oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, 51 x 40 cm, signed lower right, in black, "V Varlaj"

Research information

The work was exhibited at the retrospective in the Art Pavilion in Zagreb, XII. 1992 - II. 1993, catalogued and reproduced on page 120, catalogue no. 125, under the title "Flowers".

Varlaj's painting of spring daffodils was exhibited at a retrospective of his works at the Art Pavilion in Zagreb in 1992. It was cataloged under the number 125 and reproduced on page 120 of the accompanying exhibition catalog under the title "Flowers". The exhibition was prepared by academician Tonko Maroević and the Pavilion director Lea Ukrainčik, who in her introductory speech emphasized that it had just been completed: More than seventy years since Varlaj's brilliant time at the Spring Salon, and exactly thirty years since the death of this great Croatian painter, without a retrospective exhibition being set up of his body of work, clear and unique in its interpretation of nature and tonal construction of forms. In the work of Vladimir Varlaj, "Daffodils in a Vase" belong to the period in which the painter's creative will and fervent motivo preference for landscapes were hampered by a long illness. Preference for landscapes, both continental and costal, was prevalent up until the 30s of the last century, and he painted them all with the potential of Arcadian poetry. It should be mentioned that during his most productive creative period (1920-1930), Varlaj only painted a few still lifes, and even fewer of flowers. He only turned to this traditional motive to a greater extent after the 40s when illness confined him to his apartment in Zagreb. Years immobile and devoid of landscape inspiration, he surrounded himself with flowers and objects such as books, hexagonal vases, pitchers and bowls on which he could best show the desired firmness of the object skin, the crisp sharpness of their edges or the roundness of volumes and dispersal of light on affectionately adopted objects of his recent painterly reality. In the anthology of Croatian painting of the 20th century, Vladimir Varlaj earned a high place as one of the most significant Croatian visual artists between the two World Wars, who with a series of his first-rate paintings stood alongside the European protagonists of magic realism. BRP

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