From the Hellenistic period to Byzantium
The oldest traces of human presence on Croatian soil date back to the Paleolithic period. Artifacts have been found in the Šandalja caves near Pula, in Punikve near Ivanac and in the Krapina. The first sculptures appear in the Neolithic and Copper Age. In the 4th century BC that Croatia develops strong links with the Greek Mediterranean cultures, on the islands of Vis, Hvar and Korčula. The Apoxyomene, the 2-meter-high bronze of a naked athlete at his toilet, was discovered in 1996 off the island of Vele Orjule. Restored in Zagreb, it has joined the Apoxyomenon Museum in Veli Lošinj.
A province of the Roman Empire, Dalmatia, located around Split (Salona), has its own school of sculpture which produced a number of works including a white marble bust of the emperor Augustus, discovered in Nin in the 20th century. After the fall of the Empire, Dalmatia received the Byzantine influence. The reliefs of the baptistery and the sarcophagi of the basilica of Split or the mosaics of the basilica of Poreč are the best testimonies. Illuminated manuscripts of the Sacred Museum of Zadar, the gospels of the cathedral of Split, date from the 6th and 7th centuries. In Istria, the frescoes in the church of St. Jerome (Hum), in Byzantine style, those in the church of St. Foška near Peroj, in Romanesque style, following French models, date from the 12th century. The carved and painted wooden crucifix from the Monastery of St. Francis in Zadar is the oldest discovered. The face of Christ becomes more animated and the style moves away from the Byzantine icon. They mark the beginning of Romanesque art.
During the Romanesque period, the basilicas with several naves and apses, such as in Rab, Zadar and Trogir, have portals very elaborate with bas-reliefs and sculptures relating episodes from the Bible. For example, the portal of the cathedral in Split, whose wooden door is signed by the workshop of the master Buvina, and that of Trogir, with its western tympanum, sculpted by Master Radovan in 1240. In full international Gothic, the Dalmatian school is illustrated in Trogir or Korčula, with the works of Blaž Jurjev in particular. His polyptych on wood in the church of All Saints, perfectly restored, testifies to the Italian influence. The painting also illuminates the manuscripts, in a sophisticated way. The most famous is the Trogir gospel (1231-1250). In addition, in the 13th century, the number of painters and workshops multiplied, the personality of the master builder asserted itself as did the radiance of his influence.
From the XIIIth to the XVth century, the Gothic style is also present in the north of Croatia (cathedral of Zagreb). In Dalmatie, the development of the radiant and flamboyant Gothic sees emerging the signature of the architect and sculptor Juraj Dalmatinac, who made his schools in Venice. This complete artist worked in Split, Dubrovnik and Zadar, but it is in the cathedral of Šibenik, classified by Unesco as a world heritage site, that we found his mysterious baptistery (1443), decorated with reticular structures and sculptures in the form of stalactites, reminiscent of a cave.
From the Renaissance to Art Nouveau
The advent of the Renaissance found fertile ground in Ragusa (Dubrovnik), where sculptors and painters collaborated, drawing inspiration from Italian artists of the Quattrocento while retaining the lessons of the Gothic. In the mid-15th century, Lovro Dobričević was the first painter to introduce three-dimensionality into the representation of his figures. It was not until the sixteenth century, with Mihajlo Hamzić or Nikola Božidarević, that painters broke free from traditional structures, such as flat gilding, and cleared the space behind their figures.
From the seventeenth century until the eighteenth century, the Baroque style developed in the north of the country, in Jesuit churches and private homes (Zagreb, Varaždin, Trški Vrh, near Krapina, the castles of Hrvatsko Zagorje). On the Adriatic coast, exchanges with Venice were beneficial to painters. The style of Federico Benković (1677-1733) in particular, influenced all of Central Europe. Other Ragusan painters, Stay and Matejević-Matteï, chose Rome or Naples to train. They witnessed the appearance of illusionist painting on walls where gilding and moldings, weightless figures, twirling cherubs.
In the 19th century, Vlaho Bukovac (1855-1922), born in Cavtat, south of Dubrovnik, made his living as a draftsman and portraitist before leaving for San Francisco where he trained as a painter. Back in Dubrovnik, Bishop Strossmayer offered him a scholarship to go to Paris where he frequented the studios of Cheramok and Cabanel. The artist experienced a formal evolution and the appearance of symbolic painting was a revelation. He returned to Zagreb before being appointed professor in Prague. In Cavtat, his family home became a studio-museum, where many of his paintings can be seen. These new trends of the Zagrebačka šarena škola contribute to the formation of the secessionist movement in Croatia, with Josip Račić, Bela Čikoš-Sesija, Crnčić.
The end of the nineteenth century in Croatia was marked by the revolutionary movements active in Europe. Inspired by the Austrian and German Secession, painters enter the Art Nouveau movement, which stands against traditionalism in art. The graphic arts became an autonomous mode of expression thanks to the development of lithography (Tomislav Krizman), posters, wallpaper and lettering. The sculptors Robert Frangeš-Mihanović and Rudolph Valdec developed funerary and symbolic themes in the Secession style. At this time, master sculptor Ivan Meštrović developed a personal expressionist style. He is the most renowned artist in Croatia. His monumental sculptures are still in place in Zagreb and Split, where you can visit his palace-studio, as well as in Nin. Mainly a sculptor but also a painter, architect and writer, he travels a lot, meeting among other personalities Gustav Klimt and Auguste Rodin and exhibiting at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York in 1947.
From moderns to Croatian photography
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Croatia followed the European artistic wave of impressionism and landscape painting while developing an identity theme linked to the renewal of national consciousness (Quiquerez, Mašić, Iveković). Croatian modernists (Josip Račić Kraljević, Becić) went to school in Paris or Munich.
Croatian photography experienced a special development. The first department of photography was established in 1939, at the Museum of Applied Arts in Zagreb. The birth of the Zagreb School endorsed the artistic and poetic commitment of photographers such as Bela Čikoš Sessia, a symbolist painter who made photographic studies prior to his paintings or Franjo Mosinger, one of the first avant-garde photographers in Europe. As for Ðuro Janeković (1912-1989) or Tošo Dabac (1907-1970), they inaugurated a golden age of photojournalism for the print media. Foreign magazines, Life, Stern, Paris Match, Elle, Tempo and Gente regularly hired Croatian photographers, who were published all over the world. Among them, Tošo Dabac, known for his work during the Great Depression of 1929, Frank Horvat, fashion photographer and reporter. Since 1970, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb has preserved an important collection of photographs dating back to the 1920s.
From socialist realism to street art
The Munich Circle (Münchenski krug) is the term given by art historians in the early 20th century to a group of Croatian painters (Josip Račić, Miroslav Kraljević, Vladimir Becić and Oskar Herman), who attended the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. Influenced by French Impressionism and German Expressionism, they laid the foundations of Croatian Modernism.
During the interwar period, Croatia experimented with various pictorial modes - expressionism, cubism, abstraction (Tartaglia, Šulentić, Gecan) - but the dogmas of socialist realism in the 1950s curbed the development of the avant-garde. During the 1950s-1960s, the country saw the erection of a number of statues of illustrious and popular figures. At the same time, before and after the Second World War, a school of naive art was founded in Koprivnica, a village on the Hungarian border. In Zagreb, the Hlebine gallery and museum dedicated to this style present the history of these rural artists, the pioneers Ivan Generalić, Franjo Mraz, Mirko Virius, the second generation, Dragan Gazi, Ivan Vecenaj, Mijo Kovačić, Franjo Filipović, Martin Mehke, Krsto Hegedušić, and the great Ivan Generalić. A whole tradition of folk painters who created a regional, colorful, original art.
In the early 1960s, the "second avant-garde" was more conceptualist. Edo Murtić's lyrical abstraction, Drazen Grubišić's colorful, cracked flat tints, Zlatko Keser's raw painting, Antun Maračić's silkscreen installations or multimedia questioned the place of art in galleries, the role of the artist in society. Few of them have succeeded in establishing themselves in an international market, with the exception of Zoran Mušič or Andrea Andriya Filipović. In Croatia, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Meštrović Pavilion and the Lauba Gallery in Zagreb, as well as museums and galleries in Rijeka (European Capital of Croatian Culture in 2020), Pula, Zadar, Split and Dubrovnik, showcase the work of contemporary artists.
Today, Croatian photography is illustrated by the work of contemporary artists such as Ivan Faktor, whose work makes as much use of photography and video as it does of performance, or Antun Maračić, the conceptual artist Boris Cvjetanović who, with Ana Opalić, represented Croatia at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Represented by several international galleries, Mladen Stilinović was undoubtedly the best-known of these avant-garde artists. A politically committed multimedia activist, he used photography as well as all the techniques required for conceptual installations. The snapshots of Pavo Urban, who died under the bombs in Dubrovnik in 1991 while working as a reporter, are striking. The massive arrival of digital technology is contributing to the emergence in Croatia of a new scene of young photographic artists such as Bojan Mrdenović, Luka Kedzo, Davor Konjikusić and Sinisa Glogoski.
Based in France, Veljko Vidak is a photographer, filmmaker and painter. His last exhibition was held at La Criée in Marseille in 2020. Entitled Traversée (Crossing), his series of large-format oils on canvas impresses, with the threatening sky hanging over the sea and the man overboard, probing the horizon in the hope of survival.
Many Croatian visual artists are not fortunate enough to exhibit in galleries. For them, especially painters, digital platforms are a way of making themselves known internationally. For example, Artsper, Singulart and Art Majeur offer virtual access to a vast catalog of Croatian works.
For street art enthusiasts, the capital boasts some superb walls by Slaven Kosanović aka Lunar, born in 1975 in Zagreb, who has been spray-painting frescoes since 1993, or OKO ("l'œil" in French). Graffiti artists Morka, Dengan Skor, Mosk and Pejac hail from Rijeka, which was European Capital of Culture in 2020.
