Tag: Vilko Gecan

Vilko Gecan, At the Table (Family), 1919

Vilko Gecan
At the Table (Family), 1919
oil on canvas
113.5 x 98 cm
MG-1075

Friends Vilko Gecan and Milivoj Uzelac started painting at the Banja Luka grammar school. Soon after, they both moved to Zagreb and continued their studies with Tomislav Krizman. Gecan’s successfully started education at the Munich Academy in 1912 was unfortunately interrupted by the war and army conscription in 1914. After spending several years as a prisoner of war in Sicily, he briefly returned home in 1919. He joined his family in Gomirje in Gorski Kotar, and during the few months he spent there he was finally able to fully devote himself to artistic work. Despite his modest previous experience, Gecan conceived and executed in oil his largest and most ambitious composition to date, titled At the Table (Family). In a typically expressionist composition without a solid focal point, the oversized figures are strung around the empty table and threatened by the cramped space. Father, mother, brother and sisters are all absorbed in their own thoughts and do not communicate with each other at all. Instead of a family idyll, Gecan uses divergent angles and pronounced light contrasts to create a scene with strong emotional tension and striking expressivity, as in the ominous frames of Fritz Lang and German New Wave films of the 1920s.
The most important part of Gecan’s oeuvre, created from 1919 to 1933, begins with the paintings from Gomirje, which was particularly influenced by his time spent in Prague with Uzelac. Besides Zagreb, Gecan has later also lived and worked in Berlin, New York and Chicago. As time went by, illness made it increasingly difficult for him to paint, and he created mostly intimate compositions with intense colours. He died in 1973.

Text: Lada Bošnjak Velagić, 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

Vilko Gecan, Viktorija, 1919

Vilko Gecan
Viktorija, 1919
oil on canvas
73 x 53.8 cm
MG-2616

The expressive drive of Gecan’s Viktorija from 1919 announces the new spirit of the Spring Salon. The young Czech woman who was in love with Uzelac, often posed for both friends (Suburban Venus, In the Bohemian Studio). Gecan paints Viktorija in half-profile with a rich tonal orchestration similar to Kraljević, but with a sliding foreground and a pronounced light halo, he actually creates a completely surreal scene in an unreal ambience.
Vilko Gecan and the three years younger Milivoj Uzelac started painting at the Banja Luka grammar school. In 1912, they both moved to Zagreb and started studying with Tomislav Krizman. Gecan’s successfully started education at the Munich Academy was interrupted by army conscription. After being captured he spent three years as a prisoner of war in Sicily, then volunteered to go to the Macedonian Front, and he eventually joined Uzelac in Prague in 1919. The complementarity of Gecan’s creative discipline and Uzelac’s hastiness was a valuable corrective for them both. Besides Zagreb, Gecan later lived and worked in Berlin, New York and Chicago. Once he returned to Croatia for good in 1932, he painted intimist scenes, portraits, still lifes, landscapes and cityscapes featuring a strong colour palette. He died in 1973.

Text: Lada Bošnjak Velagić, senior curator at National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2022
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2022

Vilko Gecan, House in New York, 1932

Vilko Gecan
House in New York, 1932
watercolour
51,5 x 40 cm
MG-1077

Along with Milivoj Uzelac, Vilko Gecan represents a kind of ‘second wave’ of modernist painting in Croatia, the period which coincides with the duration of World War I, that is, the period between the two world wars. This is due to the exceptional quality of his painting, but also the fact that the most prominent modernist painters in Croatia, Josip Račić and Miroslav Kraljević, died young, not even thirty years old. Further deepening of the aesthetics of modern painting in the works of Gecan and Uzelac is most visible through the influence of Expressionism, and later partly also the increasing presence of advertising iconography in their works. All four painters have had almost identical beginnings: they moved from Zagreb to Munich to attend the Academy or another painting school, and then to Paris.

“House in New York” belongs to Gecan’s American episode when he lived in Chicago and New York from 1928 to 1932, hoping to achieve success in a new market, still unaffected by the crisis. The painting deviates from the usual depiction of the metropolis. Not managing to fully adapt to the American environment, Gecan does not portray New York as a city of skyscrapers, but a city where buildings are in traditional proportion to man. He often goes to the banks of the Hudson River where he paints unurbanized or industrial areas, trees, one-storey buildings, anything that reminds him in some way of the suburbs of Paris or Zagreb. When he is not out painting in plein air, he stays home and paints still lifes and portraits. “House in New York” is a descriptive watercolour. Gecan depicts a type of New York building without stylization; the forms are clearly delineated, the surfaces are filled with colours that correspond to the actual scene. Gecan has never officially belonged to New Objectivity, a European art movement from the period between the two world wars that insisted on realism and the social engagement of art, but he was never closer to it than in the American phase of his work.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić, curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2022
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Foto: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2022

Skip to content