CROATIAN MODERN PAINTING 2004 - JEROLIM MIŠE, NOON IN SUPETAR, 1928

JEROLIM MIŠE (Split, 25/09/1890 – Split, 14/09/1970) (Noon in Supetar, 1928, oil on canvas: 66 x 58cm, Modern Gallery, Zagreb) Miše is an artist with a wide field of activity who could not be satisfied only with his painting and appearances at exhibitions, but who had, for more than six decades, continued to encourage and stimulate, enlightened and directed, and often found fault with the Croatian visual art production from the first half of the 20th century, criticizing its fashion-consciousness and false models. He was interesting both as a painter and a critic, giving enormous contribution to the modernizing of the painting expression and the building up of professional art critique and essay-writing. He was a master of excellent portraits, suggestive still lifes and unique landscapes of his native Dalmatia that are structured from studious deliberations of the domestic landscape, a superb metier and an authentic experience of the colouristic effects and the atmosphere of the chosen motif. He started his training of painting in Split, at the same builder-crafts school like Plančić, and then went first to the arts school in Zagreb to continue his training in Rome, like his fellow citizen Marino Tartaglia, to finally end up in Florence at the Accademia Internazionale. In Rome and Florence he was more interested in literature than in mastering the painter’s craft, he loved socializing at the avant-garde Roman bohemian circles and questioning the clash of the Viennese and pan-German secession with the Italian futurism and post-cubist return to order. His meeting with Meštrović in Rome and his frequent keeping company with the great sculptor had more influenced the young painter to turn to articulating his revolutionary tension and restoring his awareness to national feelings than his painter’s expression. In Miše’s painting from that period there can be found neither Jugendstil secessionist linearism nor heroic mythology. The motifs are simple, the content minimalist. In the whole course of his Italian period (1891 – 1914) he used to write critiques of exhibitions and reviews of the Italian contemporary visual arts scene for newspapers and journals at home. Even later, until the very end of his life, he continued to write and publish stimulating and problem articles from the area of visual art. On the eve of the First World War he returned to his country and his native Split where he organized his first independent exhibition (1914). In the course of the war he was conscripted, and after the war he spent a number of years doing pedagogical work in schools in the continental part of Croatia. Parallel to this he participated in the exhibitions of the Spring Salon with works now free from the Jugendstil tradition. Publishing sharp and interesting essays on contemporary production, he rather early built up a reputation of a lucid and well informed critic. At the Split exhibition in 1919 he was already a recognized painter of specific realistic portraits, acts of expressive forms and landscapes that would, as we shall see later, anticipate the period of magic realism and masterpieces from the twenties by which, as Ivanka Reberski writes, introduced the ideal of the euclidian order into Croatian modern painting. Since 1930 Miše worked and exhibited within the “Group of Three”, founded by Babić, Becić and Miše, that has for decades given a certain tone to Croatian painting based on their Parisian experience. For some they represented the guidelines, while the others found this a heavy burden, like a mill-stone round their neck, when it came to building up their own expression. Miše went to Paris for the first time in 1925 and this is, according to the painter himself, when his “reorientation” had started. On the occasion of the retrospective exhibition held in 1955 at the Zagreb Modern Gallery, he wrote for the Bulletin of the Institute of Fine Arts: Many works account for my own failures. It suffices to mention that I started with the Secession and I was already thirty-two when I came into contact with van Gogh, Renoir and Cézanne. In 1928, for the first time he spent a longer period in Supetar on the island of Brač where he painted a series of panoramas of the small Dalmatian town with its empty streets at the time of the summer heat and also a number of quaint landscapes that are not seascapes in the classical sense of the word, but colouristic expressive frames of fir tree woods painted with intention to make a synthesis of Cézanne’s and Renoir’s painting principles. The marvellous painting of a small street in Supetar at the time of height of the sun, called Noon in Supetar, is the most obvious example of the dichotomy of Miše’s painting principle that Igor Zidić wrote about in the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition from the year 1990. He wrote that the dichotomy was based on the opposition of several contradictory structures: the rational and emotional, structural and descriptive, Apollonian and Dionysian... In this necessarily short review of Miše’s opus what only remains is to conclude that the dichotomy of his painting procedure is the sign of freedom of the painter who neither gives up his immediate inspiration, nor agrees to a style that would be a stylization or mannerism, even at the price of losing the epithet of a progressive painter.