CROATIAN FINE ARTS, Vanja Radauš

Vanja (Ivan) Radauš (Vinkovci, 29 April 1906 – Zagreb, 24 April 1975) Artist – sculptor, painter, printmaker, medalist, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and academician, poet and photographer, a passionate and emotional individual, he is a famous Croatian who created works in all sculptural branches, from medals, sculptures in terracotta, plaster, stone, wax and bronze to important public monuments, and he is justifiably considered one of the most important and greatest Croatian sculptors of the 20th century. His sensibility towards the environment, reality, society and life was directly manifested in the production of his artistic creations in terms of stylistic versions, making him permanently unconventional both as an artist and as an individual. Just as it will remain a permanent challenge for the interpretation of Radauš’s artistic oeuvre, the circumstances of his death also remain unclear. But it is also an additional aura of intrigue that surrounds Vanja Radauš. The entire Croatian art criticism considers him a visionary inclined to experiment outside conventional patterns, escaping generational and stylistic categorizations and groupings. Despite this, but also because of it, he is rightly considered part of the Croatian sculptural “triumvirate”, together with Augustinčić and Kršinić, who bequeathed to Croatian modern art history some of the most interpretatively challenging sculptural achievements. At the art academy in Zagreb, he was taught by R. Valdec and R. Frangeš Mihanović, and from 1928 he was in the class of I. Meštrović. He became a professor in 1945 at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he worked until his death. From 1947, he was a regular member of JAZU, he led the Masters workshop for sculpture in Zmajevac, and in 1950 he represented Yugoslavia at the 20th Biennale in Venice – together with Augustinčić and Kršinić. In 1932, for one year, he was a member of the Zemlja group, whose programmatic positions on social sensitivity remained his permanent artistic preoccupation. From 1939, when, at the age of 33, Radauš, together with Jozo Turkalj, created his first large public monument, the Monument to Fallen Warriors in the First World War, erected on Mirogoj, he regularly made monuments for public spaces, from busts to monumental figures and compositions. After the Second World War, after a series of academic solutions for monumental compositions, the affirmation of his sculptural expression began. Among the best, and according to critics, the most significant works of Radauš’s oeuvre are his sculptural cycles: Typhoid Sufferers (1959), Man and Karst (1961-64), Portrait of our Man (1970s) as well as medal works and graphic maps: Dance macabre (1093-39), We Remember (1945). It is also worth mentioning the cycles Bloody Masquerade (1966), Abstract Forms (1966-68), Prisons and Camps (1969) and Slavonia (1970s), where he devoted himself to his native region with which he shared a permanent emotional connection. The above-mentioned and specially singled out contribution to the history of Croatian sculpture is Radauš’s sculptural cycle Panopticum Croaticum, created in the period from 1959 to 1961. Over two years, the cycle included 25 sculptures. It consists of two parts, a group of figures called The Trial and a depiction of the greats of Croatian culture: V. Lisinski, A. Jamometić, V. Karas, J. Račić, Matoš, I. Kozarac, I.G. Kovačić, F. Galović, A. Cesarec, F. Supilo, J. Polić Kamov, F. Krežma, E. Kvaternik, J. Križanić, S.S. Kranjčević and Slava Raškaj. With this extremely expressively cycle, almost in the form of Art Informel, Radauš showed the drama of the tragic destinies of individual personalities, basing the shaping of the figure on a specific tragedy that determined the representation and attributes, at the same time carrying a portrait characterization. With this approach to shaping the sculpture, Radauš achieved a strong and lasting effect on both the audience and critics. It is considered that one of the most impressive sculptures of that cycle, and of Radauš’s entire oeuvre, is the sculpture depicting Slava Raškaj. The Croatian painter, who spent her life as a deaf and mute artist, spent the end of her life in the Institute for the Mentally Ill in Stenjevac, with a darkened mind, believing that she was a bird. Symbolically using that tragic fate, Radauš made Slava Raškaj as a bird – truncated and ghostly, with heavy legs and clipped wings.