CROATIAN FINE ARTS, Antun Masle – Orašac

Antun Masle – Orašac Antun Masle (Orašac, 1 September 1919 – Dubrovnik, 20 August 1967) is a modern painter of coloristic expression from Dubrovnik, who, despite having passed away too soon, achieved an impressive oeuvre. He received informal lessons in Dubrovnik from Kosta Strajnić (1887–1977), a painter, art theorist, conservator, museologist and an important figure for the development of modern art in Dubrovnik. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb between 1938 and 1942, and after returning to Dubrovnik he was engaged in teaching work for the remainder of his life. His painting, in terms of its significance, belongs to the corpus of national painting, as do the opuses of Ivo Dulčić (1916–1975) and Đuro Pulitika (1922–2006), his Dubrovnik peers, with whom he shared friendship and a tendency towards a coloristic and expressionist style. In his portraits, landscapes, still lifes, depictions of animals, Antun Masle uses color in a way that is related to the Fauvist principles, especially in his earlier works. The painting "From Orašac", created in 1944, during the painter's early period, shows a typical country house with a gentle Mediterranean landscape, interpreted through bright colors and simplified shapes. Dense layers of paint, which in later paintings grow into voluminous, almost three-dimensional structures, are one of the main characteristics of Masle's painting. In the second half of the 1950s, he was fond of framing his forms in black, similar to Georges Roualt and Milan Konjović, with whom he came into contact through the informal school of Kosta Strajnić. At the start of the 1960s, in terms of layering and tactility of the painting surface, he was leaning towards art brut, which he encountered while visiting Paris. Some of Masle's typical subjects are Dubrovnik interiors with the motif of a "picture in a picture", which he intensively painted in the later period from 1962 to 1967, achieving a rich coloristic harmony and silent, but intense communication of inanimate things. Simplification of form and stylization of shapes in Masle's paintings are equally the result of his artistic upbringing on the achievements of modern artistic directions and of his sensitive nature, playfulness close to children's imagination and a poetic experience of the world. Rozana Vojvoda Museum Advisor Art Gallery Dubrovnik