Tag: Ferdinand Kulmer

Ferdinand Kulmer, Drawing, 1966

Ferdinand Kulmer
Drawing, 1966
ink lavee on paper
MG-2581

Despite the growing role of New York as a hub of art movements in the 1950s, Paris still held enough sway to change someone’s perspective on art. Although well-informed and educated – having resided in New York in 1939 and becoming acquainted with French modern painting – Kulmer, after visiting Paris in 1955, became fascinated with Tachism, a style of painting later more globally recognised as Abstract Expressionism. Before embracing abstraction, Kulmer painted within a framework of an international, pluralistic art ranging from Post-Impressionism on one side and Cubism on the other. He was particularly drawn to Fauvist painting processes, indicating an interest in reducing the illusion of three-dimensional space and the free use of colour. Therefore, Kulmer focused on colour, surface, and painterly gesture, making the turn to abstract painting after World War II a logical choice. This drawing belongs to a series of drawings on Kulmer’s favourite type of paper (rice paper), characterised by its exceptional absorbency. The “Drawing” thus defines the relationship between chance – the painter has no control over the absorption process – and controlled action (ink dosage, type of gesture, etc.).
Kulmer was born in 1925 in Cap Martin, France. He first attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest (1942-45), and then in Zagreb (1945-48). He also worked on film set and costume design (for example, for Vatroslav Mimica’s film “Anno Domini 1573”). He received the highest national award for artistic work – the Vladimir Nazor Lifetime Achievement Award – in 1990. He died in Zagreb in 1998.

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

Ferdinand Kulmer, Red Painting, 1959 – 1960

Ferdinand Kulmer
(1925-1998)
Red Painting, 1959 – 1960
oil on canvas
195 x 130 cm
MG-4147

Ferdinand Kulmer (1925-1998) was a modernist and postmodernist painter who changed styles at Mercury’s speed of travel. He is a descendant of the noble Kulmer family – Styrian barons who moved to Croatia in the 18th c., the most influential of which being the lawyer and politician Franjo Kulmer (19th c.). Tonko Maroević drew a comparison that pinpoints the very essence of Kulmer’s life, drawing a parallel with how Picasso first painted and then bought castles, while with Ferdinand Kulmer it was the other way around. He studied painting during WWII and in the post-war period: in Budapest from 1942 and in Zagreb until 1948 (under Lj. Babić and O. Mujadžić), and worked as an associate in K. Hegedušić’s Master Workshop until 1957. During the course of his three-decade long art career, the range of styles that he painted in is impressive, with the styles always up-to-date and fused into a hybrid of sorts: from (post)fauvist Figurative art and Picasso, Abstract art (from 1957), Art Informel, Tachisme, monochrome painting with elements of Action Painting and calligraphy, to postmodern New Figuration in the 1980s. In the 1960s, he was close to gestural Art Informel in the vein of Heinrich Hartung and Pierre Soulages, and in the 1970s to Japanese calligraphy. Ferdinand Kulmer’s Red Painting from 1959-1960 presents him as a painter who is aware of existential anxiety and absurdity embodied by the corporeality of the painting, which signifies the physical factuality of Art Informel. By having combined Art Informel and the controlled automatism of Tachisme, Kulmer created a painting of polarised properties. The painting is a material fact, but the reds, interspersed with white traces, create an atmosphere of uneasy, impure aesthetics of the visual composition.

Text: Željko Marciuš, 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

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