CROATIAN MODERN PAINTING 2003 - SLAVKO KOPAČ, ’FLOWER GIRL II’, 1973

The stamps have been issued in 6-stamp sheetlets, and there is also the commemorative First Day Cover (FDC). Slavko Kopač was born in Vinkovci on August 21, 1913. He completed his elementary and secondary education in his home town where he also started his training in painting within the framework of the high school class offered by his drawing teacher, Vinko Pajalić. This graduate painter was in service in Vinkovci from 1926 to 1941 and, in many respects, much credit goes to him for a number of several outstanding Croatian visual artists to have chosen the artistic profession. The generation of Slavko Kopač whom Pajalić taught artistic expression also included Branko Ružić, Vanja Radauš, Rudolf Sabljić and Albert Kinert. Slavko Kopač was linked to his Slavonian native place by unbroken ties, from his first attempts at painting in his high-school days to the very end of his life. To quote him: all his life Slavonia with its accent was present in his speech, and he felt its dust underneath his feet. The best proof of Kopač’s unbroken ties to his native region are the two donations of pictures to the City Museum Vinkovci, the one from the year 1987 (18 paintings) and the one donated this year (20 paintings). The latter was presented by his widow, Paulette Kovač, who has executed the painter’s last will. In 1933 he began his study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of Professor Vladimir Becić. As early as 1938 he had his one-man exhibition in the Ulrich Salon. In the winter of the same year Kopač was invited to participate in the great exhibition ’Half a Century of Croatian Art’. The reviewers noticed his unusual talent and praised his paintings. Owing to the success, at the end of 1939 he received a scholarship from the French government to enhance his studies in Paris. Arriving in the capital of modern painting of that time, Kopač struck up friendship with the Croatian painter Leo Junek who gave him great support and became the crucial link for him to help him keep pace with the contemporary trends in multicultural Paris. In that way Kopač’s metamorphosis could begin, as a matter of fact it was fast and painless. In September 1940 he returned to his home country and was sent to teach at the gymnasium in Mostar. His restless spirit, eager for real painting challenges, could not remain in this provincial milieu for more than a year. He returned to Zagreb and took over teaching at the second classical gymnasium. He participated at the First and Second Exhibition of artists in the Art Pavilion, where he exhibited works that have been painted during his stay in Paris and Mostar, as well as panoramas of Zagreb. Despite the war, in 1943 he took unpaid leave and went to Florence. He spent five years there, moving in circles close to Parisian ones, painting and exhibiting his works. After having dealt with some passport problems, in 1948 Kopač left Italy and went to Paris, where he met and made friends with Jean Dubuffet. The acquaintance with the great French painter crucially determined the further work of our artist. In the 40s, 50s and 60s, Kopač intensely kept up painting, illustrating, giving form and style to poetry collections (i.e. Andre Breton’s collection). He was also ardently engaged in the promotion of ideas put forward by the «Art brut» group. The opus of the «Art brut» followers, led by the strong hand of Dubuffet, fought unrelentingly against the intellectual or musty art of stooges following obsequiously the pedagogical prejudices, revealed self-taught artists of varied provenance and promoted the idea that everyone, everyone indeed - even a mentally deranged person – could be an artist. It sufficed to have a greater dose of spontaneity, playful spirit and artistic instinct for a creative act. It was this immediate, intuitive and utterly non-calculating way of creating which attracted Kopač, and within the framework of the group he succeeded to realize his artistic expression marked by striking lyrical power. Less «brutality» - and more humour, less cynism – and more imagination and finally, less crude – and more serene and nostalgic scenes. Using his distinctive poetic drawing, bordering on the surrealist, together with his delicate usage of the palette, Kopač created collages whose goal was not deform or destroy the generally accepted notions of beauty, but reconsider and rearrange it into a new experience to the satisfaction of the viewer. The painting «THE FLOWERGIRL» is exactly such a work of art, painted at the time when Kopač returned to the human body as a motif (in the 70s of the previous century). It was the return to the nudes not crushed to vulnerability any more; they did not scream with pain but sang a joyful ode to the erotic and became seductive by the poetic desire itself. In the course of almost five decades of his activity in France, Kopač created a unique opus of «barbarically refined» art, receiving great/much acclaim for his work. For thirty-five years he acted as secretary to the «Art Brut» group and made friends with many surrealists with whom he also exhibited his works. In the gallery of the Paris City Council, a great, posthumous retrospective exhibition was organized in 1996. Besides the mentioned donation of paintings to his home town of Vinkovci, Zagreb also received a donation of 70 works painted in the period from 1948 to 1985, given for safe-keeping to the Klović Gallery. He died in Paris on November 23, 1995 and found his last resting place on the Montmartre cemetery.