The TEAM of seventeen is at the start: Krsto and Željko Hegedušić, Kamilo Tompa, Edo Kovačević, and Vilim Svečnjak from the former “Zemlja”; Zlatko Prica, Nikola Reizer, Albert Kinert, and Edo Murtić from the middle generation; and Kulmer, Dogan, Kalina, Perić, Svertasek, Lipovac, and Petlevski from the youth, along with Smokvina from Opatija. This colorful and combative squad in the competition of the first league of ULUH, in the diversity of seniors and juniors, is connected in this joint combination: a contemporary visual language.

The Art Pavilion on Tomislav Square has been partitioned; even its wings and internal apse have been negated, partitioned with white panels rented from the Velesajam, to negate the main and secondary lines of the exhibition; everything is different than before. Sleepy autumn Zagreb has come alive at the last moment with motifs and colors. Something is happening: that event is the freshness of Mart, even if it is in October.

In fact, for a long time in our artistic life, there has been a need for regrouping—ideological and organizational, partial and systematic. This is one of the beginnings: seventeen vital painters found this moment appropriate to appear and perform together: seventeen today, or perhaps twenty tomorrow, it doesn’t matter. The doors are open; this “club” of seventeen is not exclusive, except in terms of a minimum of quality. It does not exclude the figural, oriented towards the abstract, forcing contemporary technical procedures—Mart tolerates tradition but seeks life. Its goal is to create an artistic milieu, to create a “temperature” in this small city…

Anyone who comes to the exhibition can see that Mart has succeeded in this. The seventeen do not appear in isolation, one by one. The exhibits are mixed, so that three, four, or five-six canvases—the maximum number for an individual—act more suggestively, not tiring with the repetition that each inevitably tends toward. Graphics intertwine with oils, gouaches, and pastels; the exhibition truly grows from the floor to the ceiling—the setup by architect Neven Šegvić is as dynamic as the exhibition itself, which seeks its space in life and finds it.

The “Zemlja” members, whose rich tradition—habet sua fata atque “Zemlja”—is in a way still present, at least in the combativeness of the group for the contemporary—continue in their development. Krsto Hegedušić, founder of “Zemlja” and organizer of the Hlebine school, undoubtedly belongs among the initiators of Mart, the March when the earth wakes up and clothes itself in new March colors. It does not matter that this awakening occurs during the time of wine fermentation.

Drawing juices from life, and living it differently today than yesterday, juices as diverse as life itself is manifold and complex—the Martovci have accepted the tradition of tradition and metier from the old “Zemlja” members. Craftsmanship. Krsto Hegedušić, that personality alongside whose work diary and notes the events of decades have flowed, appears once again as a vertical from the past into the present, from the present into the past, a pillar of consciousness. With only two—but large and powerful canvases—he seems to open two doors: into the world of the past with the dramatic “Concentration Camp” and the tragicomic “Fairground.” Subconsciously, the conscious is used here, a montage from life symbolically, magic realism, a texture refined to abstraction. Željko Hegedušić remains a graphic artist, Kamilo Tompa thinks in delicate, musical lines of quiet humor and suppressed tragedy. Edo Kovačević is in search, and Svečnjak in polemic—with towers, only this time the battle is coloristic, that fight with symbols of a bygone time.

The middle generation—whose basic “trio” has long since imposed itself on our public—Murtić, Reizer, Prica, is flanked by Albert Kinert. Murtić, as if this time he is not so loud: the best seas and fish have sailed to Vienna for his own exhibition. Reizer has not moved far from the place where we left him last year at his solo exhibition, so that of the “middle” ones, the two strongest points are recorded by Zlatko Prica and Albert Kinert. Prica has moved from his Samobor, Mirnovec motifs to urban themes; “Iron Benders,” “Atelier,” and “Handles” speak fiercely, resolutely about daily life and the terrible beauty of the city; Kinert is richer not only in impasto, there were muscles before, now a dream has burst into song, and movement carries not only motion. A bit of surrealism, sprinkled like ash, a range of grays, flesh, nerves, path. His path is clear—into the essential.

Apart from Jakov Smokvina, who living in Rijeka, or Opatija, and not excluding himself there, despite his unquestionable qualities, was known in Zagreb, except for the fame of “abstractness,” and Svertasek, who appeared for the first time with Dulčić and Vesna Sokolić, as a distinct and delicate lyricist—all others from the younger generation were collaborators of Krsto Hegedušić’s Master Workshop. And? And—precisely because they were collaborators of that master workshop, they preserved their expression. They would, no doubt, have preserved it even if they had worked after graduation at the academy—alone; the question is, if and how and how quickly they would have developed. Their exhibition—actually an exhibition of the first “graduates” three years ago, showed that this master school precisely nurtured individuality. Since then, we have known the fine taste of Ferdinand Kulmer, the visionary melancholy of Boris Dogan’s mild surrealism, we knew about Perić’s “new frescoes” and Kalina’s still lifes…

Today, among the youngest, are Lipovac and Petlevski…

But let’s leave that question, who was who, and ask what is now. Perić is today a “white” abstractionist, refined, pure, far from frescoes. Kulmer, in his variations in red, blue, and brown, proved an extraordinary sense for composing; it is a subtlety grown from unadulterated emotionality: all the threads of his weaving show it, while Perić is more rational. Ivo Kalina truly puts his form and interest into color; it seems to me that the motifs of the hurried surfaces of the city turn before his eyes into living “straps” of intertwined colors. Boris Dogan wanders under the old bell towers of cities, his flag is still a dream, night, moon, magic, transience… Lipovac is with his figures of a man in the form of a ruined figurine, a “sphere” whose head is a sphere, the torso a simple prism, and there are no extremities, close to some painterly “tragi-humor,” while Petlevski is refined in his seductive technique. Working with a technical procedure of a special kind and impasto, he suggests a separate world of his homeland, intertwined and in cross-section with other worlds…

Thus, one next to the other, in a diverse, alternating, mutually completely different, and precisely in that perhaps even more interesting order of about sixty exhibits, the “Martovci,” not including in that differentiation, but including each other and others, as if opening a series of perspectives…

The exhibition can be viewed for a long time and pleasantly, it does not tire, it is interesting and refreshing… And afterwards, it will set off on a journey across the whole country.

R. P.

Vasko Lipovac: Fisherman and the Moon (1957)