Permanent Collection

1900–1918

Franc Berneker

(Gradišče, Slovenj Gradec, 1874 − Ljubljana, 1932)

The Drowned Couple
(c. 1903), bronze, 20 x 52 x 21 cm
signed centre back: Berneker

NG P 408, National Gallery of Slovenia, Ljubljana

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This unsettling Symbolist work brings together elements of Franc Berneker’s sculptures with the shared motif of the “waves of life” or “unification in death”: The Drowned Couple, Victims, Solitude and Drama. The protagonists of each of these sculptures, created between 1903 and 1906, are seated in solitude or lying in misery, pain and death, melting into the pedestal in a Jugendstil rejection of standing, erect figures. Social issues, pessimism and a tragic worldview permeate Berneker’s works of this kind.

In 1904, Berneker, as the only Slovene sculptor in the Sava Club, exhibited his plaster sculptures Solitude and The Drowned Couple, created around 1903, the sculpture Deprivation, and two portraits at the Galerie Miethke in Vienna alongside works by Impressionist painters. The Viennese art critics predicted a productive future for Berneker.

The Drowned Couple plaster, which the sculptor envisioned as a maquette for a marble statue, was later cast in bronze. The laid bodies of the drowned man and woman are fused to each other and to the support, so that their form is truncated. In The Drowned Couple, Berneker reduced form to its essential qualities. The head of the male figure, bent backwards, is modelled in a similar way to those of the female figures in Berneker’s compositions Drama and Victims.

ABOUT THE PERIOD

Intimism, Expression, Jakopič and Sternen

The empathetic painting of Jakopič stems from his encounters with symbolist art in Munich before the turn of the century; it then transformed into intimist images of the time before the Great War. Counterlight, so exceptional in the tradition of western art, is one of the essential elements of his style. Looking at the sun through tree crowns creates a shaded and limited, intimate space in the foreground where lonely muses or bathing women appear. Analogous to natural counterlight is the “internal” light from an artificial source as a stimulus for inner life in the images of women engaged in typical female activities in middle-class interiors (At the Piano, By a Lamp, Maidens). Light and orchestration of arbitrary colours culminated in his painting Reminiscences, in which the painter, by means of a wide colour range, complementary contrasts and empathetic handling of paint, enhanced the sensual openness of the image to the viewer’s empathy and emotionality.

In a very different way the world of a lonely middle-class woman is revealed by Matej Sternen. His The Red Parasol shows a fashionable and self-confident townswoman taking a walk in the English Garden in Munich or in Tivoli Park in Ljubljana. After 1911 the painter devised in ambitious formats a number of nudes and young women dressing or being engaged in some other intimate business. The skill of his brush speaks about sensual luxury and creates thoroughly convincing equivalence between the real and re-created worlds. The suggestive look of white taffeta or various shades of silk create a sensual aura for middle-class women whom the painter’s compositional strategy offers to an uninvited, or sometimes provoked, gaze.

In the sphere of sculpture, several younger representatives emerge, such as Lojze Dolinar, Ivan Napotnik and Anton Štefic. They still depend on Art Nouveau stylization (Napotnik’s A Woman of Egypt), which is more evident in Dolinar’s small sculpture, but they already make use of more expressive interpretations, e.g. Job by Štefic and The Blind One by Dolinar.

National art, Impressionism

The discussion about national art took a new direction after the exhibition of the Sava artists’ society in the Galerie Miethke in Vienna in 1904, when Viennese art critics recognized a new painting province of the Empire in the paintings of Slovenian artists. In spite of his determination to withdraw from the ill-tempered attitude of the local scene, Ivan Grohar exhibited his painting Spring, the central piece in the above-mentioned exhibition, in the Sezession the following year under the title From My Homeland. A series of paintings suggestive of plein-air thus established themselves in public as a gallery of symbolic images of the homeland. The period of impressionistically formulated landscapes lasted until Grohar’s Sower of 1907, which is a programme-based image in which the earth and the man reach mythical identification through handling of paint, and a Carniolan hayrack appears in the picture as a national attribute of the agricultural worker. Within the Slovenian artists’ group Vesna, to which Maksim Gaspari, Gvidon Birolla and sculptor Svetoslav Peruzzi belong, a popular variant of national motifs dominated which relied on direct examples of folk tradition and creativity. The proximity of the two theses is revealed by the comparison between Birolla’s (Landscape) and Grohar’s (A Hillock) landscapes, the motifs of the same topographical area. The ideological use of the term “Slovenian Impressionism” is clearly paradoxical in view of the motifs of Lower Austria or Croatia by Matija Jama (Willows, Village in Winter, Bridge on the Dobra, etc.), but the artist’s obsessive dealing with light throughout his life imperceptibly incorporated them into the notion of the national. If impacts of Art Nouveau can be traced in his pictures, Jama’s painting, based on a skilful painting routine and self-discipline, is pervaded by reasoned distance and exaltation of the visual.

In the sphere of sculpture, Gangl’s and Repič’s realism is gradually surpassed by younger sculptors who follow Art Nouveau stylization or answer the influence of Auguste Rodin. Berneker could meet his works at exhibitions in Vienna and saw them in contemporary periodicals. Forms modelled in a fluid manner, horizontally oriented compositions and softly polished surface in marble portraits are just a few elements of the most topical trends. Ivan Zajec was staying in Paris in 1905 and had first-hand acquaintance of the master. His Conflagration and The Wave of Life demonstrate this experience.

Late Realism and Art Nouveau

When they studied in Munich, the generation of younger Slovenian realists, Anton Ažbe, Ivana Kobilca and Ferdo Vesel, took up the tradition of the manifest handling practised by the circle of Wilhelm Leibl. Ivana Kobilca surpassed her motif-related limitations to portraits tinted with genre-like hues (Woman Drinking Coffee) or pure genre pieces (Women Ironing) only with her painting Summer, 1890, in which the allegory is obliterated by plein-air intentions. But after the canvas had been exhibited in Paris, her ambitions gradually waned and for the rest of her life she painted mainly excellent portraits (e.g. Parisian Woman with a Letter; two decades later portrait of her niece Mira Pintar) and flower still lifes. Ažbe put all his energies into his work as a teacher, and his Black Woman was hung on the wall of his art school in Munich as an exemplary masterpiece. From among the realist painters it was Ferdo Vesel that came closest to the aspirations of the younger generation, but he never abandoned his realist roots. Two graduates from Prague academy, Ivan Vavpotič and Ivan Žabota, upgraded portraiture to a middle-class status portrait of intellectuals (Composer Fran Gerbič and Dr Niko Županič in Vienna) or femmes fatales (Alma Souvan), while Henrika Šantel carried on the attained level of genre portrait of children. Matej Sternen drew his power from Ažbe’s gravitational attraction; by means of light he liberated the studio motif of a nude from the qualifiers of study context. With his Head of a Black Man, Rihard Jakopič attempted to emulate his teacher Ažbe, but in his portrait of Henrik Czerny or the image of a Saint he at the same time vigorously resisted the teacher’s authority. Art Nouveau models, imbued with symbolism, are revealed by the counter light, limited palette and a rather licked surface in the portrait but emancipated handling in the figure of the saint. The time between 1899 when the question of Slovenian art became topical among the intellectuals and 1904 when landscape assumed iconic character is represented by the monumentalized genre by Ivan Grohar (The Rakers) inspired by Giovanni Segantini, and by Peter Žmitek (Beggar with a Church Model) relying on the example of Ilya Repin and Peredvizhniki.

ARTISTS

Owner	Birth - death
Franc Berneker	(Gradišče, Slovenj Gradec, 1874 − Ljubljana, 1932)
Gvidon Birolla	(Trieste, 1881 − Ljubljana, 1963)
Lojze Dolinar	(Ljubljana, 1893 − Ičići, Opatija, 1970)
Alojz Gangl	(Metlika, 1859 – Prague, 1935)
Maksim Gaspari	(Selšček, Cerknica, 1883 − Ljubljana, 1980)
Ivan Grohar	(Sorica, 1867 − Ljubljana, 1911)
Anton Gvajc	(Ljubljana, 1865 – Brežice, 1935)
Rihard Jakopič	(Ljubljana, 1869–1943)
Matija Jama	(Ljubljana, 1872–1947)
Ivana Kobilca	(Ljubljana, 1861–1926)
Ivan Napotnik	(Zavodnje, Šoštanj, 1888 − Šoštanj, 1960)
Svetoslav Peruzzi	(Lipe, 1881 − Split, 1936)
Alojzij Repič	(Vrhpolje, 1866 – Ljubljana, 1941)
Matej Sternen	(Verd, 1870 – Ljubljana, 1949)
Henrika Šantel	(Gorizia, 1874 – Ljubljana, 1940)
Anton Štefic	(Gabrnik, Boštanj, 1878 − Gorizia, 1915)
Ivan Vavpotič	(Kamnik, 1877 – Ljubljana, 1943)
Ferdo Vesel	(Ljubljana, 1861–1946)
Heinrich Wettach	(Vienna, 1858 − St. Andrä, 1929)
Ivan Zajec	(Ljubljana, 1869−1952)
Ivan Žabota	(Podgradje, Ljutomer, 1877 − Bratislava, 1939)
Peter Žmitek	(Kropa, 1874 − Ljubljana, 1935)