Antun Augustinčić, Drunkards, 1935

Antun Augustinčić
(1900 – 1979)
Drunkards, 1935
casting, bronze
13 x 10 x 8 cm
MG-2501

Augustinčić began studying sculpture at the Advanced School of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb in 1918 under Rudolf Valdec and Robert Frangeš. In 1922, after the institution was renamed the Royal Academy of Arts and Crafts, he continued his education under Ivan Meštrović. After graduating in 1924, he went to Paris as a French government scholarship recipient, studying at the École des Arts Décoratifs and the Académie des Beaux-Arts under J. A. Injalbert. He exhibited at the Salon of French Artists in 1925 and at the Salon des Indépendants in 1926. He was a co-founder of the socially engaged art group Zemlja (1929–1935) and became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1946.
From the 1930s onward, the artist’s realistic style, characterised by the free and restless modelling of original ideas, along with the dramatic movement and expressiveness, is clearly evident in the figurative composition of the Drunkards. Through dynamic diagonals and curves, the mass of the sculpture is expertly set in motion, while the indentations and protrusions that define the shapes give the surface a lively, suggestive quality. The composition as a whole is almost on the verge of instability, perfectly aligning with the subject and theme (the drunken gendarme and the obese tax collector personify the reactionary regime). The emphasis on certain details (gaping mouths, eye sockets...) creates a caricatured expressiveness that highlights the social critique.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, museum advisor 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

Ivan Meštrović, Portrait of Mrs. P. (Ada Pavičić), 1935

Ivan Meštrović
(1883 – 1962)
Portrait of Mrs. P. (Ada Pavičić), 1935
casting, bronze
57 x 31 x 30 cm
MG-800

Ivan Meštrović is the most prominent Croatian sculptor of the first half of the 20th century who has, during his lifetime, achieved worldwide fame and acclaim. He studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1901 to 1905, and during his formative years he was influenced by the prevailing atmosphere of the Vienna Secession, having himself become its most prominent representative in the medium of sculpture. His artistic, professional and public work exerted significant influence on his coevals, the younger generation of sculptors and the birth of Modernism in Croatia.
After the representative national cycle, Meštrović became increasingly preoccupied with religious and intimate themes, especially female figures and portraits executed with elegant Art Nouveau gesture, such as the portrait of his then wife Ruža Meštrović from 1915, a masterpiece of his portrait sculpture. He models the portrait busts of young de Spalatin sisters, Carmen (1914) and Ada (1915), in a similar manner.
Ada is sculpted in bronze two decades later, and the previous melodious gesture and Art Nouveau stylisation is now juxtaposed with a realistic portrait of a woman, with a narrowly cut and freely modelled bust and dynamic wavy hair. Ada Pavičić’s physiognomy is recognisable. Her face is modelled delicately and softly, with accentuated details and a pensive, yet resolute facial expression and downcast gaze, a prominent nose, a fuller round chin and high forehead. The locks of her combed hair are styled at the nape in a low, voluminous bun.

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

Željko Hegedušić, The Grain Market in Mitrovica, 1935

 

Željko Hegedušić
The Grain Market in Mitrovica, 1935
oil on canvas
61, 5 × 47 cm
on the reverse: A Composition, circa 1935
61,5 × 46.5 cm
MG-1532

Željko Hegedušić’s The Grain Market in Mitrovica from 1935 indicates that his position within the context of Croatia’s interwar painting was divergent. Although in 1932 he started exhibiting regularly as a guest with the Earth Association of Artists, which was founded by his older brother Krsto, Željko did not share the association’s fundamental commitment to descriptiveness or their pursuit of social criticism. He followed the association’s fundamental concept of form and ideology in general, but what he strove for was a surrealist aesthetics inspired by the overall European legacy of Modernism. Although the grain market in Mitrovica was indeed a typical motif of the association, Željko Hegedušić painted it with a complex network of smeary brushstrokes rather than by using the association’s trademark style of simplified flat forms of local colours. The scene of the vibrant marketplace ends with bleak architecture. The surrealist inventory that Hegedušić only hinted at in his The Grain Market in Mitrovica completely takes over his A Composition on the reverse, which is an imaginary construction of body parts and machines, architecture, musical instruments and symbols.

After having graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Željko Hegedušić studied in Paris, where he came into contact with Purism and metaphysical Surrealism. In the 1950s he started working on graphic art projects and mixed painting techniques. His imagination was becoming increasingly wide and brought to life surreal, playful motifs depicting a wide array of experiences ranging from tragic to lyrical. He taught at high schools in Zagreb and Srijemska Mitrovica, and at the Academy of Applied Arts in Zagreb. He also did wall paintings, applied print techniques, design and book illustration, and copied frescoes.

Text: Lada Bošnjak Velagić, 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

Marijan Detoni, A Soup Kitchen, 1935

Marijan Detoni
(1905-1981)
A Soup Kitchen, 1935
oil on plywood
100×83 cm
MG-1490

Marijan Detoni’s A Soup Kitchen painting from 1935 sublimates the iconographic premises advocated by the Earth Association of Artists. The painting depicts the reality of poverty and hunger, insecurity and misfortune. Although social themes were the modus operandi of the members of the Earth Association of Artists, Detoni went a step further by having depicted young people abandoned by society as the protagonists of the painting. The motif of a brick wall, a trademark of sorts typical of the Earth Association of Artists, helps to underscore the impression of alienation in the depiction of human figures crowding as they await solace in the form of a charitable hot meal.

Marijan Detoni graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1928 in the class of Professor Ljubo Babić. His earlier works highlight volumes of a Cézannesque conception, and in 1926 he began to often depict scenes from provincial life into which he introduced elements of humour and the grotesque. While on a scholarship in Paris in 1934, he drew turbulent scenes from the streets of Paris and scenes from the lives of unemployed workers. He was a member of the Earth Association of Artists from 1932 to 1934, so he expressed himself through simple drawings, locally inspired colours and basic modelling in line with the aesthetic agenda of the association. His pre-war paintings feature a powerful colour palette. Having been a forerunner of abstract tendencies in Croatian painting, in 1938 he painted two nearly abstract compositions under the tautological name A Dilapidated Wall Fantasy. While in Paris in 1939, he was inspired by the Modernism of the School of Paris, after which he returned to social themes, but this time round imbued with euphoric experiences of light and colour. He joined the anti-fascist movement in World War II, and in the post-war years featuring the dictated aesthetics of Socialist Realism he centred on partisan war themes. Later he turned to inspiring, fantastic and phantasmagorical compositions, and fully abstract painting.

Text: Lada Bošnjak Velagić, 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

Ignjat Job, Wine (Wine Pressing), 1935

Ignjat Job
Wine (Wine Pressing), 1935
oil on canvas, 100 x 120 cm
MG-7080

The painting Wine (Wine Pressing) is one of Job’s last great works. In the spring of 1935, exhausted by a serious illness, Ignjat Job recalls a wine festival scene that encapsulates the energetic, swirling spirit of the Mediterranean. With a whirlwind of strongly symbolic colours and energetic brushstrokes he achieves a completely free composition of unique emotional intensity. This is what Job said of the painting Wine: “It is large, it is accomplished. I will be attacked because it is frantic and all red.”

Having been expelled from the Zagreb College of Arts and Fine Crafts because of truancy, despite having excellent grades, in 1920 the talented Ignjat Job from Dubrovnik went to Rome, Naples and Capri. He later lived and worked in Zagreb, Belgrade and Kulina (near Aleksinac), but he showed his true painterly prowess only after returning to his Dalmatian homeland. Linked by fate to the Mediterranean, Job created the majority of his oeuvre only after his family had returned to the sea, to Vodice in 1927, and in particular Supetar in 1928. He had been suffering from tuberculosis since 1925 and died in 1936. Despite being physically, socially and emotionally completely exhausted, in the final seven years of his life he painted more than two hundred vedutas, nudes, portraits and Mediterranean genre-scenes with strong colours and accentuated free expression. Ignjat Job has only had two solo exhibitions during his lifetime (Split, 1929 and 1930) and his work was showcased at about two dozen group exhibitions.

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

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