guards. The motif of the “prisoner parade” stems from the interest of the Earth Group members in people and scenes that are on the margins of society, which the artist therefore paints with simplified flat forms of colour. The scene is set in the ambience of the urban periphery, which appears, with its emphasised drawing and flat execution, like a theatre stage, whereby Hegedušić highlights emptiness, that is, the “metaphorical desolation” (op. cit. Bužančić) in the foreground.
After having graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Hegedušić trained in Paris where he came into contact with Purism and metaphysical-surrealist painting. From the 1950s onwards, he engages in printmaking and often combines painting techniques as well as surrealist, ludic motifs in a wide range of experiences from the tragic to the lyrical. Besides the broadly understood basic conceptual and ideological tenets of the Earth Association of Artists, Željko Hegedušić strives for a surrealist expression inspired by the totality of European modernist heritage. He worked as a teacher at the grammar schools in Zagreb and Srijemska Mitrovica, and at the Academy of Applied Arts in Zagreb. In his career, he created wall paintings, frescoes, applied graphic art, he designed and illustrated books.

Text: Zlatko Tot, curator intern © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2022
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2022

Edo Kovačević, Kožarska Street, 1934

Edo Kovačević
Kožarska Street, 1934
oil, tempera on canvas
53.8 x 42.7 cm
MG-1564

The suburbs and slums of Zagreb are the central motif in the oeuvre of Edo Kovačević, a former member of the Earth Association of Artists. He most often depicts desolate spaces, scenes devoid of people that are staged, metaphorically, in the Renaissance idea of the “ideal city” (op. cit. Ivančević). An interest in the socially neglected world is manifested in urban scenes without monumental historicist palaces and luxurious villas. Even when he paints a street in the city centre (Kožarska Street), he turns his back on representative façades and puts the rear façades, the “obverses” which are not to everyone’s taste, in the foreground. Kovačević approaches the design of the scene in a planimetric manner, colour becomes an important element in image structuring, while the poetics of the surface takes precedence over the formal volume.
After having graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of Prof. Vladimir Becić, Edo Kovačević (1906-1993) showed his works for the first time in 1932 with the Earth Association of Artists, as its member, and he continued to exhibit with them until 1935, that is, until they were banned by the police. On the eve of World War II, he took study trips to Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, etc. As an associate of the City Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, he staged the visual display of numerous exhibitions. He is also responsible for setting up the displays of many museum collections; Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb, Museum of Brodsko Posavlje, Museum of Peasant Revolts in Gornja Stubica, Meštrović Atelier, etc. For his work, he was the recipient of the Zagreb City Award, and the “Vladimir Nazor” Lifetime Achievement Award in 1982. In 1986, he became a full member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Text: Zlatko Tot, curator intern © National Museum of Modern Art, 2022
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Foto: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, 2022

Sonja Kovačić – Tajčević, A Study of a Female Nude, 1934

Sonja Kovačić - Tajčević
(1894-1968)
A Study of a Female Nude, 1934
charcoal on paper
560 x 440 mm
MG-3219

Besides Slava Raškaj and Nasta Rojc, Sonja Kovačić-Tajčević was one of the first female artists in Croatia to have received an education at an art academy and to have introduced into the patriarchal culture of art not only a certain manner and style characteristic of every creative individual, but also a certain experience which we can call feminine. Most of her oeuvre is associated with inter-war art movements (Post-Cubism in particular), which is why it is difficult to distinguish the scenes in her paintings from the scenes painted by her male colleagues. A number of her drawings kept in the holdings of the National Museum of Modern Art offer the chance of a different interpretation. Sonja Kovačić-Tajčević’s A Study of a Female Nude from 1934 is just another study in pen, just another portrayal of the naked female body, a motif favoured by male artists. Yet, something in it seems to stand out from similar works drawn by men. The impression is difficult to describe, because the theme is generic and the historical context in which the drawing was created is firmly codified. Does Kovačić-Tajčević’s female perspective hide in the way the model leans, in the pronounced shadow that falls on her right shoulder and the right side of her face, in the light-shadow relationship on the model’s chest and abdomen, in all of this taken together or elsewhere? It is difficult to say, but the interpretation of women’s creativity must be built from somewhere.

Sonja Kovačić-Tajčević (1894-1968) studied painting in Zagreb, Graz and Vienna. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1917, and in 1926 she attended a training course in Paris with painter André Lhote. She stayed in Paris for the second time in the period between 1928 and 1934, which she herself regarded as her artistically most prolific period.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić, 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

Antun Motika, Muslim Woman, 1934

Antun Motika
Muslim Woman, 1934
oil on canvas
96 x 70 cm
MG-2038

The painting Muslim Woman from 1934 presents Motika’s poetics of passionate subjectivism. He developed the experiences of French Post-Impressionism with the freer application of standard artistic materials and procedures. Motika accompanied the moment of lyrical beauty with an arabesque of balanced tones. Motika’s subtle poetics develops towards abstraction in this vision of a weightless world in which the figurative is achieved with only a flash of colour.

Antun Motika interrupted the study of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and decided to study painting instead. He graduated in 1926. He continued his studies with Ljubo Babić. He publishes caricatures in the magazine Koprive (under the pseudonym Lopata) and often experiments with art techniques. From 1929 to 1940, he teaches drawing at the Grammar School in Mostar. After his study trips to Paris in 1930 and 1935, Motika’s Mostar oeuvre became increasingly more abstract. He returned to Zagreb in 1941 and for the next twenty years he taught courses in textile, photography and ceramics, and he systematically experimented with collage, decalcomania, “smoked paper”, photographic prints and organic materials. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1942 and 1952. With the drawing series Archaic Surrealism, which he exhibited in Zagreb in 1952, he completely abandoned all ideological dogmas and socialist realist burdens of his contemporary artistic and social moment. In the pursuit of liberation from everything extra-artistic, drawing as an artistic wellspring permeates all phases of Motika’s work. Since 1953, he created a significant number of glass sculptures with colouristic interventions in Rogaška Slatina and Murano. He also designed ceramics and small-scale sculpture (medals and plaques) in iron.

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

Ivan Generalić, The Funeral of Štef Halaček, 1934

Ivan Generalić
The Funeral of Štef Halaček, 1934
oil on canvas
50 x 47 cm
MG-2120

In his painting The Funreal of Štef Halaček from 1934, Ivan Generalić, an autodidact from Hlebine, uses clear drawing, flat composition and pronounced local colours to record the resignation of his fellow villagers to their fate, even death. The proportions of the typified characters are so symbolically deformed they verge on the grotesque, and the site is specified by a traditional ritual procession and a characteristic ambience – Podravina houses and coral willow canopies in a desolate plain under heavy snow. Generalić intertwines what he saw and experienced with dreams and memories, not painting reality but emotions that emerge from reality. The pauper Štef Halaček often visited Generalić. In response to Štefek’s frequent criticism of Generalić’s skill, the painter responded by painting his funeral while he was still alive.

At the historical and critical exhibition 50 Ans d'Art Moderne in Brussels in 1958, The Funreal of Štef Halaček was exhibited alongside Braque, Chagall, Picasso, Matisse, Klee and Kandinsky, and international critics emphasized Generalić’s authentic contribution to contemporary international painting.

In 1930 in Hlebine, Krsto Hegedušić recognized and started to encourage Ivan Generalić’s fascinating innate talent. From 1931, Generalić started to exhibit as a guest artist in exhibitions of the Association Zemlja. He initially critically painted images of village life in watercolours, and later often in oil and tempera on glass. After World War II he became the central figure of the so-called Hlebine Peasant Art School, and his rural scenes approached lyrical idealization, metaphor and phantasy. In the 1970s, he devoted himself to symbolic and existential themes. He received international acclaim and held around seventy solo exhibitions in Croatia and abroad.

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