oil on board, 33 x 37 cm, signed at the bottom left, in red, "Job"

Research information

Published in the monograph of Grga Gamulin, under catalogue number 151, as according to Gamulin, the work "In the Studio" was exhibited at the retrospective exhibition of Ignjat Job in 1937 in the Galić Gallery in Split. Previous owners Marko and Tomo Polić also owned two other works of Ignjat Job, "Old Olive on the Coast" (1929 - 1930), and "Children's Games" (1930 - 1931), which they also bought directly from the author. The latter work was exhibited at the retrospective exhibition in the Galić gallery, under number 37 (Milan Ivanišević, "Paintings of Ignjat Job in Split and Bol" in: "Cultural Heritage", vol. 20/28-29, Society of Friends of Cultural Heritage Split, Split, 1997., pp. 113 - 132)

PROVENANCE

Historical collection of Dr. Marko Polić, Osijek.

The painting is cataloged under number 151 in the monograph "JOB" by the text-writer Grag Gamulin, on pages 66 and 173, MH, Zagreb, 1961. It was first exhibited at a posthumous exhibition of the painter's works in the Galić Salon in Split, from July 9 to 24, 1937. This rarity of a work of the great painter Ignjat Job, one of the greatest in Croatian painting of the first half of the 20th century, was created in Split in the painter's studio where he lived for a year; from autumn 1933 to autumn 1934. During these, conditionally speaking, twelve months in Split, the painter spent little time in the city under Marjan. In May 1934, he traveled to Zagreb for an exhibition appearance with the group of Zagreb artists in the Art Pavilion, then he spent the whole of July and August in Komiža on the island of Vis, where a first-class cycle of hot-colored landscapes was created. In addition, he found himself in Belgrade in late autumn of the same year and exhibited with the group "Form" in Pag, and already in March 1935, he moved to Zagreb. It was a return to the city of his painting beginnings, guided by the desire to finish his painting studies at the Academy, which was abruptly interrupted in the fifth semester (1920). But even then he didn't rest, but drew painting stimuli in Supetar on Brač, where from June to November 1935, he painted his last Supetar cycle of paintings. Famous for his splendid landscapes of exceptional expressionistic charge, Job painted an intimate scene in the painting In the Studio in the middle of which - on an ottoman sits - his naked female companion Ksenija Bradanović, and not some professional model. Indeed, this is a rarity in the oeuvre of this restless, globetrotter painter who had already experienced the Scylla and Charybdis of painting and life situations and experiences. The reason, or perhaps just the occasion, for the creation of this intimistic work with a female act, sensitively painted in a rather innocent than sensual position, the painter's monographer Grgo Gamulin, finds in the fact that the artist in the mid-1930s was experiencing a family crisis caused by divorce from his wife Živka (born Cvetković) which shook his already always disturbed soul and the loss of balance reflected in his art. Regardless of such a characterization of Job's paintings created in Split during 1934 by Gamulin, we must emphasize that this painting demonstrates the painter's masterly composing of a pure and simple scene, his persistent coloristic power that radiates the ottoman cover, the refined matter with which he evoked the atmosphere of a modest atelier, and finally a brilliant concentration on witnessing his own life and painterly truth that newly awakened love and feelings stimulated the creation of a small painting of exceptional importance and top qualities in the oeuvre of Ignjat Job. BRP

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