Edo Murtić

Biography

In 1958 Edo Murtić took part, in a single year, in three of the biggest events in the world of contemporary art of the day: the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie Prize in Pittsburgh and Documenta in Kassel. He was thirty-seven.

He was born on 4 May 1921 in Velika Pisanica near Bjelovar, then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. He was the second child of Vinko and Franciska Murtić. The family soon moved to Zagreb, in 1925 according to some accounts, and he went to school there. In 1935–39 he attended a craft school, where his teachers were Edo Kovačević, Kamilo Tompa and Ernest Tomašević. His first exhibition was held in 1935, when he was fourteen; sources differ on where it took place, naming either his school or the city of Zagreb. In 1939 Murtić enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, studying under Ljubo Babić and Krsto Hegedušić. In 1940 he attended classes given by Petar Dobrović in Belgrade, and in 1941 he returned to Zagreb to complete his studies at the academy. His early work was realistic: interiors, portraits, still lifes and graphic illustrations. In 1940 he illustrated “Red Horse” (Crveni konj) by Jure Kaštelan, and in 1944 he made lithographs for the poem “The Pit” (Jama) by Ivan Goran Kovačić.

He held socialist views, and with the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the anti-fascist movement. In the spring of 1944 he joined the partisan forces, where he designed posters and books. Sources also differ on when he became involved in the resistance, naming 1941 and 1943.

After the war he travelled and exhibited extensively. In 1951 he spent time in the United States and Canada and encountered Abstract Expressionism at first hand; there he met the work, and the circle, of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. In France he saw the work of Jean René Bazaine, Alfred Manessier and Gustave Singier, painters of Lyrical Abstraction. Out of these two experiences his own language took shape. By the early 1960s Tachisme and Art Informel can be seen in his paintings: on a dark ground, almost monochrome works; on a light ground, a rhythmic movement of a dark mass across the surface. Titles of the period include “Autumn” (1962), “Blue Screen” (1964) and “Black Triangle” (1968). In 1956 in Zagreb he became one of the founders of the group “March” (Mart).

In the 1970s his work began to appear in public places in Zagreb: in the Mirogoj Cemetery, in the memorial ossuary at Čazma, in the Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall, where his tapestries also hung, and in the Zagrepčanka office building, for which he made a mosaic in 1975. By the 1980s he was regarded as one of the leading abstract painters of the socialist world. In the summer of 1981 he spent several months sailing along the southern Adriatic coast, and from this came the “Fires” (Požari) cycle, which he continued until 1990. At the same time, in 1981–84, came the “Eyes of Fear” cycle: a new edition of Goran Kovačić’s “The Pit” drew him back to the subject of war, violence and pain. He introduced into it two dark mythological figures, the Minotaur and the Raven, and built the cycle on red and black.

With his wife, the artist Goranka Vrus Murtić, he bought and renovated an old stone house in Vrsar, on the Istrian coast. Zagreb remained their main residence, but the couple spent much of each year in Vrsar. Of his studio there Murtić said that he enjoyed the silence and concentration. Near Vrsar lies an ancient Roman stone quarry, after which the “Montraker” cycle (1992–95) is named: he was interested not just in the landscape but in the mark of the human hand on the stone. He said he “drew these colours out of the Istrian landscape”. To my mind, this is the best explanation of his abstraction: the line of a hill, rock or tree is given without volume, and the palette is taken from the local light.

Murtić was a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, and an honorary citizen of Bjelovar. In his lifetime he held more than 150 solo exhibitions and took part in about 300 group shows on every continent; his work is in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in London. He donated more than 1,500 of his works to the City of Zagreb.

He died in Zagreb on 2 January 2005, aged 83. In January 2010 the exhibition “War” (Rat) opened at the Art Pavilion in Zagreb: more than 350 drawings, gouaches and collages on death, suffering and war. In 2010 he was posthumously made an honorary citizen of Zagreb, and in October of that year an exhibition from his donation opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art; the street beside the museum was named after him.