From Shadow into Light

The Sketchbooks of Ivana Kobilca (1861–1926) were donated to the National Gallery of Slovenia by Mrs Tatjana Pintar and have never before been presented in public. They yield insight into how the best known Slovenian woman painter tackled her work and creative deliberation. Her volumes of sketches originate from three periods of her creative life: the first and the second fall into her training years in Munich and trips to Gorenjska region (Upper Carniola), when she also collaborated with Ferdo Vesel (1861–1946) and was preparing to start exhibiting abroad and was engaged in arrangements for a solo show in her native Ljubljana in 1889. Three volumes are from her Sarajevo years, when she delved into the faces and images of Bosnian ethnicities and made preparations for the monumental painting Slovenia Pays Tribute to Ljubljana, intended for the Ljubljana Town Hal and completed in 1903. The last and the least extensive sketchbook dates from around 1911, from her Berlin sojourn, the last international station of her career as an artist.

Along with studies in other media, we can observe Kobilca’s approach to painting in the current exhibition. She made use of drawings in graphite and charcoal for the study of the basic underdrawings over which she then could paint, and for the research into faces, details of costumes and arms. She used photographic studies for the construction of composition and placing figures in space. Oil studies enhanced images of shades with colour and tone transitions and contrasts, which is with one of the principal domains of painting. The exhibition thus features the intertwinement of Renaissance practices that persisted in the studies at academies and the new technology that made the preparatory work for painting easier and faster for the realists, and was particularly important for female artists who were denied study at the academy or drawing nudes from life.

After a shorter stay in Vienna, Ivana Kobilca spent the 1880s in Munich, where she modelled her manner of executing paintings and constructing compositions on both her teacher Alois Erdtelt (1851–1911), the owner of a private painting school, and Wilhelm Leibl (1844–1900), who with his simple but tectonic designs strongly influenced Kobilca’s perseverance with pyramidal compositions. Photographic studies, that have to be differentiated from art photography, had been employed already in the works of one or two generations of older artists, including Kobilca’s model painters and colleagues who used photography for jotting down their own works, trying out ideas, and for sale. In designing monumental compositions, both sacred and secular, the example of the Šubic brothers, painters Janez (1850–1889) and Jurij (1855–1890), has to be considered and, naturally, also the painter and president of the French Secession, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898).

The exhibition also features fourteen oil paintings by Ivana Kobilca and several digital reproductions of her photographic studies. Along with her six sketchbooks and the volume from her youth, also two paintings from private property are displayed for the first timeas well as two paintings purchased by the National Gallery of Slovenia in Western Europe and whose authenticity was, besides other examinations, corroborated just through the surviving sketches.