20.02.1929–03.02.2023
Bine Rogelj
Albin “Bine” Rogelj of Ljubljana was a ski jumper for Yugoslavia and finished 23rd on the normal hill at the 1956 Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo. He studied drawing alongside his sporting career, and from 1953 to 1990 he worked for the satirical weekly Pavliha. He drew his cartoons straight in ink, without a pencil sketch.
Biography
Fifth place in Oberstdorf, 31 December 1953: Rogelj’s best individual result in the Four Hills Tournament. He was twenty-four, and by then he had been attending art classes for several years.
He was born on 20 February 1929 in Ljubljana. According to some accounts, he began ski jumping as a child. The country he grew up in changed its name within his lifetime: the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then socialist Yugoslavia, and later independent Slovenia.
He made his international debut in the 1953/54 Four Hills Tournament. After fifth place in Oberstdorf, he was thirteenth at the New Year’s jump in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, ninth in Innsbruck and seventeenth in Bischofshofen, and finished the tournament in 10th or 11th place overall (the sources differ). In 1954, at the Nordic World Ski Championships in Falun, he jumped 73 and 75.5 metres and shared 47th place with the Finn Esko Mömmö. At the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo he competed for Yugoslavia on the normal hill and took 23rd place. He began drawing at a design school, where he made pictures for the wall newspaper. According to some accounts, from 1950 he was enrolled at an art college; he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1955. Professor Marij Pregelj advised him to send his work to the weekly Pavliha, and from 1953 until 1990 Rogelj worked there steadily. His cartoons also appeared in the magazine’s yearbook, Pavlihova pratika, and in 1985 he became its editor-in-chief. In 1970 he was awarded a prize of the Prešeren Foundation.
He often tried a cartoon several times over: he drew straight in ink, without making a preliminary sketch in pencil. He rarely worked to commission and preferred to develop his own ideas. Over the years the drawings ran into the thousands, and his manner is easy to recognise; I think it is this recognisability that places him among the most prominent Slovene cartoonists of his generation. He influenced the way Slovene cartoons look today.
From 1983 Rogelj lived in Gozd Martuljek, in the municipality of Kranjska Gora in north-western Slovenia. He died in Ljubljana on 3 February 2023.
Profile notes