CROATIAN MODERN PAINTING 2008 - NEVENKA ĐORĐEVIĆ

Nevenka Đorđević (1898 – 1975) The creative work of painter and ceramic artist Nevenka Đorđević has not sufficiently been recognised for a long time, although her work has been included in all the anthologies of twentieth century art, as an unavoidable art link of our environment. Only the retrospective exhibition in 1999 organised in the Art Pavilion in Zagreb reconstructed particularities of her visual art through modernity in a wider span of time, from the end of 1920 until the mid ‘60’s. She was born in 1899 in Rumanian Banat, a place called Sannicolaul Mare. She was only sixteen when in 1915 after graduating from the Girls’ Higher Learning Academy she departed to Zagreb to study fine arts. She started her training in the private school of Ljubo Babić, and in 1916 she enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts. After graduation in 1921, with her future husband, Ernest Tomašević, she departed to Berlin. During her two year stay in Berlin she visited numerous ateliers and private schools, (W. Jackel and A. Archipenko), and mostly was engaged in painting portraits. Not many portraits executed during her stay in Berlin relate to primary positioning that at time are close to the dominant «new reality» style, solid and plasticized structured form, and that harsh simplicity from which she began would markedly be incorporated in her later art of painting After she returned to Zagreb she was more engaged in executing works of art in ceramic, and learned about the technique from the sculptor Hinko Juhn. The first exhibition of her work in ceramics was at the arts and crafts exhibition organised in 1927. On display were her ceramic sculptures and pottery plates. Modelled clay and colouring of bounded surfaces marked her painting, which gravitates towards gloominess, stylized deformation of a figure with distinct contours; precise colouration and mild ironic shift toward caricature what actually increases her expressiveness. Her early works are mostly portraits and still life of flowers in a vase, what determines her as an artist of intimisme, however only in regard to the scenes she liked to paint. Her unrestricted development of a form through broad vehement strokes and bordered surfaces in glowing and sometimes gloomy colours, quite early brought to surface her peculiar and not in the least intimistic modern style. She achieved distinction with summarines in a series of women portraits, almost regularly with bizarre bonnets on their heads, as if accentuating concise characterisation of the person whose portrait she painted. In 1930 she discovered on the island of Brač and in Komiža particularities of the Dalmatian environment and it will extensively resonate in her Mediterranean iconography. Images of stone facades of old Dalmatian churches and palaces achieved with summarinnes, are stripped of any decorative quality, assume a shape with allegoric connotations. With broad and splattered spots of reduced colour palette she developed her concise perception of Southern towns in a unique impression. In the mentioned concise style she painted several versions of Carrousel in a leisure park, (printed on a stamp) from which the version from 1953 on a display in the Modern Gallery in Zagreb, is the best version. Although there is nothing left of the Carrousel but the bare construction firmly centred in the fenced off space, and by its brightness stands out against the natural environment, and this static and concise outline of a form creates an impressive illusion of rotation. In the fifties and sixties of the last century she developed an original mark by isolating fragments of old boats, transformed «protégés» fastened on the stems of boats in an individual icon, like symbol, and by doing it procured for her a place in a contemporary art.