Ivan Generalic
A gentle dialogue between man and nature...
(...)
Mother Earth speaks through his paintings in terms of simplicity and majesty, clarity and mystery. All that happens on the earth is pictured as a sacred spectacle. It’s the same Mother we see everyday, but her face is slightly shifted. Her animals not just move. They perform their magic dance, as in the most iconic piece, Stag’s Wedding, that leaves the viewer enchanted with the mystifying totality of the whole scene. As Mother Nature's true medium, Generalic reveals her inner beauty through the mysterious immediacy of the moment. That’s when the moment becomes timeless and the small village extends to infinity.
(...)
In his landscapes, Generalic uncovers the spiritual essence of the earth with his vibrant and daring palette Whether it’s sunsets or dawns, coral textured leaves or snow-clad hills, all these elements are charged with an absorbing magnetism.
(...)
Generalic never moved away from his birthplace and died close to Hlebine. It was always this little piece of land he painted over and over; and yet it exhumes the cosmic and spiritual without being conceptual or putting any emphasis on these notions.
“He was born by the land.
He posesses it’s sweetness, wisdom and charm.
And he needs no other guides.”
Ivan Generalic.
The greatest Croatian naive art painter
and one of the greatest world painters of this century.
Ivan Generalic, Croatian (1914 - 1992)
Born in Hlebine, a small village in Croatian region Podravina, on 21st Dec 1914.
In his childhood, while his friends played hide-and-seek, he used a small branchlet to make drawings in the sand. From that time until he died he never separated from a pencil or a brush.
In elementary scholl he liked painting lessons the most and his greatest joy was a sketch-book. The least he liked maths. As a child, to earn money for his painting material, he went to bowling and set up skittles for the players.
Mostly he drew with pencil on paper bags in his uncle’s store. Those drawings were seen there by professor Krsto Hegedusic, in that time (1930) a student of art academy, who exclaimed: “This is superb! Who did it?!” The historic meeting between Hegedusic and young Ivan Generalic happened soon after that, as well as Ivan’s first public exhibition in Zagreb Art pavillion in 1931. This first contact with citizens and positive critiques led to a new era of not only Croatian art, but world one as well, as history showed us.
In 1934 he married with Anka Kolarek and got son Josip in 1936. He spent 1938 in military service and becomes the member of ULUH (society of Croatian artists) in 1945. In 1953 he exhibited in Paris, where he lived and painted for two months. He visited many museums and galleries, admiring Mona Lisa in Louvre the most, as he said. Of all beautiful critiques he received for his work, the one from French novelist and critic he liked the most. Marcel Arlan wrote: “He was born by the land. He posesses it’s sweetness, wisdom and charm. And he needs no other guides.” In 1959 he painted “The deer wedding” – his most valuable work, according to evaluation of people who were following Croatian naive art for a long time.
When asked why is he painting, Ivan Generalic replies: “I don’t know, as I wouldn’t know to answer why I live.” He just didn’t know how to live without painting.
In 1975, after his wife Anka died, he moved to Sigetec, a village next to Hlebine where he married for a second time and lived there till the end. Some consider this moment as a turnpoint in his career as things were never the same in naive art movement as before.
Ivan Generalic has a large number of followers, beside his coleagues which form The first generation – Franjo Mraz and Mirko Virius. The members of the second generation are Franjo Filipovic, Dragan Gazi, Josip Generalic, Mijo Kovacic, Martin Mehkek and Ivan Vecenaj. There are even more members of The third and The fourth generation of naive art paintiers. Ivan Generalic thus spoke: “I am a general of my army!” He gave advice to many of those youg painters who used it in their favour and faster progress.
Ivan Generalic is the greatest Croatian naïve art ( 1,2) painter and one of the greatest world painters of this century.
Ivan Generalic died in Koprivnica on 27th November 1992 and has been buried in village Sigetec near Hlebine.
http://rogallery.com/Generalic_Ivan/generalic-biography.html
The art of Ivan Generalic (1914-1992)
-- one the greatest painters of the 20th century - has been defined as primitive and naïve, but whoever stumbles upon his artwork and peruses them open-mindedly, will discover that the adjective “naïve” only scratches the surface of something inconceivably poetic and profound. Nebojsa Tomasevic in her book, The Magic World of Ivan Generalic, characterized his art as an alternative to the alienation current in the modern world.
For a self-learned Croatian artist of the 20th century painting was as natural as being alive. His first images emerged on the sand and continued in pencil drawings on paper bags. One day he got noticed by a reputed leftist artist, Krsto Hegedusic, the founder of the “Earth Group”. The group defied aesthetics of “the art of art’s sake” and foreign influences, such as impressionism, expressionism and so forth. Although aligned aesthetically with Marxism, it was free of written in stone rules of socialistic realism, leaving a broad space for pictorial novelty.
This encounter opens the new opportunities for the 15-year old artist from a small Croatian village Hlebine. The two met in 1931 and soon after the first and very successful exhibition of his artwork was held in Zagreb Art pavilion. In the early thirties, Generalic works mostly within aesthetics of the “Earth Group” with its emphasis on social themes. But he puts a new meaning into the concept of “Earth”, Zemlja, which becomes the very extension of his soul. He expressed in his art what a French critic, Marcel Arland, called in reference to his paintings, “a gentle dialogue between man and nature”. “I’ve been close to the earth all my life, the earth is what inspires me, and it’s the subject of all my pictures. I walk in its midst and look for ideas for my work. While I walk I paint, not with brushes but in my head”, wrote the artist. In 1934, he married Anka Kolarek and in 1936 his son Josip was born. Years later, he became a renowned artist of the famous “Hlebine School", founded by his father.
All major art galleries and museums locally and worldwide opened to Ivan Generalich almost instantaneously. Critics love his artwork and want to see more. Mother Earth speaks through his paintings in terms of simplicity and majesty, clarity and mystery. All that happens on the earth is pictured as a sacred spectacle. It’s the same Mother we see everyday, but her face is slightly shifted. Her animals not just move. They perform their magic dance, as in the most iconic piece, Stag’s Wedding, that leaves the viewer enchanted with the mystifying totality of the whole scene. As Mother Nature's true medium, Generalic reveals her inner beauty through the mysterious immediacy of the moment. That’s when the moment becomes timeless and the small village extends to infinity. Generalic never moved away from his birthplace and died close to Hlebine. It was always this little piece of land he painted over and over; and yet it exhumes the cosmic and spiritual without being conceptual or putting any emphasis on these notions.
Generalic worked in various painterly techniques and mediums. Painting on the glass, instead of canvas, became a perfect channel for conveying a dreamlike aura of his art. “In the beginning I painted with watercolors on paper, and then with oils on canvas and wood. I changed to glass when I realized that with this technique I could obtain fresher colors and put in more details. Colors on glass are more beautiful, more luminous. Canvas somehow swallowed up my colors, made them look dull, and besides I could not show all the details I wanted, not in such a clear way”.
In his oil on glass painting ''The Unicorn'', Generalic depicts an encounter of an old couple with a mythical unicorn one winter night. The full Moon glaring in the dark sky, accentuates the purity of snow and serenity of the scene. In the background, we see a remote village at the foot of the fluffy mountains. The couple looks spellbound, watching in silence the unicorn behind the snow coated tree, not daring to disturb the full moon mystery. A dramatic interplay of light and shadow evokes the presence of some enchanting space where, in spite of seeming distance, all pieces come together in unfathomable primordial harmony.
In his landscapes, Generalic uncovers the spiritual essence of the earth with his vibrant and daring palette Whether it’s sunsets or dawns, coral textured leaves or snow-clad hills, all these elements are charged with an absorbing magnetism. In ''Adam and Eve'', the concept of Earthly paradise is translated into a language of a simple seasonal contrast. The naked couple is freezing in the snow against the summer landscape in the background. Both sheer and elegant simplicity of the pictorial language enables this eternal myth to unfold naturally in all its multidimensional complexity in both time and space. It’s nothing final in this drama. Fluid as life itself, it can be told in myriad ways and tonalities, perspectives and overtones. The more subjective and personal it becomes, the more universal it turns out to be.
“Painting on glass means working on one side and then observing the result on the other”, said the artist. Naïve in the sense of not being realistic, Generalic takes the art to the realms where it has never been before, manifesting in each piece a harmonious fusion of the simple and complex, the temporary and timeless. Loyal to his own vision and integrity of his painterly style, he never followed any particular trend. His art has been compared with Bruegel's genre paintings. Some art critics insisted that he was copying Bruegel's peasant scenes. "But who is this Bruegel?", asked Generalic. When he learned who Bruegel was, he replied, "It may be that my world and his are the same, but our ways of expressing it are completely different. The forms and the people aren't the same, but the world that comes out of them is very similar! Because at that time, just like today, people fell in love, quarreled, believed in witches, ate, and died". For Ivan Generalic, like for his great Dutch predecessor of the 16th century, the Mother Earth embracing and nurturing all these simple things of life is magic in itself.
http://www.examiner.com/article/the-luminous-art-of-ivan-generalic
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