The motif of the metropolis, specifically Paris, where he lived between 1911 and 1912, represents an important segment in Miroslav Kraljević’s creative life (1885 – 1913). The impressionist and post-impressionist wellspring of the entire urban visuality of the time, its physiognomy and natural environment, influenced the artist’s complex urban typology and social stratigraphy. Streets, bridges, parks, walks and excursions in nature, music halls, bars, cafes and taverns, salons and apartments, rooms and brothels are the themes and motifs of the artist’s paintings, drawings and prints. With their masterful execution and intermingling of fundamental impulses, Kraljević’s works tell of the modern painter’s modern existence: of the city inside a man and the man inside a city, torn between Eros and Thanatos.
Through a typological presentation, the lecture describes the motifs, themes and content, while the conceptual interpretation sheds light on the urban spirit and the characteristic Parisian epoch, while establishing the significance of Kraljević’s influence on creativity of the younger generation of artists, his followers, Marijan Trepše, Miroslav Uzelac and Vilko Gecan, as well as the parallelism with the creative work of his contemporary, painter Josip Račić.
The urban geography of Paris extends from the exterior in the paintings Pantheon, Bridge over the Seine, the Luxembourg gardens, to the entrance into the aforementioned interiors of the city in the works: In the Paris Café, In a Café, A Man with a Nude Woman, Roosters, The Brawl, Caressing, Embrace, Dancing Couples).
For Kraljević, the metropolis is a visual field of signs and exhibits in which social parameters all appear the same – an illusion of the complex image of the metropolis – and, with the gradual revelation of life behind the façades, it becomes a mixture of value identifications about the city and the man: men and women, the observer and the observed, the nervous, modern, fast, erotic and deadly character of the depiction and the artist. The stylistic determinants, as well as the influences, mostly from the period of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, arise from the typology.
Despite chronic illness having extinguished his young life in 1913 in Zagreb, at the age of 27, in a short period Miroslav Kraljević managed to create a body of work whose ember shines, as cultural heritage, under the museum patina and convention, towards us and those who will come after us.
Željko Marciuš, museum counsellor at the National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Image: Drawing by Miroslav Kraljević "In a Paris Cafe" from 1912 from the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb. Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023