As an
artist, Ivana Kobilca felt most comfortable abroad, even if she was working for
domestic clients. Her contacts with the Slovenian art scene are sparse,
especially when compared to her relationships with foreign artists. The feeling
was mutual - Kobilca was reluctant to exhibit in the Jakopič pavilion and in
the 1913 group caricature of the Slovenian artistic community by Hinko Smrekar,
Kobilca is not included (the tall giant on the left is Pavel Gustinčič).
Kobilca
associated more with foreign artists who were involved in the four major
secessionist art movements in Munich, Paris, Vienna and Berlin. The core of her
European group were fellow students who, like her, attended the Munich Academy
for Women, led by Alois Erdtelt: Rosa Pfäffinger, Maria Slavona and Käthe
Kollwitz. When Fritz von Uhde, co-founder of the Munich Secession (founded
1892), advised Kobilca to try exhibiting in Paris, she connected with the
tireless titan of French art at the time, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who
encouraged Kobilca, like many other artists, who gathered around him, to send
her works to the Salon of the French Secession (founded 1890). In Paris,
Kobilca lived with Pfäffinger, Slavona and Willy Gretor, a manipulative art
patron, who was connected to several avant-garde artists. During her life in
Sarajevo, she met Maximilian Liebenwein, the future vice-president of the
Vienna Secession (founded in 1897), who, like her, was a regular contributor to
the illustrated Bosnian magazine Nada (published 1895–1903). In Berlin, she
kept in touch with Käthe Kollwitz (who also raised the son of Rosa Pfäffinger),
a member of the Berlin Secession (founded 1898), and lived only a short walk
away from its exhibition centre.
Kobilca
reached her creative peak in Paris at the age of thirty-two and then stuck to
realism, which she softened with modern derivatives only in composition and
pentimenti. With the exception of Sarajevo, Kobilca commissions abroad were
less ambitious and she found it difficult to tolerate rejection and criticism.
She herself reported how hard it was for foreign masters to establish
themselves in metropolitan centres, nor did she stay anywhere long enough to
really settle in. Interesting is the juxtaposition with Käthe Kollwitz and
Maria Slavona: both found success quite late, on home soil (in Berlin) and with
institutional support; Kollwitz's mentor was Max Liebermann, president of the
Berlin Secession, and Maria Slavona, also a member of the Berlin association,
married Otto Ackermann, a Swiss art dealer. Slavona focused on Impressionism
and exhibited at the Miethke Salon in Vienna and the Salon of Paul Cassirer in
Berlin when she was in her forties, and Käthe Kollwitz reached the peak of her
expressionist career after the fifties. Kobilca also got a new impetus at this
turning point in her life, but her development was interrupted by the First
World War and the painter returned from Berlin to Ljubljana, where she was
awaited by (post)war shortages, undemanding clients and domestic artistic
clique.