Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Ivan Generalić
Croatian, Yugoslav; 20th-century
Zagreb, Croatia: Croatian Museum of Naive Art
72%
Rekvizicija (Seizure). 1934. Oil on plywood
Generalić was among the first painters in the Hlebine School, a group of untrained artists in some provincial place in Croatia who came under the artistic supervision of a university painter from Zagreb, Krsto Hegedušic. What's interesting about this piece by Generalić is that it seems to be a naive work on the cusp of academicism — Hegedusič's influence is clear in the way the figures are grouped, placed, and limned. But Generalić, for my money, was a better artist than his overseer from academe, and this has to do with how Generalić's sensibility fails fully to jibe with the academic principles of organization that seem to have been imposed on the way he structured his work. Namely, the man had a sense for the wood he was painting on and its intrinsic expressive qualities, which you can see especially in the snow in the foreground. Also, Generalić, like his mentor, had a tendency towards building up his compositions out of large, mostly flat planes of straight color. But unlike Hegedusič, Generalić painted these planes with a very loose hand (making them seem to sort of bristle against the figures they're supposed to be comprising), and he had at best a vague sense of how they should relate to each other (emphasizing their basic flatness over and above their contributions to the picture's illusion). (TFS, 2025)