Aleksander Bassin – Lidia Głuchowska

Cubist Idioms Hidden within the Discourses on Modernism and the Avant-Garde in Slovenia

 

The evaluation of the largely transitory character of Cubism and Post-Cubism in the art history of the former Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, apart of monographic presentations of individual artists, doesn’t exist up to date. In Slovenia efforts towards a synthetic presentation of the Modernism and the Avant-Garde have been undertaken only since the 1980s. Generally the meaning, Cubism was ‘impossible’ within the mostly traditional, (neo)realistic profile of the local visual culture dominates.

However, breaking the paradigm of the Slovenian art history it can be stated, that there were various idioms of Cubism hidden within discourses on other -isms in the 20th century. The current investigation led to outline four phases of its reception. The earliest one, around 1919–24 encompasses e.g. Veno Pilon’s post-Cézanneian sculptural works as well Cubo-Expressionist paintings by the Brother Kralj (with the national subtext indicated — similarly like in the Polish art — by the Catholic iconography). Some sculptures by France Kralj and Lojze Spazzapan resemble Otto Gutfreund’s and August Zamoyski’s works in this style.

Since mid of the 1920s semi-Cubist forms appeared in oeuvre by Avgust Černigoj and Cubo-Futurist ones in paintings by Ivan Čargo — both up to date mostly attributed to Constructivism.

In the 1940s Cubism influenced work by Stane Kregar, who (as earlier Veno Pilon) studied in Prague. These are examples of the horizontal exchange in Central Europe.

After the WWII André Lhote’s students Ivan Seljak-Čopič and Marjan Dovjak, along with Milan Berbuč of their Group 53, since mid of 1950s were aware of the importance of analytical Cubism in their art practice. They could be with some hesitation clasificized as Neo- Cubist. The same concerns Jure Cihlař’s work, in which Cubist echoes appeared until the late 1970s, and Ladislav Pengov’s compositions, which until the beginning of the 1990s represent a kind of post-Cubist analysis, and could be seen as a recapitulation of the ‘lack of Cubism’ in the Slovenian art history.

Author's email:

aleksanderbassin@yahoo.com / l.gluchowska@isw.uz.zgora.pl

DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.54759/ART-2024-0306

Full-text in the Digital Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences:
https://kramerius.lib.cas.cz/uuid/uuid:c6453811-f9e6-4eb2-9f16-8f83a59d9938

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