EXHIBITION – JOZO KLJAKOVIĆ’S SUMMERTIME OUVRE
14 May – 1 July 2026
Introduction
The exhibition Jozo Kljaković’s Summertime Ouvre offers a curatorial and scientific treatment of the material and presents a relatively unknown corpus of this prominent artist of the first half of the twentieth century. Since a large number of valuable works by Jozo Kljaković remain in private collections and the general public is not often able to enjoy them, we have prepared a selection of Kljaković’s oeuvre depicting summertime themes. Most of these paintings are privately owned, while the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb and the Jozo Kljaković Memorial Collection respectively retain one piece with this theme in their holdings. The exhibition covers the period from 1928 to 1948, considered the artist’s most fecund period, and comprises a selection of seven valuable works by Jozo Kljaković. The selected summertime canvases depict leisure and relaxation by the sea, and all the beauty and richness of the Mediterranean milieu. Kljaković considered the human body to be an artist’s greatest challenge, finding attraction in the fullness of life and the perfection of the body’s strength and beauty, and depicted it laid bare, exposing both female and male bodies. The human figure occupies a central place in his work, accentuating a nostalgia for the past, while highlighting the innocence and simplicity of naked bodies. In the 1930s, Jozo Kljaković painted his classicist works, and at that time created several versions, The Bather, Resting on the Beach, Two Nudes, On the Seashore, Bathing, scenes inspired by summer, bathing, beaches and sensual bodies, which allowed him an inexhaustible space for depicting different variations of this theme. The motifs that Kljaković paints inspired by this subject-matter are cited by professor Grgo Gamulin as the pinnacle of heroic eroticism within Kljaković’s oeuvre. The dignity and serenity that these nudes exude accentuate the anatomy and mystery of the female and male bodies. From the very beginning, Kljaković’s style was marked by great order and form, which stems from the tradition of the region in which he grew up. By elevating sensuality and femininity, as well as the heroic strength of his male characters to the level of myth, Kljaković, moving towards Neoclassical form, plays with a kind of symbolism, i.e. “a pictorial metaphor of symbolic charge, which was for years based on the substrate of Art Nouveau and ultimately Art Deco stylisation, gradually transforming in accordance with Neorealist tendencies of classical provenance”. Over time, his female nudes and male bodies, which until then had been stylised forms, now take on a more natural appearance, characteristic of Neorealist form.
Art historian Ivanka Reberski emphasises that “it is unlikely that we will encounter such a fully realised Neoclassical ideal of beauty from the ‘world of Arcadia’ that came to life in Kljaković’s paintings in the late 1920s and 1930s, in any of our other painters”. The unique treatment of Mediterranean themes before industrialisation in the works of Jozo Kljaković, in which the characters in their natural environment of the Dalmatian coast are depicted in a somewhat romantic and magical way, characterises him as a leading creator of magical realism.
Why magical realism in the painting of Jozo Kljaković? In the curatorial text in the exhibition catalogue New Contributions to the Valorisation of the Artist’s Oeuvre, Petra Vugrinec draws a connection between the paintings of Jozo Kljaković and the literature of Gabriel García Márquez, choosing this literary discourse in her treatment of Kljaković’s oeuvre of Mediterranean themes. She states that “the postmodernist obsession with transience in our milieu is anticipated by Kljaković’s Mediterranean melancholy, his enchanted protagonists of Dalmatian siestas, frozen in the majestic stance of a ritual rite in some ancient Arcadian land”. Kljaković’s lifelong fascination with classicist values, profound humanity and figurative painting, his lasting enthrallment with the human figure, and his foregrounding of all thematic and motivational implications of the figure of a woman and a man stems from his birthplace, that is to say, his origins. Growing up on the ruins of ancient Salona, Kljaković developed a love for mythical creatures, lost worlds tied to the Mediterranean, the sea, the coastal landscape, the rural idyll, and nature. The ancient, somewhat forgotten mythical worlds of ‘Arcadia’, as Ivanka Reberski terms them, captivated Kljaković and situated him perfectly into the Neoclassicism practiced by domestic painters as the most prominent representative of the Neoclassical strand of Realism, which he elevated to mythical ideals. In his autobiographical volume U suvremenom kaosu (In Contemporary Chaos), he describes his fascination with the “grand peasants” who worked our vineyards and fields. “They were sunburned men, beaten by wind and rain. They were as wide in the neck as they were in the waist. Their arms and shoulders seemed to have been hewn from hard oak with an axe. They began their work in the fields with an unspoken prayer – the sunrise, and ended it with a similar prayer – the sunset. Then they scraped their hoes, shook out their shoes and went to dinner. At dinner they joked and frolicked. They believed that as long as the sun rose and their land existed, neither they nor their kin would go hungry.”
We believe that this cycle is highly valuable in the framework of Kljaković’s oeuvre, and have therefore decided to organise this small, albeit significant exhibition, while Petra Vugrinec has prepared the curatorial rendering of the works in the catalogue.
By setting up this exhibition consisting of seven thematically conjoined works by Jozo Kljaković at the Memorial Collection, as well as by undertaking an interdisciplinary analysis of the work and presenting it to the public, we wanted to display the works that are not available to the public, yet hold great value and complement the artist’s noteworthy oeuvre.
Lidija Fištrek
Jozo Kljaković’s Summer Paintings or the Melancholy of the Mediterranean
Jozo Kljaković’s Arcadian Cycle, presented in this exhibition, was created in the interwar period, in the joyful days he spent in Zagreb with his family, colleagues and friends, working as a professor at the Royal College for Arts and Crafts in Zagreb. This was a period in which, following a prominent solo exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in 1920, Kljaković gained recognition and acknowledgement as one of the leading artists in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and earned large painting commissions for religious and state buildings in Croatia and beyond. It is precisely for this reason that he went to Paris to perfect the fresco technique, studying under the famous French fresco artist Marcel-Lenoir. There he met and socialised with members of the French avant-garde, as well as with his compatriots, the artists Uzelac, Šumanović and Babić. He also attended lectures at the famous Académie Ranson.
This was a time of great popularity for the versatile Kljaković, who would fill numerous interiors with frescoes, such as those in: the parish church of St. Mark in Zagreb (1923–1940), the parish church of St. Martin in his native Vranjic (1927), the church of St. Mary in Biskupija near Knin (1938), and the church of St. Eustachius in Dobrota in Montenegro (1932). He also adorned secular buildings such as the Slavic Bank Palace in Zagreb near the Schlosser Steps leading to Šalata (1923), Carnelutti’s newly built Assicurazioni Generali building on Ban Josip Jelačić Square in Zagreb (1940), and created monumental murals for the Croatian Chamber of Commerce (1927) and the Zagreb City Hall (The Battle of Kaptol and Gradec, today in the holdings of the Zagreb City Museum, 1928). He would also paint the family tomb of lawyer and politician Dr Ivan Gmajner at the Mirogoj Cemetery (1928–1934). Likewise worth mentioning is the ceiling of Monsignor Svetozar Rittig’s house on Opatička Street (around 1930) and Ivan Meštrović’s bedroom at the famous sculptor’s home at No 8 Mletačka Street in Zagreb (1925–1927).
Kljaković’s exhibition endeavours reached their zenith. On the artistic horizon of the 1920s and 1930s, he, in a sense, occupied a central position, alongside Meštrović. He associated with the leading intellectuals of the time, such as artists Meštrović, Kršinić, Becić, Mujadžić, Tartaglia; architects Ibler, Ehrlich and Cota; writers Krleža, Nazor and Cesarić; musicians Bersa and Tijardović, and patrons Vladimir Arko and Krešimir Pučar.
He founded the Group of Zagreb Artists with the aim of enriching the cultural life of the metropolis, while the criterion for the selection of artists was a European level of artistic excellence. The group exhibited once a year and met in Ante Gašpić’s “Dalmatian Cellar”. This was a time of Kljaković’s intense activity in all areas of social life, from politics to culture, a period in which his friend, the poet Vladimir Nazor, penned seven hexameter poems, at the Medulić Café on the corner of Ilica and Medulićeva, dedicated precisely to Kljaković.
We might say these were joyful days of prosperity that would lull to slumber for a while the homo politicus, giving way to homo pictor or homo poeticus; a time when Joža, as he was nickname in Zagreb, as well as several other artists, would reach the height of their creative energy upon coming to Zagreb, which was in the process of rapid development.
Let us return to the portion of the oeuvre dedicated to summer, leisure, and Dalmatia as the milieu reminiscent of the lost world from which God expelled the first people East of Eden, or of the mythical Arcadia, the land of Pan and melancholy, shepherds and utopia.
This exhibition encompasses seven easel paintings that share the same motif of people lying on the beach next to the sea, savouring the sun and the murmur of the sea.
Although the selected works appear nonchalantly organised, nothing here is left to chance and every detail has been carefully considered, corresponding to the lavish tradition of figural compositions in Western European art from the Renaissance (cf. Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, 1510–1513, The Louvre, Paris) onwards. However, before we embark on a comparative analysis incorporating examples from the European and Croatian relevant corpus, the paintings in the exhibition merit careful analysis.
Petra Vugrinec
