FAMOUS CROATS 2013 - ANTONIJA KRASNIK

ANTONIJA KRASNIK (1874 – 1956)
 
Antonija Krasnik was born in Lovinac in 1874; in Croatian cultural history she takes a special place of the first Croatian woman applied artist and designer. However, her work has remained to date insufficiently researched and evaluated so that after a short but exceptionally successful period of her work and affirmation at European level she became a part of the stereotype of many women authors at the turn from 19th to 20th century, who were soon forgotten.
After her schooling in Zagreb and first lectures in art which she received from Bela Čikoš Sesija and Robert Frangeš Mihanović, she received scholarship at the recommendation of Iso Kršnjavi for the famous Viennese Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) where she studied in the class of Koloman Moser, one of the leading protagonists of art déco. After Vienna, she further practiced at the Paris Académie Julian (E. Carriére), and her career ended after marrying Baron Rudolf Sommarugu in 1907. Already during her schooling, she proved successful in various areas of creative expression, from painting and sculpturing to decorative shaping of objects in glass, metal and ceramics, in designing furniture, bijou, fabric, clothes and fashion accessories. Characteristic are her vases in irised glass, made after her drawings and by using the supreme technology of the Czech factory Johann Lötz Witwe, especially those of unusual shapes like owls, fishes or monkeys. Her inclination to ornaments with strong symbolic charge is also evident in the bijou, cigarette case and other objects of goldshmitry and jewelry with motifs of stylised insects. Apart from fashion accessories, she was also engaged in designing fabrics and clothes which she wore herself.
She participated at numerous exhibitions of decorative art in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, London, St. Louis, Torino and Paris and her works were published in the most prominent European journals for art and culture. Thus, a respectable English journal The Studio published in 1904 a supplement about her atelier, furnished to the last detail with furniture, decorative fabrics and objects she herself had designed. Independently of the medium, in all works by Antonija Krasnik evident is superior delicacy in shaping decorative objects and objects of use, which is an authentic expression of the spirit of time and style at the turn of the century, but above all a peculiar expression of her aesthetic sensibility. Antonija Krasnik died in 1956 in Zagreb.
 
                                                                                                                      Jasna Galjer