References

The guest book from Kirin's exhibition is kept by the heirs of the painter's legacy. Exhibition catalogue "Vladimir Kirin / Retrospective", Klovićevi dvori Gallery, Zagreb, 2006, pp. 83-84 (reproduction); p. 151 (catalogue description).

oil on canvas, 60 x 49 cm, signed bottom left, in black, "Kirin"

PROVENANCE

Historical collection of the Stjepan Radic family (1871 - 1928)

In the post-war 1940s, Vladimir Kirin withdrew from Zagreb to Samobor, where he yielded to his brush painting charge, hitherto suppressed by numerous drawing, printing, and trustee engagements before and during the Zagreb war years. Around the Samobor house and in his studio, he mainly painted landscapes and bouquets of field flowers, which he exhibited in 1956 at a solo exhibition in the Samobor Museum. He only sporadically continued to make his famous illustrations of literary works for which he gained world fame in pre-war times. We say sporadically, but we should say as much as was permitted by the then repressive social order, which in 1945 dissolved the editorial board of the Croatian Encyclopedia, where Kirin was a graphic editor, and at the same time fired him at the Academy, where he had been a regular professor of applied drawing. At the aforementioned exhibition in the Samobor Museum, among 54 Kirin's works, the picture Two Willows was also exhibited. About her virtues as well as the virtues of the other exhibited landscapes - freed from the narrative about old Zagreb - the testimony of the painter Cate Dujšin Ribar succinctly testifies in the book of impressions from the exhibition: What is beautiful, remains beautiful even if it is not "modern". It is worth mentioning that Kirin's drawing block from 1921 contained a series of drawing studies of characteristic Prisavsky willow trees and according to the story of the painter's daughter Neve Bandalović Kirin, "the willows wanted to be made in oil as soon as he finds time to paint, but there was only time in Samobor”. Only a couple of such drawings have been preserved by the lady and one Vrbik was exhibited at the retrospective of Kirin's opus held in the Klovićevi dvori Gallery (2006/2007). BRP

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