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Vlaho Bukovac (5
July 1855 - 23 April 1922), a
Croatian painter.
His life and work were eclectic,
for the artist pursued his career in a variety of
locales and his style changed greatly over the course of
that career. He is probably best known for his 1887 nude Une
fleur (A
Flower),
which he created during his French period
and which received attention in various reviews and
publications during his lifetime.
Bukovac was born as Biagio
Faggioni in
the town of Cavtat south
of Dubrovnik in Dalmatia.
His father was an Italian from Genoa,
while his mother was of Croatian descent.
Bukovac received his artistic education in Paris where
he was sent by the patron (Knez) Medo
Pucić. His small studies and sketches delighted
his professor,
the well-known Alexandre
Cabanel, and Bukovac became a student at
the prestigious École
des Beaux-Arts.
Bukovac died in Prague.
Bukovac began his career in France.
Painted in a "sugary" realistic style, his fashionable
paintings achieved great success at the Paris
Salon. During his sojourn in France,
he travelled to England and
the coast of Dalmatia,
where he was born. His wide travels throughout his life
also included voyages to the Black
Sea, South (Chile and Peru),
and North
America.
He learnt English when living in America
as a teenager and, from the mid-1880s to the First World
War, regularly visited England, where many of his most
popular pictures were sold by the London art dealers,
Vicars Bros. They included his large religious piece, Suffer
the Little Children to Come to Me, and three nude
subjects, The
White Slave, Potiphar’s
Wife and Adam
and Eve. In Britain, Bukovac also painted portraits
of Vicars’s clients, including his best patrons Samson
Fox of
Harrogate and Richard LeDoux of Liverpool. Samson Fox
had bought Suffer
the Little Children to Come to Me, exhibited at the
Paris Salon in 1888, which was later presented to St
Robert's church in Harrogate.
Bukovac became a significant
representative of fine arts in Zagreb, Croatia from
1893 to 1897, bringing with him the spirit of French
art. These new directives are most evident in his landscapes.
He then began using a palette of lively and lighter
colors using liberated strokes, soft rendering and the
introduction of light on the painting canvas.
In his time in Zagreb,
he became a leader at many important cultural and
artistic events. He founded the Zagreb
multicoloured school,
helped initiate the construction of the Art
Pavilion,
and organized the first artistic exhibition in the
Academy Palace in 1893. Due to conflict with Izidor
Kršnjavi and
his great sensitivity, he withdrew to his native Cavtat where
he stayed from 1898 to 1902. Upon his return to Prague
he was appointed associate professor at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Prague in
1903.
His departure from Prague resulted in a
complete change of personality for Bukovac. He felt
satisfaction and enthusiasm in Zagreb that he had not
felt in a while, and began to dedicate all of his energy to
his new students, one of which was noted Croatian
painter Mirko
Rački.
It was in this time he introduced pointillism to
the Prague
Academy,
and earned his historical reputation as an excellent
pedagogue. In Zagreb, he is probably best known as the
painter of the theatre
curtain in
the Croatian
National Theatre,
"Croatian National Revival".
Besides being an artist who followed the
established canons dictated by the Salon and the general
public, he followed his own inner impulses of artistic
creation. Liberated artistic expression, which was
called Impressionism,
developed in the spirit of the artists who kept
gathering in modernism-oriented marginal galleries in
Paris in the 1870s. He knew the spirit of academism and,
on the other hand, he felt the spirit of Impressionistic
freedom. Having accepted modern principles, Bukovac
painted casual pictures, using liberated strokes of the
brush, in thepointillist technique.
Vlaho's painting "Une
fleur"
sold at Bonhams in London on
14 June 2006 for £100.800.00, including the auction
premium. The auction
house
identified the painting as Reclining
Nude. |
