Shifting the Focus Solely onto Art

The next generation of professors, led by Ivan Meštrović, Ljubo Babić, and somewhat later Krsto Hegedušić, will shift the focus to fine art. And it was precisely this brief respite between the horrors of the two world wars when the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb reached its pinnacle. In addition to the aforementioned artists, the classes were taught by other iconic personalities of Croatian art, Jerolim Miše, Tomislav Krizman, Jozo Kljaković, Marino Tartaglia… whose individual approach will facilitate the emergence of Croatian modernism. At the same time, interest will shift from the predominantly Germanic geographical area of education to the Romance (French, Spanish, Italian). The different poetics of the academy professors who considered themselves to be artists first, and only then pedagogues, will be visible in the individual approach of each professor-artist, which probably contributed to the fact that the academy did not become academized, that is, it did not turn into an art school with a schematic curriculum. The essential difference stemmed from the understanding of art. And precisely because of the avant-garde and modernist movements and their exponents – professors, art academies opened their doors to different poetics and work methods, so it is quite justified to ask the question whether artistic poetics, or practices, to use a contemporary term, exist outside the academies today, in the sense of such historical phenomena as Impressionism or even more radically, historical avant-gardes, that is, if we were to completely radicalise the question: is all contemporary fine art ultimately academic art. Thus, the well-known cry of the Dadaists, that carried with it a lethal attack on the utilitarian and mercantile mentality, and openly fought against the very concept of marketability and for an escape from institutions, “We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every kind!”, eventually turned into its opposite. Not only did their works become part of prestigious public and private collections, but they soon found their place within the mechanisms of industry and bourgeois culture and society.

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