31. Pillars [1928.-1931.]

Sergije Glumac moved to Belgrade with his parents in 1919. Alongside his high school education, he also attended the Beograd Art and Craft School where he received his first lessons in painting. From 1921 he lived in Zagreb, studied at the Art Academy and with two longer interruptions due to study stays in Paris, where he learned and worked in the studio of André Lhote, he graduated in painting in 1928 in the class of V. Becić. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he created his own unique artistic expression, particularly in graphic medium with which he became a key protagonist of contemporary cubist and constructivist aspirations on the Croatian art scene. In painting, he often tackled themes related to contemporary urban civilization. Many of his drawings executed in charcoal, graphite and dense applications of dark pastels carry the characteristics of expressionism with strong light contrasts, while on oil paintings on canvas, which are few in his opus, the spirit and tonal scale of magical realism, which was in the 1920s in Croatian painting, it was the leading style of the decade. The painting of the pillar from Zagreb's "little market", one of his rare paintings from the 1920s that are in circulation at all, is an exemplary example of the painter's early and sovereign adoption of the current visual idiom of magical realism. He achieved it with a bold composition of alienating expressiveness and a kind of identification with the thematic origin to which he turned more out of humane than critical incentives. An exhaustive insight into Glumac's graphic and scenographic heritage, and partly also into painting, was provided by the retrospective exhibition with more than two hundred of the painter's works organized by Dr. Sc. Lovorka Magaš Bilandžić and the Klovićevi dvori Gallery in 2022. Apart from revealing Glumac's rich and varied opus and visual language – until then almost completely unknown to the public – this exhibition pointed to the need for further research of the painter's opus and, given the significance of Glumac's contribution to cubism and realism in the twenties, the necessary redefinition of the history of artistic achievements in Croatia during the first half of the 20th. BRP

Dimensions

width 65 cm, height 95 cm

Description

oil on canvas, signed at the top right, in red, "S. GLUMAC"

Dating

1928.-1931.

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