CROATIAN VISUAL ART - BAKIC

Vojin Bakić, The Bull, 1956, plaster The work of the sculptor Vojin Bakić covers one of the most interesting, revolutionary periods in Croatian art and presents also a very important link to acquiring freedom of creation within South-Slavic cultural space and to reaching authentic modernist achievements at European scale. Born 1915 in Bjelovar, Bakić took his degree in 1938 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in the class of Robert Frangeš-Mihanović, and started his specialisation with Ivan Meštrović in 1940 and during the Second World War period in the workshop of Fran Kršinić. As an exceptionally talented beginner, he presented himself with a series of subtle female nudes - summarily modelled and softly shaped volumes, to some extent similar to the art of Kršinić. In the first after war years (1945 – 1949) he is engaged on several monument compositions of great dramatic power and already about 1950 starts with strict summarising, reduction to the essential, removal of all descriptive, decorative and strictly mimetic. With his radical reduction and strictness Bakić comes close to geometric artistic directions ('New Tendencies, 1961), but never transits into the dryness of the program or loses interest for organic and biomorphic incentives. The sculpture of Bull, made in several versions, is an exceptionally mature and definitive result of a systematic filtering and autonomy of sculptural expression. Still as student, Bakić made animalistic figures; in1950 he had his work - a realistically modelled statue of the bull - exposed at the Venice Biennale and in 1956 at the same international exhibition he presented himself with a completely new variance of the same motif - a work which rightfully attracted attention and became recognised in the country and abroad as an example of sculptural synthesis and attained power of modelling. Indeed, a heavy mass residing on small conic projections („legs“) gives an impression of hovering, due to its smoothness and a melodic contour of surface area and collects and emphasises its energy in a gently separated suggestion of head, especially through the top frontal points („horns“) through which it seems to expand a compressed inner span of shape. Vojin Bakić died on 18 December 1992. Tonko Maroević