CROATIAN FINE ART, Jozo Kljaković

Jozo Kljaković, Fishermen (Return of the Fishermen), 1935 (oil on canvas, 100 cm x 130 cm), Modern Gallery, Zagreb (Inventory No.: MG-846) The formative path of painter and pedagogist Jozo Kljaković (Solin, 1889 - Zagreb, 1969) was very rich and characterised by diversity. He first studied from Vlaho Bukovac in Prague (1908), after which he continued his studies in Rome and finally at the studio of Ferdinand Hodler in Geneva (1917). He studied fresco painting at the Académie Ranson in Paris in 1920. From 1921 to 1943, he held the position of professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He was imprisoned, together with Ivan Meštrović, by the Ustaša Croatian Revolutionary Movement at the end of 1941 and beginning of 1942, after which he left his homeland and spent the following twenty-five years living in Rome and Buenos Aires. He spent the last year of his life in Zagreb. The Jozo Kljaković Memorial Collection is housed in his family home at Rokov Perivoj in Zagreb. In his artistic beginnings, he took to the Art Nouveau style of expression, influenced by Hodler and Meštrović’s symbolism, in which context he made a significant contribution to Croatian Art Nouveau corpus of artwork. Focused on the form of the figure, the value of the drawing and an intently balanced composition, Kljaković grew to become the most important representative of monumental Neoclassicism as a part of neorealistic tendencies in Croatian post-war painting. His works were mostly large paintings and his skill of figurative monumentalization was best reflected in numerous cycles of frescos (in St. Mark’s Church in Zagreb, St. Martin’s Church in Vranjic, St. Mary’s Church in Biskupija kod Knina and others) and in his mosaics on the facade of the building of Pontifical Croatian College of St. Jerome in Rome (1944 – 1961). He painted biblical compositions, Arcadian scenes and scenes from day-to-day lives of fishermen. His paintings were mostly oil paintings. He was an excellent caricature artist and illustrator and he also published a novel and a book of memoir prose. His painting Return of the Fishermen (1935) is representative of Kljaković’s style of painting in mid 1930s. It shows a commonplace scene often observed in small towns on the coast: fishermen returning to the port with their catch, where they are awaited by townsfolk. Although one can notice a gradual softening of the previously distinctly hard modelling of objects and figures, which used to be at the core of Kljaković’s style by that point, the painting is still dominated by an interest in volume and thought-out composition, which lends the scene an impression of classical grandeur. By “monumentalizing his image of the world” (G. Gamulin), Kljaković approached the day-to-day lives of small towns on the Adriatic coast with particular attention, regarding them to be worthy of being presented in the same fashion as the grand art themes. Petar Prelog Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Art History