EXHIBITIONS · Gallery Dulčić Masle Pulitika
DUBROVNIK COLOURISTS 1948 – 1945
- A SELECTION FROM THE COLLECTION OF MOMAD
Curator: Andrea Batinić Ivanković
Duration: 21.12.2021. – 30.1.2022.
Ignjat Job, Olive trees, 1935
oil on cardboard
49,4 x 65,4 cm
Dubrovnik, city right on the periphery of western culture, yet nevertheless an elect city that has for centuries in its way been a centre and focal point of culture, a city that has been blessed with hues and the meridional note of colourism, has lastingly been an inspiration to painters, poets, musicians, sculptors and all kinds of artists. Social conditions in the Dubrovnik milieu between the wars were characterised by the work of artists gathered around conservator and expert in the visual, Kosta Strajnić. Strajnić, aesthete, art historian and critic, as well as curator, generously taught young painters, in a very difficult time for art, a time of war and its attendant disasters, of stratification in settled human standards. The generation of Dubrovnik painters from the early 1920s went its own way in art, in the direction of expressive colourism.
Božidar Rašica, Below Babin Kuk, 1933
oil on canvas
39 x 43 cm
New cohorts of painters developing in the Strajnić circle transferred the visual experience they had gained in the period of war to the age after WWII, like Niko Miljan. Yet the place for being first in the Dubrovnik colourist circle belongs to the trio composed of Gabro Rajčević, Ivan Ettore and Marko Rašica.
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Gabro Rajčević, Portrait of a young man, 1935 |
Gabro Rajčević, Portrait of a young man, 1935 |
Gabro Rajčević (1912-1943) was the first among the youthful artists to encounter Strajnić. Rajčević’s painting is a profound metaphor of human reality, while his colourism and gesturality, his associative landscapism and the dynamism of the elements are an unmistakable leitmotif of all of his phases and cycles. A broad palette of colours in his works is at once symbolic and structural, vivid and either merry or melancholic.
Ivan Ettore, A street with four trees, 1936
oil on canvas
48,5 x 66,3 cm
Ivan Ettore (1911-1938) in his brief painting career bequeathed to Dubrovnik and Croatian painting many important works. The viewer of his landscapes gains the impression that the colours on the canvas are in motion. The dynamics of the colour are related to the frequent contrast in hues, while the manner in which he treats the surface is practically neo-Impressionist, à la Vlaminck. In his paintings, Ettore expresses a profound impression of his own, almost palpable in his landscapes.
Marko Rašica, Landscape from Lokrum, 1932
oil on canvas
55,5 x 68,5 cm
Marko Rašica (1883-1963) in his long life produced a huge oeuvre, mostly inspired by his native landscape, and as a whole prompted by Mediterranean settings. Sea and the sky above it, rocks, cypresses and the coastal landscape are the recognisable sign of Rašica’s painting. His coastal colouring, the dense and strident hues, draw in painting terms on the local Dubrovnik tradition, and so we experience Rašica primarily as Mediterranean Epicurean, who surrendered himself to his innermost unrestrained revelry in the joy of living.
Božidar Rašica, Portrait of Kosta Strajnić, 1935
oil on canvas
78 x 57 cm
Alongside the activity of these three colourists it is interesting to remark on the appearance of Dubrovnik architect, town planner and set designer possessed of a very specific painterly style, Božidar Rašica (1912-1992). His Portrait of Kosta Strajnić is simply bursting with its wide range of hues. He mixes them, changes their tonalities and intensities and shapes them into flat, irregular forms. The interesting aesthetic dualism created in contact of painter and painting nevertheless manages to speak about existential and emotional tensions, revealing the fear, anxiety and fluttery agitation of the interior state of the spirit.
Niko Miljan, Street Between Gardens, cca 1948
oil on canvas
63,7 x 73 cm
A unique figure to appear in this period, intriguing and far from negligible to the art criticism discipline, is the Dubrovnik painter Niko Miljan (1891-1962), who works in a colouristically expressive application of paint of blurred outlines, in mild chromatic definitions with which shapes the tonal atmosphere of the painting. Miljan’s divisionism does not penetrate into the depth of the painting. He builds it only on the surface, beneath which is hidden the same mosaic that creates the magical world of his own painterly explorations, so warm that we viewers wish for a moment to be a part of its atmosphere.
Of great importance was the appearance of one master of Dubrovnik origins in whom the Dubrovnik motifs are not projections of Strajnić’s instructions, but come into being independently of that artistic coterie, out of the painter himself, out of his euphoric nature, of his Dubrovnik childhood. This was Ignjat Job, whom we would consider to be the progenitor of Dubrovnik inter-war colourism. In his pictures colour has its main property; it is the catalyst and conveyor of all the mental and visual energies, the vehicle of all the visual transformations, for colour creates the choppy style, the restless surface and experience of strong expressiveness. His figures live in a strangely undefined space of the internal spiritual state. These are images of a mental spirit, layers of the soul transferred to the flat surface of the painting, materialised in the superimposition of tinted painterly structures.
Ignjat Job, Wine, 1933 – 1935
oil on wood
56,2 x 40,5 cm
The Dubrovnik colourists left their mark with their paintings, which take us back to the past, to the feeling of belonging to the City and its artistic circle, while at the same time we move out into spaces of the future, where the trace of the Dubrovnik painting circle can be felt in the contemporary art of our clime.
Gabro Rajčević, Still life, 1934
oil on canvas
50 x 48,1 cm
BIOGRAPHIES
IVAN ETTORE
He was born in Dubrovnik on March 16th, 1910. He had been showing fondness and talent for painting from an early age, so after high school in Dubrovnik he went to Zagreb and got enrolled into Higher School of Fine Arts. He soon dropped out of school and left to Trieste and Florence. Poor health forced him to drop out of school and to return to his hometown Dubrovnik prematurely. He died in Ljubljana in 1938.
IGNJAT JOB
He was born in Dubrovnik on March 28th, 1885. He was enrolled in high school in his hometown but he soon neglected it and dropped out of school. At the beginning of the war (1914) he was arrested by the Austrians and held hostage in Šibenik. Released from the refuge, Job got enrolled into the College of Fine Arts and Crafts in Zagreb and attended it irregularly. In the next couple of years he lived in Dubrovnik, Zagreb, Belgrade, Lopud, Vodice, Supetar and finally he tried to settle down in Split (1933-1934), Belgrade, Zagreb and again Supetar; until his final appeasement (death) in Zagreb on April 28th, 1936.
NIKO MILJAN
Niko Miljan was born in Cavtat in 1891. He attended and finished high school in Dubrovnik, and received his first lessons in painting from the watercolourist Josip Lalic. In 1909 he enrolled at the Academy in Prague. In a period from 1919-1931 he worked as a professor in high schools in: Tetovo, Krusevac, Zemun and Dubrovnik. During WW2 he stayed in Prague where he remained until 1949 when he went to Zagreb and then came back to Dubrovnik in 1956 where he died in 1962.
GABRO RAJČEVIĆ
He was born in Dobrota in 1912. In 1925 he had arrived to Dubrovnik with his family where he settled definitely. His fondness for painting brought him into contact with art critic Kosta Strajnic in 1928, which, along with participation at Strajnic’s seminars, resulted in Rajcevic’s enrollement into the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1930. He returned to Dubrovnik in 1934. Being severely ill with tuberculosis, he died in Dubrovnik in 1943.
BOŽIDAR RAŠICA
He was born in Ljubljana in 1912. As early as 1920 he returned with his family to his native Dubrovnik where he attended high school. In autumn of 1932 Rašica got enrolled into the study of architecture in Roman Valle Giulia, travelled through Italy and visited exhibitions. He continued his studies in Belgrade, Warsawa and finally in Zagreb where he graduated from the architectural department of the Technical University. Since 1954 he was enrolled as a set designer on our and world stages. He died in Zagreb on September 13th, 1992.
MARKO RAŠICA
He was born in Dubrovnik on November 13th, 1883. Initially self-taught, he made scenographic designs for the Dubrovnik premiere of “Equinox” by Ivo Vojnović. This success ensured him with the material support for studies at Vienna academy. He was a professor of drawing at the Crafts School in Zagreb, and retired ahead of time (in 1932) reactivated in 1936 and used his “ years of freedom” in best way: for painting in Dubrovnik and its surrounding area. He died on Koločep Island on January 27th, 1963.
PAVO URBAN (1968 – 1991) _ SCENES OF DARKNESS
Dulčić Masle Pulitika Gallery
16.11. – 12.12.2021.
Curator: Petra Golušić
The Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik marks thirty years since the death of Pava Urban and thirty years since the attack on Dubrovnik. It is a presentation of twenty-three works by artists documenting the reality of war and which are part of the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibition Scenes of Darkness features the last twelve photographs of Urban taken on December 6, 1991, during the fiercest attack on Dubrovnik, in which a young photographer lost his life. The exhibition includes the documentary Photography in Croatia _ Pavo Urban (1968 - 1991) made in 2003.
The shots express the truth with aesthetic quality and sharpness of insight. Fineness and harmony are embodied in scenes of darkness that Urban photographs masterfully and extremely bravely. Scenes of the horrors of war are recorded by a balanced structure of light and framing in which _ harmony, order, and proportion are formed. The author filmed suffering, destruction, fear, despair, destruction, death... Pavo Urban simply witnessed _ terrible pain.
IN THE SALON, 1991
silver print
PORAT GORI II. 1991.
silver print
‘Photographing Stradun in a perspective from at position at Vrata od Ploče down to the Vrata od Pile with marvellous intuition he was able to determine the frame in which the biggest drama of last-century’s Dubrovnik was to unfold. Nothing happens in the first shot; we see just the city, that gloomy December morning. But in the next shot, hell has broken loose, at the end of Stradun there is fire and an explosion that rattles both city and camera. Urban, totally composed, went on following the events and ignoring the danger, with careful framing, documented their development in a sequence of 12 shots. In the last black and white photograph he seems to have been embracing the whole of the city in farewell. In a picture taken between two explosions all the places that make up the idea of Dubrovnik are taken in: on the left hand side of the frame is the edge of the bell tower, the axis of the city’s space. On the right, the Sponza, the acme of its architecture. There is the church of St Blaise, patron of the city, and Stradun, its most vital artery. Finally, in the very centre, the Orlando Column, monument to the legendary liberator, a place that sublimates Liberty, and its synonym, a guiding motif throughout history. After this condensed and comprehensive shot, in the immediate vicinity the next shell exploded, a fragment from which fatally wounded Pavo Urban.’ (Antun Maračić)
LAST IMAGES _ DUBROVNIK, 6 XII 1991
7 colour photographs, digital print from original colour slides
LAST IMAGES _ DUBROVNIK, 6 XII 1991
5 black & white photographs, digital print from original negatives
BIOGRAPHY
PAVO URBAN (Dubrovnik 1968 – Dubrovnik 1991)
Pavo Urban was educated at the Maritime Secondary School and the Maritime Faculty in Dubrovnik. Self-taught, he started photographing in secondary school, and was a member of the Marin Getaldić (Dubrovnik) photographic club. In September 1991 he won entrance into the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb, film and TV camera department, but never started the course, deciding to stay in wartime Dubrovnik instead. As early as September 29, 1991, he was on the front line in Župa Dubrovačka, and here started his wartime photographic oeuvre (rat-art / war-art). When Župa Dubrovačka fell, he returned to Dubrovnik and started working as war reporter for Dubrovački vjesnik and Slobodna Dalmacija as war reporter. It was in this capacity that he recorded the first shell to land on the historical city centre on October 26, 1991. The Ministry of Information of the Republic of Croatia recruits him into a special documentation and information unit with the task of photographing and filming the war destruction and suffering of Dubrovnik. He carried out his job very conscientiously and systematically. In the early morning of December 6, 1991, he began to photograph the fiercest assault on the city. On this date, at the end of the dramatic series of 12 photographs shown here, he was killed, in the twenty third year of his life. Pavo Urban is a cult name in Croatian photography and one of the symbols of wartime Dubrovnik.
THE FRAGILITY AND STRENGHT OF A WOMAN – selection of sculptures from the collection of the Museum of modern art Dubrovnik
Duration: 19.3.2021. - 30.5.2021.
Curator: Andrea Batinić
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Sophisticated, sensible and elegant sculptures of women, girls and their bodies in the works of Croatian sculptors represented at the recent exhibition speak fully from a perspective of perception, but from narration too.
The delicate, linear structures of female bodies possess clearly-stated metaphorical- symbolic meanings. Their bodies seem to derive from the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, and these are: physical, ethereal, astral and spiritual bodies. Female structures in their interpretation are in certain states. These are lonely and anxious women, almost static and simple in a kind of a minimal movement, drawn into some oneiric inner world of theirs. Imposted female figures of a young, sensual body are naked and asthenic, with the emphasized erotic corporeality. With their self-denial, purity, sensuality and fragility they unite the fundamental female essence – her inner strength; the strength that keeps her going on even when she is not capable to do so; the energy and the beating state of mind with which she maintains self-control even when it is most difficult for her and when she is overwhelmed by the fear of the unknown and the unpredictable.
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The different stylistic and discursive affiliation of the exhibited sculptures, as well as the individual approaches to the theme, overlapping in certain segments, and united in the unique exhibited collection, make the former interesting and dynamic. The opus of the selected sculptures exudes special aura of ethereal radiation, although their basic effect is very much autonomous and core monumental. The surface of the sculptures is simple but layered, vulnerably exposed in a certain way but warm at the same time, it attracts and does not repel with these, and it is not cold as it often is in its smoothness and sharpness. The sculptures are liberated from the flat narration, while the power of expression finds its foothold in the composition (movement, eroticism). The depictions of women and the female body almost burst with different degrees of emotion and passion, and act on us with its meditative purity and noble innocence of the spirit that emanates from them.
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The depictions of women and the female body in the works of Ivan Lozica are expressive, erotically naturalistic and they incline to the feminine sensibility, tenderness and a kind of spirituality that permeate each of his sculptures. The artist's true gift resulted in a rare expressiveness, purity of vision, melodic modelling and unwavering staticity of his figures.
There is so much immanent beauty and tightness in that „ feminine note“ that the ideas of purism and reduction are just being imposed. The reduction of form and beauty of pure lines is also visible in the sculpture „Concern“ of Frano Kršinić which in an elegant manner simplifies female figure with a tendency toward symbolic expression which simultaneously expresses the woman's fragility and strength. Thematically, dimensionally and volumetrically, the female figure of Đorđe Oraovac is similarly treated, which achieves the harmony and elegance of the line with simple transitions, bulges and depressions. With the special sense of harmony and beauty, Nikola Njirić embodies the eroticism of form in a bronze sculpture of a woman’s torso with visible, reduced and purified elements, thus approaching the modern understanding of the sculptural form. In his „Female planter“, Robert Frangeš Mihanović synthesized realistic, secessionist, symbolic artistic expression. The woman in the bent position, in addition to being performed in a realistic manner with accentuated lines, is also fixed as much in the morphological as in the psychological form. The naked female statues of Kosta Angela Radovani exude full, mature curves of cubist shapes, robustly executed with unwavering staticity and fluid frontality. With the refined sense of simple, organic mass of concise artistic details, he synthesizes his figures by which he expresses a woman's strength and power.
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MATO CELESTIN MEDOVIĆ
Exhibition marking the centenary of artist’s death
/from the MOMAD collection
Duration: 22.10.2020.-31.1.2020.
Curator: Rozana Vojvoda
South-westerly, around 1906., oil on cardboard
The Collection of Dubrovnik Museum of Modern Art holds thirty-four works1 by Mato Celestin Medović – on the whole portraits, some works with religious subjects, and landscapes, as well as various sketches and studies. Some of the works from the collection are reckoned to be among the finest that Medović created. The generic diversity that characterises Medović’s works in the Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik reflects, in fact, something that has never been sufficiently accentuated – that Medović was an artist who produced works of great quality in various fields of activity – in history painting, and in the religious, portrait and landscape genres.
Rozana Vojvoda
Motif from Pelješac, 1906. – 1908., oil on cardboard
BIOGRAPHY
Mato Celestin Medović was born on November 17, 1857 in Kuna, a village on the peninsula of Pelješac. After a year of education at the Franciscan Monastery of Our Lady of Loreto (Delorita) on Pelješac, in 1868 he left for the monastery of the Minorites in Dubrovnik, where he entered the novitiate. There, he started doing drawings and painting in oil, and in 1880 went off to study painting in Italy. He had private lessons in Rome from 1880 to 1882 (Ludwig Seitz, Francesco Grandi), and then from 1883 to 1884 in Florence (Antonio Ciseri). In 1886 he returned to Dubrovnik, but aware of the shortcomings of his incomplete training in 1888 he went to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (his teachers were Gabriel Hackl, Ludwig Löfftz and Aleksandar Wagner). The three last years spent in the class of Wagner left the deepest trace from this period, in the spirit of the decorative historical compositions of Karl Piloty. He spent 1893 to 1894 in Dubrovnik and Kuna, and left the order. After Munich, his conception for the making of religious paintings underwent fundamental modifications. Details of setting were rejected, and the paintings were dominated by the monumental figures of the saints. He spent 1895 to 1907 in Zagreb, where under the influence of the plein air thinking and rich colourism of Vlaho Bukovac he changed his brushstroke and invigorated his colours. He is the first of the modern Croatian painters to have emancipated still life as a freestanding subject, which also goes for landscape, which he mainly painted on Pelješac, in plein air, with a bright scale of pure colours. This new visual expression was transferred also to the historical compositions, to paintings with religious subjects and portraits. In 1908 when he returned to his native Kuna, a new period in the painting of Celestin Medović started, forming what is called the Pelješac phase, interrupted by a brief period in 1912 to 1914 when he lived in Vienna. In this period he painted almost entirely landscapes, abounding in the bright southern light and in vigorous colours, with which he made his greatest contribution to Croatian painting. Mato Celestin Medović died on January 20, 1920, in Sarajevo.
Holy Trinity (sketch for a fresco), 1899., oil on canvas
The Dulčić Masle Pulitika Gallery
Located opposite Dubrovnik Cathedral and alongside the Rector’s Palace, at the address Držićeva poljana 1, opened in 1997 as a memorial space to American diplomat Ronald Brown who perished in an aircraft crash on just before he was due to visit Dubrovnik in 1996, the Dulčić/Masle/Pulitika Gallery is devoted on the second and third floors of the building to an exhibition venue of the institution the Dubrovnik Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. The works of the painters Dulčić, Masle and Pulitika that are the trademark of these premises are exhibited between exhibitions of other artists. Hence on the first floor, the year 2013 saw the establishment of a permanent display of the works of the three distinguished Dubrovnik painters: Ivo Dulčić (1916-1975), Antun Masle (1919-1967) and Đuro Pulitika (1922-2006). Although there are no formal links among them, what joins these painters together, apart from a dominant feeling for picturality is their powerful creative expression. Dulčić’s personality is exceptional in the rapid brushstrokes and refinement of texture; in Masle’s manner of painting the thick applications of paint are similar to the child’s drawing; Pulitika’s saturated colour triumphs in its flat monumentality. On the second floor of this exhibition space there are constantly changing temporary exhibitions, showing artists and themes of various origins, attention always being paid, however, to the high quality of the exhibits and the accompanying materials (exhibition catalogues).
The second floor of the Dulčić/Masle/Pulitika Gallery allows access to the not very distant third exhibition space of the Dubrovnik Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Pulitika Studio. In the in situ space in which that painter distinguished by the vigour of his colour Đuro Pulitika for many years had his working space and in which he exhibited his works to a stream of visitors, in 2013 a faithfully recreated studio was opened, complete with paintings; in the larger, front part of this space within the Dubrovnik defensive walls is an exhibition space for temporary exhibitions.
