Tag: 1953.

Valerije Michieli, Mate’s Head, 1953

Valerije Michieli
(1922 – 1981)
Mate’s Head, 1953
bronze
47.5x31x41cm
MG-2223

In 1949, Valerije Michieli obtained a degree in sculpture under Frano Kršinić at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he himself worked as a professor from 1962 until his death in 1981. He also painted, often depicting dogs in his artworks. From the very beginning, he inclined towards an expressionist style influenced by the heavy and painful experiences of his youth, possibly also influenced by his work in Vanja Radauš's workshop. The empathy towards human and animal destinies is evident in his works featuring contorted, dramatic, and often elongated forms that are open on all sides, and rough surfaces. He is considered the most significant animalistic sculptor after Branislav Dešković, having created cycles of horses (1955-1960) and dogs (1950-1981) that range stylistically from expressionist to non-figurative shapes.
Although a professor at the Zagreb Academy, Michieli remains deeply connected to the stone of Brač and its rough-textured landscapes.
The museum sculpture Mate from 1953 deviates from his typical elongated, contorted, and open forms with its closed form. The elongated oval of the head is devoid of unnecessary description, and with minimal intervention in the basic form, Michieli presents a figurative and suggestive portrait, seemingly of a disgruntled local resident. This demonstrates how he successfully portrays the psychological states of the portrayed individual using minimal expressive means.

Text: Dajana Vlaisavljević, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023

Frano Kršinić, Young Woman Tending a Rose, 1953

Frano Kršinić
(1897 – 1982)
Young Woman Tending a Rose, 1953 (detalj)
casting, bronze
188 x 55 x 68 cm
MG-2449

After having studied sculpture at the Crafts School in Korčula and at the Sculpture and Stonemasonry School in Hořice in the Czech Republic (1913 – 1917), Kršinić went on to graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1917 – 1921). He was one of the founding members of the Earth Association of Artists and a member of the Independent Collective of Croatian Artists. With his refined sculpture and unconstrained approach to teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, he made significant contributions to the development of contemporary Croatian sculpture.
Using visually reduced elements, calm line, balanced building of mass, and idealisation and spiritualisation of forms, Kršinić succeeded in creatively assimilating the elements of Štursa’s art in the way he conceptualised and composed his motifs, as well as Maillol’s synthesis of form, inspired by the classical and Mediterranean tradition, particularly evident in a series of his female nudes.
The works of Frano Kršinić installed in public space represent examples of sculpture harmoniously blending with its surroundings, such as this standing female nude titled Young Woman Tending a Rose in the park on King Petar Krešimir IV Square in Zagreb, while the joie de vivre that the work radiates now also elevates the lobby of Providur’s Palace in Zadar. With its refined form, taut surfaces and harmonious outlines, the sensual figure of a woman leaning slightly forward balances descriptiveness and stylisation of soft forms.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, 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

Edo Murtić, Zadar, 1953

Edo Murtić
Zadar, 1953
oil on canvas
81 x 115 cm
MG- 2331

Edo Murtić’s Zadar (1953) is essentially a self-confident departure from the poetics of Socialist Realism. It fits in with Socialist Realism only formally with its theme, but it departs from it stylistically and figuratively with its post-Expressionism. The painting manifests a particular legacy of coloured “pure painting” of the Group of Three, as well as the colouristic expression of P. Dobrović. The significance of the two doves as symbols of peace embodied on the ruined headless ancient monumental sculpture is also woven into the engaged lyrical-expressive figuration. The composition is rendered with a colouristic perspective that succinctly materialises the square and the ruins of Zadar in the background. The layered scene also signifies the absurdity and consequences of war. The painting had a great reception in New York, and it also marks Murtić’s time spent in the destroyed post-war Zadar that the artist felt very sentimental about. It also possesses an anticipatory charge of abstracting the imago. In the early 1960s, Edo Murtić (1921 – 2005) developed a recognisable abstract style of painting characterised by dynamic gestures and intense colours, which made him the most influential and most widely known artist of High Modernism in socialist Yugoslavia, with a respectable career on the international art scene. In the early 1950s whilst in the USA, Murtić met Jackson Pollock, which gave him fresh creative impetus. Unlike Pollock’s gestural Action Painting automatism, Murtić’s expression is more colour-centred. Murtić learned from the greatest artists of his time at the academies in Zagreb and Belgrade (P. Dobrović, Lj. Babić). As a staunch socialist, he joined the partisan movement during World War II. Being a prominent cultural worker, he later advocated democratic values. He had a highly intense and influential career that lasted for sixty years. After the period of figuration in the 1980s, for the rest of his life and career he remained an abstractionist who created a diverse oeuvre similar in its eclecticism to that of Picasso.

Text: Željko Marciuš, museum counselor at the National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023

Miljenko Stančić, Vjekoslav Karas, 1953

Miljenko Stančić
(1926-1977)
Vjekoslav Karas, 1953
oil on canvas
460 × 670 mm
MG-2175

Miljenko Stančić (1926-1977) was the introducer and leading painter of Croatia’s post-war Surrealism and Fantastic Art based on tradition, precise tone modulation, the legacy of the old masters (Georges de La Tour, Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch) and Josip Račić’s ‘pure perception’. With his exceptional skill and by having synthesised the old and the new, Stančić created a unique style in the manner of so-called museum-like, anachronistic painting. The paintings he created between the early 1950s and the late 1970s depict personal metamorphoses (vedutas of Varaždin, fantastic transformations of human figures, metaphysical figures in poetic interiors, erotic paintings) and subdued gammas illuminated by “inspirited lighting and an increasingly virtuoso and melancholic palette” (writer Miroslav Krleža). He graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1949, and in printing from Tomislav Krizman’s advanced graphic art school in 1951. He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts between 1960 and 1977.

Vjekoslav Karas from 1953 is Stančić’s early anthological painting that bears witness to his respect for tradition (Karas’s painting A Roman Woman, 1845-1847), mortality (Karas’s suicide) and his identification with the founder of modern painting in Croatia. Everything in the painting is symbolic, reductively descriptive and attributive: “(…) the lute (…) is the musical instrument taken from the hands of A Roman Woman by Karas (…) The extinguished candle represents death; the empty palette is unfinished work; the dice thrown represents failing at life. (…) the space of Karas’s workshop is but a mirror image of a morgue.” (Igor Zidić, 1979). Stančić was a member of the Group of Five. From the 1960s onwards, he also exhibited at the exhibitions of the Belgian group of artists called Fantasmagie.

Text: Željko Marciuš, 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

Ivan Generalić, A Motif from Paris, 1953

Ivan Generalić
(1914-1992)
A Motif from Paris, 1953
oil on glass
560×425 mm
MG-2342

Although immensely talented, Croatia’s pioneer and the world’s classic of Naive Art, painter Ivan Generalić (1914-1992), was self-taught. He was discovered at the age of 15 by painter Krsto Hegedušić in 1930 in the village of Hlebine. He exhibited with the Zemlja (Earth) group of artists until 1935 when the group parted ways. His early works (1930-1945) feature flatly and somewhat clumsily painted rural scenes, are socially engaged which was prompted by his membership of the Zemlja (Earth) group of artists (Requisition, 1934) and are orientated towards landscape themes of Poetic Realism bringing romanticised depictions of rural motifs and tonal painting (Cows in the Forest, 1938). Generalić’s oeuvre seems to have been barely touched on by the ideas of Socialist Realism, and this only in a short post-war period; he continued developing his expression which climaxed in the 1950s in the form of allegorical, fairy-tale-like, fantastic nocturnal scenes, still lifes and landscapes (Solar Eclipse, 1961). In 1953, a solo exhibition of his work was set up in Paris, which marked the beginning of his international success. Generalić’s oil on glass A Motif from Paris is from the same year. Being a naive artist, he approached the painting’s urban theme – a theme so atypical of his oeuvre – with cold, objective figuration. The painting is dominated by flatly composed facades of buildings serving as a backdrop. Antennas and chimneys, signs of the city, penetrate the cloudy sky. The name of a ground-floor bistro handwritten on its awning and two female figures, both modelled in a strikingly condensed manner with their backs turned, are the only insignificant sign of human presence in Generalić’s distant and unattached depiction of Paris.

Text: Željko Marciuš, 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

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