57. Female Nude [1911.]

Painter Vanka was born in Zagreb, but grew up in the countryside, in Croatian Zagorje, which is worth emphasizing that it always inspired him for creative work. He lived in Kupljenovo near Pušća Bistra until high school and that rural landscape and milieu with its crosses and gingerbread cookies in houses permanently marked him. He began his painting education in Zagreb, at Čikoš's school, where he solidly mastered drawing and artistic storytelling. From Zagreb he left for Brussels to the local Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1910 and graduated with excellent success in the prescribed period. To understand the stylistic and morphological difference between this Study of a Seated Female Nude from 1911 and later Vanka's works, which show an evident influence of studied Spanish painters of ethnographic motifs (Ignacio Zuloaga), it should be emphasized that at the Belgian Academy at his time it was taught to paint shady with earth colors, a brown tone of old Flemish masters was forced and insisted on precise modeling of forms. Maximilian Vanka is well known and highly recognized painter in our country primarily for his large and brilliant compositions of national fervor and folk motifs and for experienced portraits of an expressionist sign. In painting Zagorje landscapes and Korčula marinas, he liked to use watercolor and pastel colors with which he knew how to capture the light of the chosen landscape like few plein air painters of the so-called Parisian painting education. At the retrospective of his work in Klovićevi dvori Gallery (2002), his works from the 1920s of the last century clearly testified to this. BRP

Dimensions

width 41 cm, height 59 cm

Description

pastel on paper, signed and dated lower right, in black, "Vanka (1)911"

Dating

1911.

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