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PISAVA
VELIKOST

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VELIKE/MALE
STIL
Permanent Collection

1900–1918

Matija Jama

(Ljubljana, 1872–1947)

Rozi Bleiweis with Her Children
(1901), oil, canvas, 121 x 84,5 cm
signed and dated lower right: M: JAMA / 01

NG S 3297, National Gallery of Slovenia, Ljubljana

Jama began the new century with a series of bourgeois portraits that set new standards for this genre in Slovenia. He placed Leo Souvan in an interior with discreet signifiers of his social status such as the wallpaper, his fashionably elegant attire and his dandyish, nonchalant pose. The unusual point of view, reminiscent of Degas, focuses the viewer’s attention on the subject of the portrait, who is only allotted a limited amount of space in front of the decorated wall. In the case of Rozi Bleiweis with her Children, Jama expands the genre into a portrait image in the modern style introduced by photography and it would be no surprise to learn that Jama – an occasional photographer himself, at least of the Govekar family – was working from a photograph here. The subjects of the portrait – with the exception of the baby wriggling in its mother’s lap – look straight ahead as though into a photographer’s lens.

Informality is an expression of bourgeois intimacy. Like the domestic interior, the enjoyment of life outdoors is part of the bourgeois ritual: a yearning for an elemental, unadulterated, morally prestigious world that is the antipode of everyday urban life. The framing landscape consisting of the lawn and the stand of slender, elegant birches in the background, represents a place dedicated to recreation, relaxation and a restoration of vitality and health. Jama has set the mother, with her unmistakably fin-de-siècle hairstyle, on a base consisting of her widely spreading skirt, a rich fashionable dress. Her handsome looks and the obvious health she radiates allude to the family’s wealth, at least in the allegorical sense. The delicate rose-pink shade of Rozi’s dress, while perfectly in tune with the colour composition of the work, is undoubtedly also a subtle allusion to her name.

A planar composition consisting of bands oriented parallel to the picture plane was a constant even in Jama’s early works. In this portrait we can recognise the fruits of the mentorship of Johann Herterich, which Jama enjoyed at the Munich Academy. The realistic tradition of Wilhelm Leibl’s idea of pure painting is reflected in the suggestive power of the brushstrokes used to model the folds of the light-coloured dress and the grass, in which reflections of the pink garment are scattered. The painting stands at the threshold of Jama’s reorientation towards the problem of light and a divided palette. In Tomaž Brejc’s view, the painter’s preoccupation with the tonal unity of the painting contributes to a dilution of its plein air effect (Brejc, 1982).



Intimism, Expression, Jakopič and Sternen
The empathetic painting of Jakopič stems from his encounters with symbolist art in Munich before the turn of the century; it then transformed into intimist images of the time before the Great War. Counterlight, so exceptional in the tradition of western art, is one of the essential elements of his style. Looking at the sun through tree crowns creates a shaded and limited, intimate space in the foreground where lonely muses or bathing women appear. Analogous to natural counterlight is the “internal” light from an artificial source as a stimulus for inner life in the images of women engaged in typical female activities in middle-class interiors (At the Piano, By a Lamp, Maidens). Light and orchestration of arbitrary colours culminated in his painting Reminiscences, in which the painter, by means of a wide colour range, complementary contrasts and empathetic handling of paint, enhanced the sensual openness of the image to the viewer’s empathy and emotionality. 

In a very different way the world of a lonely middle-class woman is revealed by Matej Sternen. His The Red Parasol shows a fashionable and self-confident townswoman taking a walk in the English Garden in Munich or in Tivoli Park in Ljubljana. After 1911 the painter devised in ambitious formats a number of nudes and young women dressing or being engaged in some other intimate business. The skill of his brush speaks about sensual luxury and creates thoroughly convincing equivalence between the real and re-created worlds. The suggestive look of white taffeta or various shades of silk create a sensual aura for middle-class women whom the painter’s compositional strategy offers to an uninvited, or sometimes provoked, gaze. 

In the sphere of sculpture, several younger representatives emerge, such as Lojze Dolinar, Ivan Napotnik and Anton Štefic. They still depend on Art Nouveau stylization (Napotnik’s A Woman of Egypt), which is more evident in Dolinar’s small sculpture, but they already make use of more expressive interpretations, e.g. Job by Štefic and The Blind One by Dolinar.
National art, Impressionism
The discussion about national art took a new direction after the exhibition of the Sava artists’ society in the Galerie Miethke in Vienna in 1904, when Viennese art critics recognized a new painting province of the Empire in the paintings of Slovenian artists. In spite of his determination to withdraw from the ill-tempered attitude of the local scene, Ivan Grohar exhibited his painting Spring, the central piece in the above-mentioned exhibition, in the Sezession the following year under the title From My Homeland. A series of paintings suggestive of plein-air thus established themselves in public as a gallery of symbolic images of the homeland. The period of impressionistically formulated landscapes lasted until Grohar’s Sower of 1907, which is a programme-based image in which the earth and the man reach mythical identification through handling of paint, and a Carniolan hayrack appears in the picture as a national attribute of the agricultural worker. Within the Slovenian artists’ group Vesna, to which Maksim Gaspari, Gvidon Birolla and sculptor Svetoslav Peruzzi belong, a popular variant of national motifs dominated which relied on direct examples of folk tradition and creativity. The proximity of the two theses is revealed by the comparison between Birolla’s (Landscape) and Grohar’s (A Hillock) landscapes, the motifs of the same topographical area. The ideological use of the term “Slovenian Impressionism” is clearly paradoxical in view of the motifs of Lower Austria or Croatia by Matija Jama (Willows, Village in Winter, Bridge on the Dobra, etc.), but the artist’s obsessive dealing with light throughout his life imperceptibly incorporated them into the notion of the national. If impacts of Art Nouveau can be traced in his pictures, Jama’s painting, based on a skilful painting routine and self-discipline, is pervaded by reasoned distance and exaltation of the visual. 

In the sphere of sculpture, Gangl’s and Repič’s realism is gradually surpassed by younger sculptors who follow Art Nouveau stylization or answer the influence of Auguste Rodin. Berneker could meet his works at exhibitions in Vienna and saw them in contemporary periodicals. Forms modelled in a fluid manner, horizontally oriented compositions and softly polished surface in marble portraits are just a few elements of the most topical trends. Ivan Zajec was staying in Paris in 1905 and had first-hand acquaintance of the master. His Conflagration and The Wave of Life demonstrate this experience.
Late Realism and Art Nouveau
When they studied in Munich, the generation of younger Slovenian realists, Anton Ažbe, Ivana Kobilca and Ferdo Vesel, took up the tradition of the manifest handling practised by the circle of Wilhelm Leibl. Ivana Kobilca surpassed her motif-related limitations to portraits tinted with genre-like hues (Woman Drinking Coffee) or pure genre pieces (Women Ironing) only with her painting Summer, 1890, in which the allegory is obliterated by plein-air intentions. But after the canvas had been exhibited in Paris, her ambitions gradually waned and for the rest of her life she painted mainly excellent portraits (e.g. Parisian Woman with a Letter; two decades later portrait of her niece Mira Pintar) and flower still lifes. Ažbe put all his energies into his work as a teacher, and his Black Woman was hung on the wall of his art school in Munich as an exemplary masterpiece. From among the realist painters it was Ferdo Vesel that came closest to the aspirations of the younger generation, but he never abandoned his realist roots. Two graduates from Prague academy, Ivan Vavpotič and Ivan Žabota, upgraded portraiture to a middle-class status portrait of intellectuals (Composer Fran Gerbič and Dr Niko Županič in Vienna) or femmes fatales (Alma Souvan), while Henrika Šantel carried on the attained level of genre portrait of children. Matej Sternen drew his power from Ažbe’s gravitational attraction; by means of light he liberated the studio motif of a nude from the qualifiers of study context. With his Head of a Black Man, Rihard Jakopič attempted to emulate his teacher Ažbe, but in his portrait of Henrik Czerny or the image of a Saint he at the same time vigorously resisted the teacher’s authority. Art Nouveau models, imbued with symbolism, are revealed by the counter light, limited palette and a rather licked surface in the portrait but emancipated handling in the figure of the saint. The time between 1899 when the question of Slovenian art became topical among the intellectuals and 1904 when landscape assumed iconic character is represented by the monumentalized genre by Ivan Grohar (The Rakers) inspired by Giovanni Segantini, and by Peter Žmitek (Beggar with a Church Model) relying on the example of Ilya Repin and Peredvizhniki.