CROATIAN MODERN PAINTING 2003 - JOSIP RAČIĆ, «PONT DES ARTS», 1908

The stamps have been issued in 6-stamp sheetlets, and there is also the commemorative First Day Cover (FDC). The Paris panorama of the bridge that connects the banks of the Seine, painted by Josip Račić, in the place dedicated to French and world art (Musee du Louvre and Institute de France), is the boundary line of Croatian modern painting, the cause and motive of the Parisian orientation of a large number of our painters from the first half of the 20th century and a unique proof of the birth of the Croatian Painting Modernism. This painting, raised to the level of a myth, inspired numerous art reviewers to write hundreds of pages on its enormous influence upon the overall Croatian painting and, according to the opinion of many, a demonic significance for the destiny of its author – the young man from Horvati, from a small backwater and muddy village pub who had kept desperately and so bravely fighting throughout his short life. Since the time of the first permanent layout of the Zagreb Modern Gallery (1918), when Ljubo Babić, including the works of Račić and Kraljević, revealed to the Croatian public the works of the early deceased painters (ten years after Račić died and five years following Kraljević’s death), and also determined the initiation of new painting in this country, ever since that time the adoration of many going on when standing before Račić’s painting continues. Vladimir Becić, a colleague of Račić from the Munich study years and his companion manque to roam along the Paris boulevards (he arrived in Paris shortly after Račić’s death), while giving a lecture in 1935, on the occasion of the exhibition ’100 years of Croatian Art’, strengthened the high opinion of the art professionals concerning Račić’s Parisian works and their significance for the birth of our modern visual expression. Painted in 1908, when Račić was only 23 years old (he was born on March 22, 1885), the painting of the bridge with the misty image of a «clochard», represented for many the announcement of the artist’s end in the merciless environment of the French painting metropolis. Living in permanently strained circumstances, without support from his home country, Račić lost the battle. Many pages of speculations and doubts concerning his death have been written, and the only fact that can be determined is that the unhappy young man committed suicide on June 19, 1908, having fired a shot through his head in a third-class Paris hotel. Growing up in a family of rather strained means, Račić started working and earning his living at the age of thirteen in the Zagreb lithographic workshop of Vladimir Rožankovski. Owing to this first contact with decorative art, his talent became awakened and soon he moved from lithographic apprentice to an ambitious student of the school of painting of Antun Ažbe in Munich. His wish for a better artistic education and financial need took Račić to Berlin where he worked in the lithographic printing house «Bong». Having earned enough money for a veritable course of painting studies, he returned to Munich and enrolled as a student at the Art Academy in 1905. Many pages were written about Račić’s rebellious student days, his clash with Professor Hugo von Habermann and about the gathering of compatriots and like-minded painters, whom the Germans laconically named «Croatische Schule». Račić, being the most outstanding representative of the Croatian Munich circle fought against the backward syllabus of the Academy and the historic painting and its pathos. Serious and by no means a bonvivant (he had neither money nor experience for such a thing), he was a great supporter of the painting method of observation – condensing what has been seen to its very essence – and the pictorial modelling. His desire for pure painting and real art – without the decorative servility of the Secession – made Račić leave for Paris in February 1908. In less than three months there, he painted several figurative compositions, anthological water colours of Parisian panoramas and his unsurpassable PONT DES ARTS. In Paris he found the source from where to meet the contemporary French art which, in his letter home, he referred to as being ahead of all other nations. He was enthusiastic about Goya’s canvases in the Louvre and his mastership in painting the blackness, but he was also drawn by the light of the late impressionists, their painting of visual phenomena and the subjective interpretation of the observed landscape. Being a pronounced individualist, he reconciled the adopted procedure of Manet and the postimpressionists into his personal painting poetics. He would choose and paint that particular scene of a city panorama that was in harmony with the subjective feeling of the experienced. The psychological interpretation of the motif was for him first in rank, and the optical sensations of the impressionists or the blazing colours of the fauvists never attracted him, neither did he have a tendency for such painting. Along with the superior command of the technique, accumulated mature painting handwriting and the acquired realistic approach, it is obvious the Munich academy, i.e. its «drill» of concise tone and ranking of the volume modelling, and finally the tone painting of our Munich circle, all these have posed upon Račić a too heavy stamp which the young man could not get rid of.