CROATIAN MODERN PAINTING 2004 - MIROSLAV KRALJEVIĆ, SELF-PORTRAIT, 1912

MIROSLAV KRALJEVIĆ (Gospić, 14/12/1885 – Zagreb, 16/04/1913) (Self-portrait, 1912, oil on canvas; 40 x 30cm, Modern Gallery, Zagreb) Miroslav Kraljević was one of the Croatian students at the Munich Academy whom Professor von Habermann used to call “Kroatische Schule”, while in the Croatian theory of fine arts they were referred to as the “Munich circle”, giving this generation of painters from the beginning of the 20th century a key role in the creation of Croatian modern painting. In addition to Kraljević we find here Josip Račić, Vladimir Becić, Oskar Hermann, even Nasta Rojc a few years later. Their creations after their return home, whether they had come from Paris or Munich, marked a decisive turn on the Croatian visual arts scene and a final deviation from the fin de siècle ornate style or the monumental features of secession. Born and grown up in a family of wealthy Slavonian noblemen, Kraljević attended the best schools since his early days and received instruction in drawing from excellent teachers. In the course of his two-year-long study of law in Vienna he regularly attended a painting course, so that the final choice of the painter’s profession (1906) of this extremely talented young man was a natural course for the family. In 1907 he enrolled the study of painting at the Munich Academy where he found the already mentioned painters Račić and Becić. Drawn together on account of the common resistance to the old-fashioned programme of the academy that continued in adhering to historicism and strict respecting of the tonal gradation of colours, the young men turned into an informal group standing out for their polemic discussions and a free was of painting assigned topics. After completing the study, Kraljević joined his family on account of his poor health and while there tried to recuperate in order to leave for Paris for improving his skill and a “veritable” painting course. He arrived in Paris in the autumn of the year 1911, and after some starting difficulties succeeded to get rid of the Grand Chaumière Academy timetable, found his own studio and started painting freed of every type of discipline. He exchanged the tonal gradation with contrasting, and the classical realistic expression gave way to the swelling wish for expressive forms, enlightened palette and immediate drawing. His excellent talent for drawing soon brought Kraljević to his first acknowledgements and a permanent engagement in the illustrated magazine Panurge. How difficult it was to break through in Paris in the course of the first decade of the 20th century and what it meant to succeed in the multitude of painters eager for affirmation – all this we can learn from Kraljević’s letter to his mother on the occasion of the publishing of his drawings from the theatre and café milieu: If you take into account that there are 40,000 living painters and sculptors in Paris coming from all over the world, and they all try hard and attempt to make their names public, to become known, then you can believe that such success for a Croat, and with a name no real Frenchman can pronounce correctly, (it always turns out as some ‘Kralževik’ or ‘Kralževiš’), is really great and momentous. In barely two years in Paris, Kraljević painted several anthological works of Croatian modern painting. His path led him from reminiscences of the plein-air impressionism, present in the oil paintings of the Luxembourg Park (1911 and 1912) and the adoption of Manet’s teaching on how to use ink, obvious in the Self-portraits with the dog and with the pipe (1910 and 1912) further to expressionism tinted with a powerful personality and a characteristic caricaturist feature on his acts and scenes from pubs, and to the extremely direct and impressive face-mask with hints of destruction of the whole bust on the Self-portrait from the end of the year 1912. His arrival in Zagreb in 1912, on account of participating at the exhibitions of Lado and the Croatian Artistic Association, and above all because of his first independent exhibition in the Ullrich Salon marks, unfortunately, the end of Kraljević’s painting. With his health seriously failing he could not return to Paris. After unsuccessful treatment in the sanatorium he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. Death has interrupted Kraljević in his most creative period of work and like in the case of Plančić made it impossible for us to get to know their final achievements. In the Zagreb Ullrich Salon a posthumous exhibition of Miroslav Kraljević’s works was held in 1913. Five years later, Ljubo Babić, then twenty-eight, included the works of Miroslav Kraljević in the permanent layout of the Modern Gallery, marking the beginning of the line of many followers who had, for decades, begun their painting explorations standing before Kraljević’s paintings.