CROATIAN MODERN PAINTING 2007 - FERDINAND KULMER (1925 – 1998)

Ferdinand Kulmer (1925 – 1998) One of the most charismatic and remarkable of the 20th century Croatian artists is undoubtedly the painter Ferdinand Kulmer (born in Cap Martin, France, on January 29, 1925 and died in Zagreb on November 11, 1998). Frequent style-motif changes, “manuscript in permanent movement” (cit. G Xuriguera) in the past often baffled the interpreters of his opus, but nowadays it is doubtless that this phenomenon is the consequence of the ingenious and lucid vitalism and not barely a signal/ for an artist in high spirits who cannot stop in one place. Kulmer’s childhood marked by frequent voyages with his parents all across the world deeply engraved sufficient pictures and impressions in the painter’s mental treasury for his later artistic activity. In 1942 he enrolled the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest; in 1945 he returned to Zagreb and in 1946 continued his studies in the classes of Omer Mujadžić and Đuro Tiljak. In 1950 he graduated in painting after having also joined the special class with Đuro Tiljak. He then became collaborator in the Master class workshop of Krsto Hegedušić. Since that time Kulmer’s virtuosic advancement and maturing had started that would in the fifties be marked by the phase of Fauvism (Matisse, Dufy), and the inclination abstraction and the enthusiasm with the matter and the Art Informel at the turn into the sixties. In 1961 he was made assistant to Krsto Hegedušić, teaching the drawing of nudes at the Academy of Fine Arts; he exhibited a lot in Europe (Paris, London, Vienna, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Hungary), and in 1969 he became member of the gallery “Forum” in Zagreb. After the phase of calligraphy in the second half of the sixties, in the first half of the 1970s he started his famous zigzag phase of vehement colourist features that was going to last until the year 1983, parallel to the neo-expressionist and post-cubist dissenting ideas and heraldic and animal images. In 1980 he was made collaborator of the then Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (since 1988 associate member), and in his painting he intensified the cycle of pictures of mythological and heraldic contents in the manner of the current post-modern return to the mannerist stylization. The myth about Kulmer as a painter of superior quality can be recognized and substantiated by the younger generations of painters and art historians because being unencumbered by the past we can identify how Kulmer’s opus – in certain segments greatly before his time – harmoniously fits into the recent tendencies of world painting. One of such timeless works is definitely the big composition Pegasus’s Garden whose creation would be difficult to classify according to the elements of style, had the painter himself not written down the year of painting it. The rough texture of the picture clearly announces the reverberation of the Art Informel treatment of matter, while the dramatic feature of the composition and the stylization of the action speak in favour of the neo-expressionist revival. What we could do is list all the possible metaphoric and symbolic interpretations of the animal images in the picture, but what seems more important is the pointing out of the existential anxiety of the artist who, instead of painting the human image turns to the animal paradise and to mythological creatures. Never running from the alluvia of the history of painting, in his Pegasus’s Garden Kulmer simultaneously returned to the Palaeolithic scraping of crude signs and thus gave a significant provision to the younger generation of Croatian painters who have been currently arriving at the visual arts scene.