Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Vasilije Jordan
Croatian, Yugoslav; 20th-century
Split, Croatia: Museum of Fine Arts
59%
Ikar (Icarus). 1962. Oil on wood panel
In any context other than a strange Balkan museum full of forgeries and trite Sunday paintings, I wouldn't look twice at an artwork like this. But two things about Jordan's Icarus at Split's museum caught my attention. First, while its surrealism is certainly aligned with that of, say, a Carrington or a Varo or a Delvaux, it's not completely reducible to any of these or any other famous Western models, in the way so much other modern Croatian art is (though their models tend to be more Cubist or AbEx than Jordan's Surrealism). Jordan's relative uniqueness has a bit to do with how spindly his figures are, which is a quirk he wears well, as well as with his murky paint handling and how this accentuates the roughness of his very cheap-looking canvas. If there's an awful high school romanticism at work here, there's also something indelible about that miasma of red in the top left corner, or the not-quite-perfect perspective of the platform with the snake. The other thing that made me look at this painting by Jordan is the similarity of its facture to that of a (probably misattributed) Andrija Medulić painting in the same museum. It's nice to think that Jordan might have been drawing on the work of his elders. (TFS, 2025)