Izvorni znanstveni članak
Urban Interiors in Croatian Art between two World Wars
Željko Marciuš
; Moderna galerija
Sažetak
With the help of the "auxiliary discipline" of art history, iconology, or some of its tenets, the author concentrates on theme and content present in layers of a painting. He analyses the relationship between the sign and the meaning, follows their "development" and enters to a certain degree the area of visual communication, thus sharing the "literary approach to visual art, the narrative, thematic, even ideological interpretation" in the words of Radovan Ivančević in his study Introduction into Iconology. Based on this formulation the author, in his treatment of collected material, underlines the links between the theme (urban interior), content (its typological definition) and style of a work of art: he establishes the motif itself as the basic object of research, and gives the iconography analysis priority over the formal and stylistic ones. The author states that Croatian paintings from that period contain and convey a larger or smaller amount of information which - on equal terms and inseparable from visual elements - communicate the message (idea, meaning) on the level of medium, establish a relationship towards the spirit of the period in which that painting originated and express their modernity through these iconography co-ordinates which in many cases define it better than purely stylistic ones. There were periods in which it was obviously important not only how something was painted, but also what was painted, that is, content and meaning conveyed by the painting.
Iconographic features of the selected works by major Croatian artists of the period (Uzelac, Cecan, Trepše, Babić, Detoni, Postružnik, Krizmanić, Tomašević, Plančić, job, Tabaković) and many others which are not subject of this study give us valuable information on the "life in urban interiors" of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. Motifs and themes, imbued by Eros and Thanatos, range from pubs and cafes, music-halls and cabarets and private (intimate) interiors, to themes of hospitals and lunatic asylums which analysing manis psychic problems succeed in exposing the unstable spirit of the period. The present paper is a segment of an integral iconography of the city in Croatian art. The introductory study attempts to analyse and evaluate Croatian painting of that period from an entirely different and, in Croatian art history, unusual point of view.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
153854
URI
Datum izdavanja:
15.12.1998.
Posjeta: 1.407 *