CROATIAN MODERN PAINTING 2004 - JURAJ PLANČIĆ, PARISIAN SUBURB, 1930

JURAJ PLANČIĆ (Stari Grad, 22/10/1899 – Paris, 19/08/1930) (Parisian suburb, 1930, oil on canvas; 38 x 46cm, Modern Gallery, Zagreb) The uniqueness of Plančić’s expression in painting, i.e. the wondrous distinction of his opus generated in the Paris finale, which differs diametrically from his beginnings in Split and the domestic painting tradition of the first half of the 20th century, launched him as an artist to mythical dimensions of the rare ones who have reached the veritable harmony of inspiration, the painter’s handwriting and personal deliberation of modern means of expression. Winter in Paris, the years 1927/1928, came upon our painter like a bolt from the blue. Slightly advanced in age for a postgraduate, he arrived in Paris for upgrading, with what we could say naive eyes and paintbrush. On his way as painter from Stari Grad on the island of Hvar, via Split and Zagreb, all the way to Paris, there were no other stops or international meetings. The world mecca of painters met him in its most colourful form. Many-fold avant-garde streamings have already rumbled through the French and European visual arts scene. Among the international assemblage of painters – naturalized Frenchmen – some of them looked for stimulation in the past of non-European civilizations: the African, Polynesian or Aztec art, others tended to a return to the French artistic past, the painting of Manet, Courbet or Watteau. Having arrived with sound painting provisions of the Zagreb artistic school, characterized in the twenties of the last century by the realistic expression with classic and magic signs, Plančić was looking at the varied visual art scene of Paris with surprise. He got to know the ornate and decorative concepts of Nabis and the already weary “wild” colouristic effects of the fauvists, got enraptured by the art of the gallant 17th century and learned from the works of the old masters in the Louvre. As he was readier for the more moderate trend of French modern art than its final consequences, Plančić found the independents and their nostalgic return to the European artistic past nearer to his heart in this painters’ ant-hill. The open and unrestrained École de Paris with its return to nature represented a treasury for Plančić to choose from, majestically adopt and build upon his inherited erotic and poetic sensuality, close to his Mediterranean origin and inherited from the French art. The life story of Juraj Plančić and his painter’s opus are marvellous, not only for the speed of the author’s transformation from a poor islander and fisherman’s son to an intellectual of francophone culture and a citizen of Paris, but also on account of the painter’s unyielding break through from the provincial restraint to the European openness and success in the centre of the artistic world at that time. Since the times of Vlaho Bukovac and Miroslav Kraljević there has been no Croatian painter in Paris who had gained such success and attracted the attention of the public as Plančić did in only two years marked by his exhibitions. From the original and simple Mediterranean motives, tonal painting and classic realism of his pre-Paris opus that he succeeded to exhibit in Zagreb only partially (the exhibition of the Ullrich Salon in 1927), in Paris he turned into a painter of live joyousness whose scenes had nothing in common with the former restraint and whose pictures attracted with their quivering lines and yellow light that plate with gold the architecture of the painting. As we think nowadays, the pictures exhibited at the autumn and spring salons, and especially his one-man exhibition in the Galerie de Seine (1930), attracted the attention both of the critics and the public. The gracefulness and beauty of Plančić’s “mise en scene”, the constructive power of his drawing and the distinction of his colouristic effects conquered then and continue to conquer us today with the genuine symbiosis of modern expression and romantic inspiration. In a painting crescendo in the course of the years 1929 and 1930, Plančić painted, starting with the isolation in the village of Rosny sous Bois, and later in the picturesque surroundings of the Parisian suburb, oil paintings of sharpened colouristic harmonies with dazzling and bright surfaces. All these paintings are masterpieces of painting among which Parisian Suburb takes a special place. It is a typical scene of Plančić’s, with an intimate atmosphere and delicate lighting that turns a yard at the edge of a metropolis into a personal homage to the village nature. In Zagreb, after the closing of the posthumous exhibition of Plančić’s paintings at the Ullrich Salon in 1931 the Gallery Board of the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences held a meeting, when on January 17, 1932 they had a short and successful discussion about the buying off of this painting for the Modern Gallery. It was fortunate that the academicians of that time had enough money to buy off the painting from the widow, Tonica Plančić. Otherwise, Croatian modern painting heritage would have been deprived of a work of art that continued attracting the attention and delight of the public at all representative state exhibitions in the course of the last century, from the Venice Biennale in 1942, the exhibitions of Croatian modern art in Berlin, Vienna and Pressburg in 1943, St.Petersburg in 1947, Warsaw and Krakow in 1948, New York in 1966, and Paris in 1985.