Tag: 1942.

Slavko Šohaj, Meeting at the Exhibition I, 1942

Slavko Šohaj
Meeting at the Exhibition I, 1942
gouache, chalk
MG- 7526

Slavko Šohaj was born in 1908 in Zagreb. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1931, and continued his studies in Paris in 1931–32 and 1939. He worked as an art associate at the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb and became a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1977. He was the recipient of the Vladimir Nazor Lifetime Achievement Award in 1978. Šohaj will not stage his first solo exhibition until he was 60-years-old and already retired, at the National Museum of Modern Art, then Modern Gallery, in Zagreb in 1968, and he will have his last solo exhibition in the same city in 2000, a retrospective exhibition at the Klovićevi Dvori Gallery. He died in 2003.
The painting “Meeting at the Exhibition I” is an exception in the painter’s oeuvre. Two men, two exhibition visitors, are shown having a conversation as they view the paintings. In 1942, Šohaj exhibited, with a group of artists, at the Venice Biennale, representing the Independent State of Croatia, and perhaps this painting refers to that event. During World War II, Šohaj mostly paints still lifes and portraits, which Matko Peić will write about in 1961: “The first phase of grotesque and the second phase of Cézannism are followed by Slavko Šohaj’s third phase, one of the greatest artistic achievements created during the dark days of World War II. And that is why when we talk about painters who painted the horrors of war: burned houses and dead people – I think we should not forget, as a special painterly document of war: the solitary blue interiors of Slavko Šohaj”. Life and work during the war, however, had not been easy for Šohaj, despite working at the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb and participating at the Venice Biennale. As Igor Zidić pointed out on the occasion of his exhibition at the NMMU in 2017, Šohaj was arrested and interrogated by the Ustasha authorities on suspicion of collaborating with the Communists, and his friend Marija Hanževački was shot in 1944, which deeply affected the painter.

Text Klaudio Štefančić, 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

Ivo Lozica, Sand Carrier, 1942

Ivo Lozica
(1910. – 1943.)
Sand Carrier, 1942
bronze
MG-1394

Ivo Lozica attended the Stonemasonry School in Korčula from 1923 to 1925, where he was taught by sculptor Frano Kršinić, who pointed him towards the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he studied sculpture from 1926 to 1930 (mentored by Rudolf Valdec and Robert Frangeš-Mihanović; in 1933 he completed sculptor Ivan Meštrović’s advanced course in sculpture). As a French government scholarship holder, he attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1933-1934. In 1935 he moved to Split and in 1938 he started teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. In 1942 he moved to his native Lumbarda on the Island of Korčula, where he was shot by Italian occupiers in 1943 because he was a member of the local Partisan Movement. He collaborated on Meštrović’s projects in Otavice (mausoleum) and Split (studio).

Drawing on the Mediterranean sculptural tradition (Frano Kršinić), particularly its understanding of light and form, and on his Parisian experiences (Aristide Maillol, Auguste Rodin and Antoine Bourdelle), Lozica created a unique oeuvre in a series of intimist, lyrically shaped nudes of round volumes and flickering surfaces, heralding the sculptural syntheses of figuration and abstraction taking place in Croatia in the post-WWII period.

In the early 1940s, Lozica started being more of a realist in his approach to modelling dynamic sculptures of social themes featuring motifs from typical life in Dalmatia. These sculptures bear witness to an obvious shift from Lyrical Abstraction to Realism, connecting social themes with unaffected figuration of expressively modelled volumes. His Sand Carrier from 1942 is a robust male nude of a pronouncedly tense musculature on the roughly modelled form of his heavily loaded body.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, museum consultant 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

Grga Antunac, Engineer Dragutin Mandl, 1942 and A Mother with a Child, 1942

           

Grga Antunac
(1906-1970)
Engineer Dragutin Mandl, 1942
ivory
36 mm in diameter
MG-2892-540

A Mother with a Child, 1942
ivory
37 mm in diameter
MG-2892-541

Academically trained sculptor Grga Antunac was a respected medallist who created an original oeuvre in both metals and non-metals, such as ivory and wood. His socially engaged medals and plaques feature realistic figurative compositions, as do his visual designs for Yugoslav dinar coins.

What comes to the fore in Antunac’s portrait memorials is his sharp perception thanks to which he was able to portray the most distinctive features of his models. He engraved in ivory a portrait medal of engineer and collector Dragutin Mandl (1892-1959), whose medal and plaque collection forms the backbone of the medal collection of the National Museum of Modern Art. The facial features of Dragutin Mandl’s left-side profile are ascetically clean, with the focus being on the most prominent details of his face. Antunac’s Engineer Dragutin Mandl medal from 1942 is a brilliant example of his mastery of achieving close physical resemblance between his portraits and the portrayed, and at characterising them psychologically.

Antunac modelled his small medals of intimist motifs gently and poetically. He most often engraved treasured motifs on equally treasured material, such as ivory, matching motif with material. On his A Mother with a Child medal also from 1942, the broken folds of clothing are contrasted with the figures’ smoothly modelled featureless faces, thanks to which Antunac created a universal and intimist atmosphere suffused with the strength and tenderness of motherly love. He modelled the motif of a mother holding a child in her arms using clean and gentle lines, and he balanced the relationship between light and shadow, all of which is in harmony with the delicateness of ivory, a most prized material.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, museum consultant 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

Marin Studin, Woman’s Head, c. 1925, Spring (Nest), 1942

 

Marin Studin
(1985 – 1960)
Woman's Head, 1925
wood
41 x 18 x 21 cm
MG-1362

Spring (Nest), 1942
wood
99 x 34 x 6 cm
MG-2083

Marin Studin studied at the academies in Zagreb, Vienna and Prague, and then under A. Bourdelle in Paris (1921 – 1922). Between the two world wars he worked as a high school art teacher, and he later taught at the Academies of Fine Arts in Belgrade and Zagreb.
The initial period of Marin Studin’s career, characterised by the secessionist stylization, pronounced expression and universal symbolism (Melody, 1919, MG-2635) has, in his mature phase, been followed by carving popular figures in wood or relief compositions inspired by folk art with ordinary people as protagonists. The realistic motif of a Woman’s Head is carved in wood as an elongated stylised secessionist-expressive form. As he developed this new preoccupation, he moved ever closer to the folk expression. In the elongated wooden relief Spring (Nest), irregular edges follow the silhouettes of the clinging bodies of a woman and a man facing each other, hugging a nest with baby birds between them. The smooth surfaces of the figures and their stylised folk costumes are barely defined by clear lines of the relief composition, and the title of the work refers to the symbolism of the lyrical scene.

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

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