Tag: Slavko Šohaj

Slavko Šohaj, Naš salon

Slavko Šohaj
Our Salon
felt-tip pen on paper
24,3 x 33,4 cm
MG-7598

Throughout his long painting career, Šohaj created a wide array of interior scenes. While Our Salon depicts the interior of an apartment, it is unique among Šohaj’s works for several reasons. Generally, Šohaj used interiors as backdrops for still life compositions. He would meticulously arrange fruit, plants, vases, or small sculptures on tables or dressers, with only the walls, and occasionally a glimpse of curtains or a portion of the floor, visible in the rooms. The hues, brushstrokes, and viewpoint could infuse these scenes with an atmosphere that the observer would sense rather than consciously perceive. This would be the extent of our understanding of Šohaj’s interiors – works for which he was once celebrated as the foremost painter of intimate motifs in Croatian art. In contrast, this drawing seems to unveil the backdrop for all those still lifes, portraits, and nudes, by showing the layout of furniture in what we presume to be his living room (as indicated by the possessive pronoun referring to the artist and his wife).
Among Šohaj’s paintings and drawings, which he exclusively produced since graduating from the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts in 1931, Our Salon is distinctive in that it neither stylises nor idealises the apartment’s interior. Rather than drawing, Šohaj sketches, providing just enough detail to differentiate the objects and convey their spatial arrangement. His focus on the intimate atmosphere – reflecting his long-standing indecision between pursuing painting or music – seems to reach a culmination in this drawing. He articulated this best himself: I have mostly (like many other painters) found inspiration in things that are secondary, insignificant, and unpretentious in life. For me, painting was about giving these minor and trivial objects, as well as the landscapes and people I encountered, a second existence.

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

Slavko Šohaj, A Boy II, 1938

Slavko Šohaj
(1908-2003)
A Boy II, 1938
oil on canvas
89x69.7 cm
MG-1806

Slavko Šohaj’s A Boy II painting from 1938 is an anthological work of Cézanneism in Croatia and represents a sure step along the road to European Modernism. With the help of Cézannesque construction and local colours, Šohaj did not describe a scene, but rather interpreted the atmosphere of his studio, the centre of both his creative universe and universe of life. A compositional and gestural discipline, and a narrow range of motifs and themes are the features of the seven decades of creativity of Šohaj, the ‘last classic of Croatian Modernism’.

Slavko Šohaj studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb under Prof. Vladimir Becić and Prof. Ljubo Babić. After graduation, he stayed and studied in Paris in 1931/32 and in 1939. Having been inspired by the works of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, Šohaj strove for a painterly synthesis to express his own intimate world. In 1934 and 1935 he exhibited as a guest exhibitor at the exhibitions of The Group of Three (Ljubo Babić, Vladimir Becić and Jerolim Miše). Critics appreciate him as a master of figurative Poetic Realism. He worked as a draughtsman at the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb (1935-1965) and exhibited regularly at group exhibitions. His appearance at the Venice Biennale in 1942 won him international acclaim. Although his first ever solo exhibition was held in Paris as early as 1952, it was not until 1968 that Croatia saw the opening of his first solo exhibition in Zagreb. Not having cared much about the post-war trends in art of the 1950s, he befriended and exhibited with Croatian painters Oton Postružnik and Fran Šimunović. He did not care much about the Neo-Avant-Garde of the 1960s and 1970s either. Šohaj’s impressive oeuvre is mainly devoted to intimist themes, self-portraits and portraits, nudes and still lifes. Slavko and his wife, Heda Dubac Šohaj, donated over 150 masterpieces to the National Museum of Modern Art.

Text: lada Bošnjak Velagić, 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

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

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