Vlaho Bukovac, Woman in Ancient Costume

Vlaho Bukovac
Woman in Ancient Costume, 1919
oil on cardboard
85 x 62.1 cm
MG-312

Vlaho Bukovac (1855–1922) is considered to be among the pioneers of Modern art in Croatia. This Parisian student had an international career (France, England, USA, Vienna, the Czech Republic) and received awards at the Paris Salon, while his works are kept in private collections around the world. Bukovac’s painting style ranges from Academic Realism to the Colourful School of Zagreb period and the distinctive leaning towards Symbolism in the portraits and nudes executed in the last twenty years of his life when he worked as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

Bukovac painted the Woman in Ancient Costume in Prague, where he worked as a professor at the local Academy, promoting a technique characterised by a unique divisionist brushstroke in the service of Symbolist painting. This method was developed in Lombardy, subsequently refined through the “filter” of the Central European Viennese cultural milieu, and later disseminated throughout Europe.  The divisionist, dotted brushstroke gives the painting an intentionally vibrant and flickering surface, evoking the ambiguous and undefined states of transition typical of Symbolism. The choice to depict a woman in ancient costume reflects the legacy of the nineteenth-century academic tradition, which frequently situated imagined figures and scenes from Classical Antiquity in classical interiors and realistically rendered landscapes.

Text: PhD Ivana Rončević Elezović, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

Skip to content