CROATIAN MODERN PAINTING 2006 - VLADIMIR BECIĆ (1886. – 1954.)

VLADIMIR BECIĆ (1886 – 1954) Vladimir Becić (Slavonski Brod, June 1, 1886 – Zagreb, May 24, 1954) is one of the few Croatian artists whose opus brings to an end one and starts another, new period of Croatian modern painting. Zdenko Tonković considers that Becić’s work is of first class importance when it relates to the formation of the visual feature standards of Croatian painting: “For half a century he was the vertical of living tradition, according to whom aberrations were measured and he was the stronghold defying the temptations and calamities of the pre-war contemporary art.” Though Becić originally enrolled law studies in Zagreb in 1904, he attended parallel private painting courses in the ateliers of Crnčić and Čikoš and exhibited his works at the commemorative exhibition of the Croatian Art Society and the First Yugoslav Art Exhibition in Belgrade. In the years 1905 and 1906 Becić went to Munich where he attended private painting courses. In 1906 he was accepted at the Academy in H. J. Habermann’s class which all the four participants of the so called Munich Circle (Račić, Kraljević, Herman and Becić) attended in the period between 1905 and 1910. From the present position it is quite clear that Becić’s painting opus was slightly overshadowed by the myth that was created after the early deaths of Račić and Kraljević as the sorely missed and never-to-be-forgotten great artistic features of the Croatian modern painting. Matko Peić points out in several places that Becić performed in our modern painting the same role that Edouard Manet’s painting “Breakfast in the Open Air” had done for the French modern painting, because he managed to synthesize in a short time period Habermann’s Munich academism, Leibl’s characteristic realism and Manet’s interpretation of Goya’s and Velásquez’s painting, which, according to Zdenko Rus, becomes evident in a defined “constructive” standpoint to the picture. In 1909 Becić’s education at the Munich Academy came to an end and that year was then marked by his departure for Paris and the enrolment at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris where he discovered the paintings of Manet and Cézanne, painted copies of Manet and exhibited at the Autumn Salon. He returned to Zagreb in 1910 and opened his first individual exhibition in the Salon Ulrich. Matko Peić relates Becić’s Still Life from the year 1909 in his book dedicated personally to Becić (Revija, Osijek, 1987) to the everyday atmosphere of the Croatian painting class at Habermann’s Munich Academy. Becić’s Still Life (1909) is a veritable breakfast for the young Croatian painters: “... served on a white tablecloth, which according to Becić must always be clean, and it was made up of an earthenware jug, milk, a loaf of bread, some grapes and several apples. Similar to this simple, clean and sober breakfast, it was also the whole of Becić’s morning...” (M. Peić). The form – basis of the whole picture – has been realized by three elements: half-tone, light and shadow, or by the volume and tone. As a matter of fact, as early as 1908 in Habermann’s class there could be noted “in Becić’s work a completely defined way of painting in the characteristic grey-greenish and earthen-coloured nuances of the colour range” (B.Gagro). Matoš’s sharp and precise eye was only one of many who have noticed in this early phase of Becić’s painting (1909) his talent and sensitivity for new stylistic problems in the art of painting, particularly regarding the individual values of colour and volume on the painting which would have been impossible without the important Paris episode that played an important role in Becić’s maturation in painting. After more than seven decades Zdenko Tonković, too, has acknowledged that it was exactly Becić’s painting that remained the notion of “healthy visualization, the experience of reality and the visual expression in categories of the very plastic language that laid the strong foundations of the visual expression of our art of painting”. Vladimir Becić exhibited at the exhibitions of the Zagreb Spring Salon, the exhibitions of the Group of independent artists (Miše, Varlaj, Kljaković, Kršinić, Meštrović, Babić) from 1921 to 1927, and he was also the member of the eminent Group of Three (Babić, Miše, Becić), established in 1930 which nurtured poetics of the so called pure painting of realistic and colouristic orientation. In 1934 he was given the position of full professor at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts where he continued to educate generations of Croatian artists and where he worked until his retirement in 1947. He was member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts since the year 1934.