The Gallery of Matica Srpska in Novi Sad is a national gallery with a long and complex history, that
inherits one of the richest collections of Serbian art of the modern period.
Founded in Budapest in 1847, transferred to Novi Sad in 1864 and opened to the
public in 1933, the Gallery actually set on its professional mission in 1958
after moving into a building of its own in which it has remained ever since.
Besides collecting, research, safekeeping and exhibiting one of its primary
assignments remains advance of international cooperation − presentation of
collections from abroad as well as promotion of Serbian art in other European
institutions.
Every art
collection is a looking glass that reflects values of communities and
individuals, of the World and the homestead; therefore the works of art
selected from the rich collection of the Gallery
of Matica Srpska represent the mirror of the Serbian Modernism. Within the
ramification of European culture Serbian Modernism occupies a deserved place,
since it had followed immediately the most recent phenomena within European
Modernism and thus reflects Serbian culture in the light of European culture.
Serbian
national emancipation endeavours spanned the entire 19th century
parallel on both banks of the Danube within two empires − the Ottoman and the
Austro-Hungarian. If the South took the lead politically with two uprisings and
the formation of a national state, the North with the Vuk Karadžić circle
hastened to create cultural institutions of which Matica Srpska was the
most important. The visual arts existed in its museum as a field with a special
collection. Modernity occurred in the very instant, when the promulgators of
the emancipatory endeavour became enlightened by the power of the image. Taking
the lesson of paintings by Paja Jovanović and his colleagues Đorđe Krstić and
Uroš Predić, they integrated the visual arts into the state-building effort and
the unification of the partitioned nation. The younger generation, educated
predominantly in Munich and a little later in Paris (Josif Falta, Anastas
Bocarić, Vasa Eškićević, Đorđe Jovanović, Nadežda Petrović, Bora Stevanović,
Milan Milovanović and others), came to understand the broader South Slavic
identity. Through their artistic connections and with the support of the
Serbian government they created a prefiguration of the 1918 unification in the
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes even before the Great War.
After the
Great War, Serbian artists looked up above all to Paris. Petar Dobrović, Sava
Šumanović, Mladen Josić, Milan Konjović, Marko Čelebonović and others followed
the lead of the École de Paris, while Mihailo S. Petrov belonged to the
circle of the international avant-garde and the Zenyth (Zenit)magazine. The art of the Rapelle à l’ordre and art deco of the
1920s was in their work transformed into the realisms of the 1930s with an
outstanding social criticism in the woodcuts by Đorđe Andrejević Kun. The bond
of the poets Dušan Matić and Marko Ristić with André Breton’s Surrealist circle
echoed indirectly in the work of Petar Lubarda, while more substantially and
significantly permeated the creativity of Serbian painters and sculptors of the
sixth decade. Extraordinary paintings by Milenko Šerban, Bogdan Šuput and Marko
Čelebonović wrap up this selection and represent a unique upgrading of the
Fauvist and the Intimist paradigms.
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Exhibition opening, video
Author of the exhibition
Tijana
Palkovljević Bugarski
Expert associate
Jelena
Ognjanović
Project coordination
Andrej
Smrekar
Exhibition set-up
Tijana
Palkovljević Bugarski, Andrej Smrekar
Conservation-restoration works
Darko
Despotović, Luka Kulić, Marijeta Sidovski, Danilo Vuksanović
Lead conservator-restorer at the National
Gallery
Miha Pirnat
30 January–6 September 2020
National
Gallery of Slovenia
Prešernova
24
1000
Ljubljana