33. Marina (Diptych) [1915.]

The great marine painter Menci Cl. Crnčić, whose commemorative plaque above Hreljin above Bakar Bay reads: ... WHO WITH HIS BRUSH COPIED MANY BEAUTIES OF CROATIAN PRIMORJE FROM THE PAST ... ., from 1913. spent all summer holidays in Novi Vinodolski, in his villa built on the coast. There he loved to paint and work with his students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he led a painting and graphic class for more than three decades. These summer "holidays" for the painter and his students often included painting "pilgrimages" to Učka where the students practiced panoramic composition of landscapes while professor Crnčić painted his famous vistas from Plasa. After working with students, he would usually descend to the coast and paint the sea, bays with lush vegetation, and often kvarner tuners with a view of St. Mark's reef. This diptych is an example of a classic Crnčić motif that captures Mediterranean vegetation and three tuners from which observers must watch the sea of the Kvarner bay to notice a school of tuna. Colour is once again subordinate to the content: the spread is pasty and almost pointillistic sparkly in the vegetation zone, and thin and calmer with brush movements applied in the sea surface zone. The exceptional balance of details and the whole on both wings of this marine is its special feature. As an excellent landscaper and sensitive observer of nature, Menci Cl. Crnčić easily recorded the peculiarities of our regions, mainly the Croatian Primorje and also Dalmatia, often varying the same theme on a always two-layer realistic-impressionistic expression level. Crnčić's close connection with the coastal landscape during the first two decades of the 20th century resulted in a series of paintings of pronounced colouristic ranges, at the same time subtle tonal peaks that earned him the epithet not only of one of the initiators of modern Croatian landscape painting, but also the inviolable value of Croatian fine art in the first half of the 20th century. His passionate dealing with maritime motifs would suggest that he was a coastal child. But Crnčić was born in Bruck an der Mur as the son of a border officer, a native of Slavonia. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1882 to 1884 and then continued in Munich at the local academy from 1889 to 1892. Upon returning from his studies, Crnčić met Izidor Kršnjavi, who noticed his drawing skills and enabled him to study graphic techniques in Vienna with a scholarship at the great German graphic artist William Unger. The immense graphic opus of Crnčić, who was an innovative artist in the black-and-white medium, testifies to the excellence gained in this field. BRP

Dimensions

custom 54 x 31 cm; 53 x 38 cm

Description

ulje na platnu, signed lower left, in brown, "M.Cl. Crnčić"; signed lower right, in brown, "M.Cl. Crnčić"

Dating

1915.

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