Ivan Generalić

Biography

On 13 September 1931 the third exhibition of the Zemlja (“Earth”) group opened in the Art Pavilion in Zagreb. Among the participants were two peasant lads from Hlebine, Ivan Generalić and Franjo Mraz. This date is generally taken as the beginning of Croatian naïve art.

Generalić was born on 21 December 1914 in Hlebine, near Koprivnica, into a poor peasant family. From 1921 to 1926 he attended the village school, helped his parents on the farm and spent his free time drawing. In the summer of 1930, together with Mraz, he met Krsto Hegedušić, one of the founders of Zemlja. Hegedušić showed them various painting techniques and demanded that they stop copying devotional pictures and postcards and paint from their own observation. This is how the “school” of peasant painters in Hlebine came about; by other accounts, Hegedušić had founded it as early as 1929. In his first years Generalić worked mostly in watercolour and ink. In 1932–1937, under the influence of Zemlja, he painted village scenes with a social note: swineherds, fairs, funerals, property seized for unpaid taxes, clashes between peasants and gendarmes. Among the works of this time are “Requisition” (1934), “The Funeral of Štef Halaček” and “The Đelekovec Uprising” (1936). In 1934 he married Anka Kolarek, and in 1935 their son Josip was born, who also became a naïve painter. In 1936 a joint exhibition of Generalić and Mraz was held in Zagreb, and in 1938 there were two solo shows, in Zagreb and in Novi Sad.

By the end of the 1930s he had moved away from social subjects. His pictures had more air and fewer people: forests, solitary trees, flooded meadows, cloudy skies. At the same time he switched from oil on canvas and cardboard to tempera and oil on glass, in small formats. Drawing nevertheless remained the basis of every work, and he had begun with drawings. He did not trade his own fame, or Hegedušić’s, for the city: he stayed in the village and combined painting with farming.

After the war Generalić gathered several gifted village youths in Hlebine, among them Franjo Dolenec, Franjo Filipović and Dragan Gaži, and became the mentor of the second generation of the Hlebine School. In 1946–1951, under the pressure of the new political situation, his pictures began to show front-line veterans, women’s brigades building roads and tunnels, tractor drivers and members of farming cooperatives; he did not abandon his earlier subjects, but painted them without their former lyricism. In these years he painted many portraits, among them “Portrait of Franjo Gaži” (1950). In 1952 the Peasant Art Gallery was founded in Zagreb (now the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art), and Generalić’s works made up a large part of its collection. In 1953 he showed his paintings at the Galerie Yougoslave in Paris, and the exhibition drew the interest of public and critics; by some accounts he lived and worked in Paris for several months. In the mid-1950s he began to work closely with the art historian Mića Bašičević, and in 1954–1958 he taught drawing and technical drawing at the eight-year school in Hlebine. In 1955 the Hlebine painters were shown at the São Paulo Biennial, and in 1958 his pictures hung in the Brussels exhibition “50 Ans d’Art Moderne”, after which he was invited to hold a solo show at the Palais des Beaux-Arts.

Around then symbolism and allegory became noticeable in his work. He began to paint still lifes of peasant food and night scenes with fires and blazes, and he made the rooster his main character: “The Plucked Rooster” (1954), “Rooster on the Roof” (1956), “The Hanged Rooster” (1959), and later “The Crucified Rooster” (1964). In 1959 came “The Deer Wedding”, “The Death of Virius” (in memory of Mirko Virius, his companion in the Hlebine group) and “The Woodcutters”, and with them his first large-format pictures. The meaning of many of them, to my mind, cannot be read without knowing the context and the significance of individual details: the rooster means something different from one picture to the next.

In the mid-1960s he began to work with the Swiss gallerist Bruno Bischofberger. From 1963 his compositions became theatrical: figures in the centre, landscape and village architecture at the edges like stage wings; in these years he also made autograph repetitions of his successes. In 1969, at the world exhibition of naïve art in Bratislava, the international jury named him the only living artist among the classics of naïve art. Later his palette narrowed to a few colours, abstract backgrounds appeared in his large pictures, and his themes became loneliness and the finiteness of life: “Self-Portrait” (1975).

In 1975 his wife Anka died. From 1977 Generalić lived alternately in Sigetec and Primošten. In 1980 he married Roza Lončarić and in the same year gave twenty paintings to the gallery in his native Hlebine; the museum collection that bears his name was formed on that basis. In his lifetime he had more than seventy solo exhibitions, illustrated books and designed theatre sets, and eight monographs have been published about him.

Generalić died on 27 November 1992 in the hospital in Koprivnica. He is buried in the village of Sigetec, near Hlebine. Posthumously he was awarded the Order of Danica Hrvatska with the effigy of Marko Marulić.