{"id":2350,"date":"2024-04-25T07:37:45","date_gmt":"2024-04-25T07:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgallery.hazu.hr\/izlozba\/vanka\/?page_id=2350"},"modified":"2024-05-06T09:40:11","modified_gmt":"2024-05-06T09:40:11","slug":"maksimilijan-vanka-en","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sgallery.hazu.hr\/izlozba\/vanka\/en\/maksimilijan-vanka-en\/","title":{"rendered":"Maksimilijan Vanka"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Maksimilijan Vanka: a life fit for a novel<\/h1>\n

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Vanka's large and diverse oeuvre has been insufficiently researched in Croatian (and it would also seem American) art history, whereas to the general public he is relatively unknown. This is usually justified by the fact that in leaving his homeland, the artist's work had been lost for us; a claim which has been firmly refuted by Tonko Maroevi\u0107 in one of the reviews of the retrospective exhibition of Vanka's works held in Klovi\u0107evi Dvori Gallery in the early 2000s, some seventy years after his last major solo exhibition held in Croatia. He noted, as a matter of fact, that Vanka never completely severed the ties with \u201chis old country\u201d and that the features which he incorporated in the Zagreb environment, either as a student of Bela Csikos-Sesia (and a sort of companion of the Zagreb Colourful School), or as a co-exhibitor of the famous \u2018Group of Three\u2019, i.e. a stylistically similar fellow artist of Ljubo Babi\u0107, Vladimir Beci\u0107 and Jerolim Mi\u0161e, were represented in his \u2018American phase\u2019, which includes a range of \u201cminute segments and various aspects dealing with motif, problem and style\u201d, just like the Croatian one (comparable in both scope and meaning). Vanka was represented sporadically through a few works from domestic collections, in thematic exhibitions in his homeland (e.g. Watercolour art of the 20th century in Croatia<\/em>, 1958; Self-portrait in Recent Croatian Painting<\/em>, 1976; Still Life in Recent Croatian Painting<\/em>, 1979; Expressionism and Croatian Painting<\/em>; Human Figure in Recent Croatian Painting<\/em>, 1982), and two smaller exhibitions of his works from the holdings of Croatian museums and from private collections were held (Exhibitions from the Gallery Holdings. Maximilian Vanka<\/em>, 1976; Maximilian Vanka. Portraits<\/em>, 1997). Occasional newspaper reports from the New World during his lifetime, as well as the headlines accompanying the later opening of the Memorial Collection in Kor\u010dula, bear witness that there was a certain interest in the artist\u2019s fate. Although the contributions (albeit unequal in scope and differently focused) of Vladislav Ku\u0161an, the threesome Cvito Fiskovi\u0107 \u2013 Vinko Zlamalik \u2013 Ljerka Ga\u0161parovi\u0107 (1968), Zdenko Rus (1976), Ljubo Gamulin (1987), Snje\u017eana Pintari\u0107 (1997), Ivo \u0160imat Banov (2002) and the aforementioned Maroevi\u0107 (2002) right down to the most recent additions by Ana \u0160eparovi\u0107 (2016) and the tandem Jasminka Najcer Sabljak \u2013 Silvija Lu\u010devnjak (2018), are commendable in the overall examination of his work, the fact remains that Vanka has never been adequately monographically presented. According to critics, the aforementioned ambitiously designed retrospective in Klovi\u0107evi dvori by Nevenka Posavec Komarica did not result in the desired synthetic overview, despite the fact that it, together with a somewhat earlier and more studiously arranged, small exhibition at the James A. Michener Art Museum<\/em>, which in turn included Vanka's works from that museum and some, mostly private, American family collections, did provide a broader insight into his oeuvre, and it familiarised Croatian audiences with hitherto unseen works created in emigration. Not long thereafter, Nikola Vizner, who participated in preparing the American exhibition, defended his doctoral dissertation, which was the first somewhat complete and systematic cross-section of Vanka's 50-year activity, and whose special contribution is outlining the artistic context that Vanka encountered coming to study in Brussels, as well as a more informed analysis of American artistic circumstances at the time when the artist first settled on the East Coast in the mid-1930s. It is undeniable, however, that Vanka's work still eludes a comprehensive analysis, which would, apart from emphasizing amongst critics undisputed outbursts of excellence \u2013 early landscapes with borderline expressionist aesthetics, more successful portraits of diverse stylistic attributes, and cycles of more luminous landscapes from the early 1930s akin to Babi\u0107 \u2013 take a more sober look at his entire body of work; on the one hand more appropriately \u201cplacing within our evolutions\u201d certain sections; and on the other hand discerning the \u201ccreative thread\u201d which, in Gamulin's words, \u201cindeed does run successfully, albeit with difficulty, through his entire body of work\u201d from the ballast of confabulation and superfluous \u2018arranging\u2019, for which Vanka is usually criticized. \u0160imat Banov assessed him as a \u201cpainter of unstable and short-lived preoccupations, methods and solutions, of a broken artistic existence\u201d who nevertheless left several dozen works that \u201ccan be incorporated within the good tradition of Croatian modern art\u201d. Maroevi\u0107, in his characteristically more benevolent tone, pointed out the \u201cgreat disparity between his potential and orientations, with almost the only common denominator being his considerable manual skill and morphological nomadism\u201d, his propensity to \u201cvent by means of technical virtuosity in skillful exhibitionism, in captivating stylization and in the theatricality of the models' poses\u201d, his artistic personality in the extremes between \u201cfashionable production reminiscent of saccharine academicism\u201d and \u201cseveral attempts at \u2018abstract\u2019, post-cubist composing\u201d, which is why the \u201cfocal point of the oeuvre\u201d should be sought somewhere in the middle. It is generally believed that this is an artist who is \u201cnot a simple case\u201d, who is \u201ca problem for our critics\u201d and \u201ca questionable figure of our art\u201d.<\/p>\n

Too often, therefore, when trying to evoke Vanka's work, more attention had been paid to his peculiar appearance and dramatic personal biography \u2013 \u201cfate fit for an adventure novel\u201d, according to \u0160imat Banov \u2013 especially his unexplained ancestry and ostensibly mysterious death in the Pacific waters of Mexico. The exception is the above-mentioned dissertation, which approaches Vanka's curriculum vitae much more seriously. It summarizes several variations of the fundamentally identical assumption about the artist's birth being the result of an extramarital affair within the circles of the (high) Austro-Hungarian nobility, noting that the romanticized biography of Vanka, The Cradle of Life<\/em> (1936), written by the painter's American friend, the Slovenian Luj Adami\u010d, who wrote about him in several literary and journalistic texts, largely contributed to the widespread lore.<\/p>\n

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Maximilijan Vanka (in the middle) and Luj Adami\u010d (on the right) on Kor\u010dula in the 1930s, accompanied by an unidentified man, possibly Vanka\u2019s father-in-law, dr. DeWitt Stetten (Maksimilijan Vanka Collection Archive, the Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Vizner himself often resorts to the same novel as a source, questioning, however, its credibility with information from documents preserved in the Vanka family archive. The Register of Births of the Zagreb Parish of St. Mark includes a record of the birth of Maximilijan Joseph as an illegitimate child. The father's name is omitted, while the mother is listed as Katarina Vanka, a private citizen, with a residence in Brno, Moravia. The child's godmother was the midwife Marija Salavari. The Registers thus refute the popular hypothesis percolating through a number of texts on Vanka\u2019s ancestry: that he chose the surname himself to emphasize that he was an abandoned child or that he acquired it as a derogatory nickname for the same reason. Vizner correctly deduced, however, that this information is not conclusive proof that it was indeed the mother's true surname. While investigating the circumstances of the painter's death, the same author obtained a copy of his death certificate from the Municipality of Porto Vallarta in the Mexican federal state of Jalisco, from which it can be seen that Vanka's allegedly unexplained drowning was immediately preceded by a heart attack. Just like Posavec Komarica, Vizner bases some of his conclusions on conversations with the artist's living relatives and acquaintances, who, nonetheless, were not a completely reliable source of information. The reason for this is the deceitfulness of memory, along with the fact that these are, after all, second-hand experiences and, lasty, that Vanka himself was often contradictory in his statements, as evidenced by a number of equally mutually contradictory archival documents. The most eloquent example of this are the records of the Lower Town's Boys' Folk School and the Royal Real Gymnasium in Zagreb. While they disprove, for example, the unsubstantiated claims of several authors that Vanka \u2013 having been raised by a peasant woman from Kupljenovo (Pu\u0161\u0107a County) near Zapre\u0161i\u0107 with the regular financial support of unknown benefactors \u2013 attended a primary school (at least for a while) in \u201cBrestje\u201d, where he, under the supervision of his guardian, ostensibly lived in his own manor at the same time, they are teeming with inconsistent and evidently made-up information that varies from year to year in the sections about the students' family circumstances. Hence, the assertions about Vanka's place of birth, class affiliation and his mother's residence do not coincide; moreover, it is particularly bizarre that individual school years of the gradebook include information about the name and occupation of the alleged father, which are, as expected, in discrepancy. We learn from the school General Registers that Vanka's schooling in Zagreb didn\u2019t start until 1898\/99, after he attended the first two grades of folk school elsewhere, which is concordant with the claims of a local history chronicler from Zapre\u0161i\u0107 that the boy's name was recorded in the main gradebook of the elementary school in Pu\u0161\u0107a in 1896. Anton K(r)menth from Brezje near Samobor, who is probably the same person as the lord Kment(h) from Brezje in the then Municipality of Rakov Potok, is recorded as his guardian on two separate occasions in the high school Matriculation Records. Due to the current unavailability of more credible arguments that would confirm this assumption, on this occasion it remains only an intimation. The person occasionally appearing in the role of the guardian or \u201cresposible supervisor\u201d is Jozefina Rieger, the widow of a postal clerk, with an address at Ilica Street 96, who is, incidentally, as Vanka's landlord, the only constant reference in the school gradebooks and, later, student directories, until he came of age.<\/p>\n

Having graduated high school in 1908, he spent the next three years attending the Provisional College of Arts and Crafts, while simultaneously, in his own words, attending the Faculty of Philosophy for a few semesters. In the Archives of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb there is a record of Vanka as a student of a beginner course of the Department of Painting, from which it is evident that he was taught the main subjects by Bela Csikos Sesia. It is worth emphasizing that the preserved material does not include Vanka's degree certificate, which, according to the head of the Archives, could lead to the conclusion that he had never officially finished his studies in Zagreb. In the fall of 1910, as a \u201cboarder of the temporary art school in Zagreb\u201d who had been intending to go to Brussels in order to \u201cperfect himself in the field of art\u201d, he was heard before the competent authority of the City Government in order to determine his domicile and regulate his military service obligation. All the steps taken by the city services, including contacting the Magistrate in Brno, were futile, which is why Vanka was eventually included in the conscription lists of conscripts of a dubious domicile. He was only granted his domicile right in Zagreb six years later, and this was based on his many years of continuous residence in the city, whereby the prerequisites for acquiring Hungarian-Croatian citizenship were fulfilled, at least until \u201che was proven other \/ foreign \/ citizenship\u201d.<\/p>\n

Critics agree that in Vanka's early works \u2013 mostly nude and portrait studies, vases with flowers, charcoal sketches, watercolours and a few oil paintings, created as part of compulsory student exercises \u2013 raw talent is evident. Referring to several works created around 1910 and presented at the exhibition from the early 2000s, Maroevi\u0107 assesses that with them Vanka is \u201camalgamating himself into the genealogy of Croatian Modernism, partly putting to good use the experiences of the \u2018Colourful school\u2019, and partly \u2013 that is with paintings inspired by forest scenes \u2013 opening up the possibilities of a more liberal understanding of smudges and colour, that is, the creation of an almost autonomous space of the painting\u201d.<\/p>\n

From autumn 1911 to summer 1914, Vanka studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Decorative Arts in Brussels. To what extent this, for local artists unorthodox, choice of destination for the continuation of his education was conditioned by the need for broadening his horizons in an at the time already established cultural-artistic centre, and to what extent by practical motives, including alleged family and financial reasons, we can only speculate. In the context of the oft-repeated claims in literature that he took up residence there thanks to generous family support, it should be mentioned that during all his academic years he received scholarships from the Provincial Government of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia, on different grounds and in various amounts. During that period, his modest Brussels financial circumstances, as well as the necessity of constant financial support for the young ward so that he would be able to merely continue his studies in Belgium, are referenced in several documents of the Department for Social Welfare of Zagreb (Croat. Sirotinjsko povjerenstvo), under whose supervision as an illegitimate child Vanka had been since birth. One archival source from 1912 bears witness to a travel grant that Vanka was awarded for visiting the museums in Antwerp, but he most certainly extensively pored over collections in other nearby culturally relevant centres as well. He intensively studied the old masters, not remaining mute to the diverse contemporary forces in the artistically vibrant atmosphere of his new environment. Vizner points out that in Brussels, where in addition to Belgian artists, who were themselves active on the artistic map of Europe, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, British and, for example, Swiss artists also exhibited, \u201cthe influences of Impressionism, Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Pointillism, Post-Impressionism, Proto-Expressionism, along with the new Parisian movements of Fauvism and Cubism, the British Arts and Crafts movement and its Art Nouveau derivations, the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as the idea of \u2018art for art's sake\u2019 of the Aesthetic Movement converged\u201d. At the High Master's School, Vanka attended \u201cseveral courses in drawing based on live models and a 1st year course in decorative painting\u201d and received \u201cone honourable mention for a drawing composition and a first prize for a decorative composition in 1913\u2013 1914\u201d. In his own words, he was instructed by the renowned professors Constant Montald (1862 \u2013 1944) and Jean Delville (1867 \u2013 1953). Although a skillful draughtsman himself, with a refined sense of colour and composition, Delville, as a representative of the aesthetics of idealism, favoured content over form, considering art to be merely a means of achieving higher spiritual and moral goals. Inclined towards the mystical, with his allegorical symbolism \u2013 in the words of Snje\u017eana Pintari\u0107, of a Wagnerian-Moreauian expression \u2013 he influenced the young Croat, thereby building on the symbolist-secessionist heritage that Vanka had brought with him from his Zagreb studies.<\/p>\n

In Croatian museums and private collections, dozens of works created during his student-day wanderings across Belgium and the Netherlands have been preserved: city vedutas and Dutch interior paintings, the odd portrait (for example, the portrait of an old woman from Volendam, Geertje Karregat, known as Zaligmaker \u2013 the Saviour \u2013 a kind of local attraction and a frequent model for artists), small marinas in watercolour and pastel. One such, according to Grga Gamulin's appraisal, excellent, dark-toned watercolour, Skiffs - A Motif from Holland (1912), was bought at the exhibition of the Art Society in 1913 by the government's Department of Religion and Education and donated to the Academy for the Strossmayer Gallery, and is today part of the holdings of Zagreb's Modern Gallery. Vizner evaluates Vanka's Dutch interiors of a dark and dull palette (Loving Marriage<\/em>, Dutch Interior<\/em>, Dutch Women<\/em>), with only the occasional white form as a light source, as a conservative academic style of painting, based on Dutch painting of the 17th century.<\/p>\n

At the Brussels Triennial Salon in 1914 Vanka exhibited the painting The Fairgoers (F\u00eate de la Madone en Croatie)<\/em>, which was awarded the gold medal of King Albert. In that earliest manifestation of Vanka's \u201cfolklorism impregnated with rustic piety\u201d, as Maroevi\u0107 describes it, local critics already back then recognized the influence of contemporary Spanish painters. The Basques Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta \u2013 with his canvases of folklore motifs, darkened palette, figures with theatrical gestures and modelled like sculptures \u2013 and the thematically similarly oriented deaf-mute brothers Valent\u00edn and Ram\u00f3n de Zubiaurre, the latter inclined to the simplification of form and volume, and the flattening of the picture plane, are usually mentioned in this context, along with, occasionally, the Catalan Hermenegildo Anglada.<\/p>\n

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A postcard with a reproduction of Vanka's painting The Fairgoers (F\u00eate de la Madone en Croatie)<\/em>, which was awarded the gold medal of King Albert at the Brussels Triennial Salon in 1914 (The Fine Arts Archives of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Vizner expounds his view claiming that Vanka's paintings with depictions of peasants dressed in traditional garments, set in idealized landscapes of cultivated fields, with a white bell tower in the distance and a desolate cemetery at the edge of the valley, and the dignified focus of the depicted on a religious or an agricultural activity are the embodiment of \u201cthe artistic formula of romantic nationalism rooted in antebellum Europe of the late 19th and early 20th centuries\u201d. In this context, Ivo Herge\u0161i\u0107's thoughts are striking: \u201cHis favourite is Zuloaga, who has an influence on him, not artistically, but, so to speak, ideologically. Vanka - the regionalist, Vanka the ardent amateur of Croatian folklore, looks up to contemporary Spaniards because their example emboldens him to artistically exhaust ethnographic motifs harboured in his soul since his earliest childhood.\u201d Birth and death, working in the fields, folk customs, beliefs and superstitions, the harvest festival, reaping and nuptials \u2013 as beautifully enumerated by Ku\u0161an \u2013 are the subject of a series of large compositions that Vanka created, with varying degrees of success, over the next two decades. The same critic, aware that in Vanka \u201cthe story is often too \u2018arranged\u2019 at the expense of the art\u201d, points to a novelty brought to Croatian art of similar thematic preoccupations by his \u201cattempts to epically depict the main elements accompanying or driving the life of peasants in decorative conception\u201d. Moreover, Rus clearly defines this \u2018new interpretation\u2019 as \u201cdecorative steadfastness, the hectic heat of coloristic diversity consistently carried out in every square centimetre of the canvas without academic modelling and aerial perspective\u201d, extending this to some of Vanka's later compositions (Under the old crucifix<\/em>, Witches - Enchantment Against Hail<\/em>), in which his constant tendency towards the mystical is clearly manifested. This thematic segment of the artist's oeuvre in the Kor\u010dula collection is represented by the two aforementioned works, along with another concurrent work, segment, which is characterized by a much softer modelling and a radically different treatment of light, which has its source within the scene itself. The painting supposedly illustrates an ancient Zagorje ritual in which, on Easter Eve in a secluded place in the mountains, some elderly women reveal to an unmarried local girl the identity of her future husband. In so doing, they cut her hair; when it grows back, her wish will come true; and in the meantime the young woman will be forced to stay at home. This way, she will preserve her light complexion, the ideal of peasant beauty. The girl pays for the service with chickens, bread, wine, milk and oil.<\/p>\n

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