Painter Ivan Žabota (1877‒1939) was born in the
hamlet of Podgradje near Ljutomer and grew up among the vineyards of Prlekija together
with his mother Magdalena, a vineyard labourer, and his brother Alojz. As a young
boy, he served as a herder to well-off farmers, and he enjoyed drawing cows,
horses and other animals already at that time. His talent was early recognized
by the craftsmen and bigwigs of Ljutomer, who then made it possible for him to go
to school to Graz, Austria. He attended a secondary modern school for one year
and the provincial drawing school for two years.
Between 1901‒1907, Žabota studied by turns at
the Academies of Fine Arts in Vienna under professors Christian Griepenkerl,
Kazimir Pochwalski and Siegmund L'Allemand, and in Prague under professors
Franz Thiele and František Ženíšek. From 1911 on he lived in Vienna, in
1915‒1917 he was staying in Budapest, and from then onwards in various places
in Slovakia. In 1921 he finally settled in Bratislava which came to be his
second home. He continued his career there, among Slovak artists, and gained
recognition mainly for his portraits of numerous well-known persons. His
portrait of the poet Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav (1921) became the model image for
the visual perception of the poet's look and it helped Žabota to enter the national
consciousness of the Slovaks. Painting distinctly ethnically tuned genre
scenes, he had a prominent place in Slovak fine arts as well as in the Slovak
cultural life in general in the period between the two wars. He was also among
the founders of the Slovak Artists’ Association and later acted as president of
its painting section.
Žabota was an expressly figure painter,
although he also painted landscapes, endowed with a typically romantic atmosphere.
In terms of style, he initially kept to academic realism, relying also on his
experiences with light effects, not neglecting plein air freshness. He often resorted
to Secessionist moods and to Intimism (e.g. Tea
Party, 1902; Evening in the Student Room,
1905), but he later succumbed to idealistic aesthetics and sweetness. The
painting Tea Party is from his time
as a student: it features the literary historian and translator Dr. Fran Vidic,
his patron at the time, his wife Milica, and two other visitors. In the same
year, i.e. 1902, Žabota for the first time visited Slovakia, where his brother
Alojz, a prominent cabinetmaker and woodcarver, was living after his marriage.
The painter was captivated at once by southern Slovakia, as it reminded him of
his native Slovenske gorice countryside. At this time, he produced the paintingThe Old Ones, featuring a group of
Slovak elderly men in a pub that won him the so-called Professorenpreis, a cash prize of 500 florins. That same year he
also made acquaintance of the author Ivan Cankar and was commissioned by the
publisher Lavoslav Schwentner to furnish the second edition of Cankar’s Erotika (Erotica) collection of poems with decorative designs. Žabota drew
Art Nouveau vignettes featuring beautiful female images in medallions made up
of tendrils. Schwentner reused the same vignettes for the collection of poems by
Josip Murn, Pesmi in romance (Poems and Romances).
Žabota’s oeuvre also encompasses numerous
portraits of his Slovenian fellow countrymen, including the patriots Fran
Rosina and Ivan Dečko as well as the historian, ethnologist, anthropologist,
prehistory archaeologist, palaeontologist, and politician Niko Zupanič. The two
met while they were students in Vienna, and Zupanič invited Žabota to make
illustrations for the journal Jug.
Žabota also spent his holidays twice at the Zupanič family’s home in Bela
krajina (White Carniola).
The National Gallery of Slovenia’s archive houses
a record of the occasion when Žabota found his subject matter for the painting Evening in the Student Room. The document
was provided to the Gallery in 1951 by Dr. Davorin Senjor, one of the characters
featuring in the picture. The scene takes place in Senjor’s student room in
Prague, where he was studying law. On the eve on November 11, 1905, three
guests called on for Martinmas feast – painter Žabota, his colleague painter
Peter Žmitek, and Stanko Svetek. Žabota found this occasional party attractive
enough to decide to paint it. He left himself out of the scene but positioned
Žmitek, busily engaged making tea, in the far end of the room. The two painters
both studied in Prague. Žmitek's diaries inform us that they spent time
together, helped each other financially, attended choir rehearsals at the
Illyria (Ilirija) Society, etc. Whenever Žabota visited Žmitek at his home, the
latter always served him Russian tea. Žmitek mastered tea brewing to
perfection, serving the beverage to everyone, also to Zofka Kveder, whose books
Slovenian students would read along with France Prešeren’s Poezije (Book of Poetry),
Ivan Cankar’s dramas, etc. In the picture, Žmitek, with his tea skills and
sobriety, is a rather insignificant figure; in contrast, a table lamp casts
intense light on the laughing face of Stanko Svetek, a lawyer-to-be and a later
judge of the district court in Zagreb, sitting in the foreground as the central
figure of the scene, with a bottle of wine and several glasses on the table in
front of him. As a kind of a shadow silhouette to the left of him, the future lawyer
Davorin Senjor is seen, with his back to the viewer. He was a pioneer of mountaineering
in Slovenian Styria, the head of the Maribor
Branch of Slovenian Mountaineering Society, initiator and moving spirit in
establishing several mountain huts, among others the one on the Ribniško
Pohorje, where an up-to-date mountain hut was then named after him – the Senjor
Lodge (1932, burnt down in 1942).
Interesting also proves to be the provenance of
the painting: Žabota donated it to the one-time Styrian Provincial Council in
Graz to express his thanks for having been given a certain grant. The Council subsequently
donated the painting to the then provincial councillor, Slovenian provincial
deputy and school inspector Dr. Franc Robič, who in turn gave it as a present
to his daughter, Marija. She was married to Dr. Milan Gorišek, a Slovene
patriot, the Mayor of Lenart, and leader of the local branch of the Sokol gym movement.
In 1951, the painting was purchased by the National Gallery of Slovenia for its
collection.