Anka Krizmanić
Medvednica After the Rain, 1926
pastel on paper
50 x 58 cm
MG-4432
Anka Krizmanić (1896 – 1987) was a child painting prodigy and the youngest student at the Krizman School of Painting. Having already exhibited with the Medulić Group as a fourteen-year-old, her considerable talent and drawing skills acquired at such an early age were noticed at the School of Applied Arts in Dresden, which she graduated from in 1917. Despite the extreme forms of Expressionism and the radical New Reality that were prevalent in Dresden at that time, Anka Krizmanić persisted in emphasizing the true essence of life precisely in the beauty of the human body and nature. She reached the pinnacle of stylistic maturity between 1926 and 1929 in the series of landscapes, portraits and figural compositions that combine constructive and magical elements. In the pastel Medvednica After the Rain from 1926, the painter highlights the preternatural harmony and elemental beauty of the native landscape, and builds her vision on clear forms of solid plasticity consolidated by warm blue-green tonal harmony.
Anka Krizmanić herself said that she was made only for painting. Although she has worked for a long time as a draughtswoman at the School of Medicine and occasionally supported herself doing other jobs, she produced an impressive oeuvre of almost 6,000 recorded works, paintings, drawings, prints, sketches for tapestries and theatre… Until 1970, she has shown her works at about twenty solo and group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad.
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