152. House Among Sunflowers [1921.]

Becić's signature in the lower left corner of this view with a suburban, perhaps a rural house of wealthy hosts - surrounded by a garden where sunflowers stand out - indicates that the painting was created in the post-war year 1921. For a painter from a wealthy Slavonian family - who during scholastic cruises across Europe from Zagreb and Pest to Munich and Paris experienced the benefits from the table of modern painting and who during the Great War undertook the dangerous task of a reporter from the battlefield for French newspapers and barely found his wife Ljubica (b. Jokanović) after the war in Rome - that year 1921 was fraught with existential trials, but also providential in terms of new creative breakthroughs. Upon returning from Paris, he briefly stayed in Belgrade and in 1919 - on the estate of his wife's parents in Blažuj above Sarajevo - he built a house and studio made of wood. In the forested environment there, Becić, painting outdoors, until 1923 accomplished an ambitious cycle of landscape and figural scenes in a natural environment full of light, color, and chromatic-tonal harmonies. It's the realism of a painter with the powerful skill to sincerely and objectively effect the transfer of nature onto the canvas, in fact, pure painting of a master carried by a brilliant observational talent and an undeniably secure, but broad paintbrush strokes. A beautiful example of such his pure painting is the here exhibited ''House Among Sunflowers''. Without losing contact with Zagreb - where his painting education began in the private school of Crnčić and Račić (1904.) and where he held his first solo exhibition (Salon Ullrich, 1910.), Becić continued to send his paintings to Zagreb for exhibitions after the war. Particularly noticed were two solo exhibitions he prepared in Salon Ullrich in 1921 and 1922 in which he mostly exhibited landscapes from Blažuj. How successfully and with what regard his painting presented at the aforementioned exhibitions was received speaks to the fact that Vladimir Becić in 1923 was invited to take the position of painting professor at the Art Academy in Zagreb. From then on in his opus, landscapes from Blažuj would alternate with views of Zagreb, paintings of blooming orchards of Šestine and landscapes from Dalmatia, of which he was a regular guest during the free summer months as long as he could paint. BRP

Dimensions

width 45 cm, height 44.5 cm

Description

oil on canvas, signed and dated lower left, in black, '' V. Becić (1)921''

Dating

1921.

PROVENANCE

historical Osijek collection

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