Issue: 1/2019

Igor Borozan

Authors:
PESSIMISM AND ANTICIPATION OF THE GREAT WAR IN THE ARTWORK OF UROŠ PREDIĆ

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Uroš Predić (1857‐1953) was born on 7 December 1857 in Orlovat, a r‐ egion of Banat, then part of the Austro‐Hungarian Empire. In school year 1876⁄1877, Predić enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (Akademie der bildenden Künste). In 1876, motivated by the conflicts in Montenegro and Bosnia, he painted the first version of Bosnian Fugitives. Leaving Vienna, Predić found himself in Berlin, Munich, and other centers of the Germanic world where he was able to get acquainted with contemporary trends in painting, aswell as with modern cultural and conceptual trends. It was, in particular, the decadent pessimism, as well as the currents of Symbolism, that could have affected the maturing of a young intellectual and his further personal and professional growth. In 1886, Predić moved to Belgrade, an indisputable ‐ integrative symbol of the entire Serbian ethnics. In 1887, Predić presented an unusual allegorical image titled Vision in the Clouds. Uroš Predić, a subject of the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, painted an antiwar and, conditionally speaking, an anti‐Austrian painting. The critique of the contemporary society through the allegorical representation of a downfall confirmed Predić as the supporter of Schopenhauer and his voluntarism. In 1889 he painted Bosnian Fugitives. This large patriotic image evokes events related to the Herzegovina uprising in the village of Nevesinje in 1875, with a special emphasis on the re‐ fuge of Serbian fugitives on Kozara. The painter’s unquestionable patriotism was overshadowed the sadness of the entire world, at the time when the new ‐ and young Serbian nation was looking for expressive and dynamic art. Some decadent elitism was recorded in the painter’s opus at the beginning of the ‐ twentieth century. The Circle of Serbian Sisters commissioned from Predić in ‐ 1914 the painting Kosovo Maiden with the intention to reproduce and distribute it widely. The painting in its present form was finally completed in 1919. The total destruction and devastation caused by the First World War ‐ made it difficult for Predić’s nature to make an iconic image of the Serbian nation after the end of the conflict. The interwar climate in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was largely dominated by an official, representative culture, which confirmed Predić’s vision that his work would again be up‐to‐date. State stability and peacetime also produced new social circumstances within which Predić’s artworks were revived