Ivan Rabuzin

Biography

Ivan Rabuzin’s first exhibition took place in 1956 in Novi Marof. He was thirty-five, and not yet a professional painter: by day he worked in a furniture factory.

He was born on 27 March 1921 in the village of Ključ near Novi Marof, in Varaždin County. His father was a miner, and Ivan was the sixth of eleven children. In 1937–1940 he trained as a carpenter in Zagreb and Zemun, and in 1947 he graduated from the master craftsman department of the trade school in Zagreb. There was almost no other artistic training in his youth: an evening drawing course with Kosta Angeli Radovani in 1947–1948, and that was all. From 1950 Rabuzin worked at the Bor furniture factory in Novi Marof, as a carpenter, then a shop foreman, then director. He began to paint seriously alongside this work, in the mid-1950s. When exactly he became a full-time artist is not known for certain: both 1959 and 1962 are given. After 1963 he painted exclusively.

The turning point was a solo exhibition at the Galerie Mona Lisa in Paris in 1963. His international reputation begins with it. In the same year the Galerie St. Etienne in New York showed him; in 1964 he took part in exhibitions of naïve art in Rotterdam and again in Paris; and in the 1970s his work was shown in Zagreb, Paris (the Grand Palais, 1971) and Munich (Haus der Kunst, 1975). He is credited with about two hundred solo exhibitions in all. In 1972 the French critic Anatole Jakovsky called him one of the greatest naïve painters of all times and countries; the quotation is often repeated, and I would read it as a collector’s compliment, not a verdict of art history.

His pictures are almost always about Hrvatsko Zagorje, the hilly region of northern Croatia. He painted hills, flowers, clouds and the sun, and trees turn into ornament: dense geometric patterns of vegetation and clouds form arabesques in soft pastel colours. Critics spoke of an “idealistic reconstruction of the world”. He belonged to the circle of Croatian naïve art close to the Hlebine School, although he himself was less closely tied to Hlebine than its founders.

In the 1970s Rabuzin decorated about five hundred sets of the Suomi tableware, designed by the Finnish designer Timo Sarpaneva, for the German firm Rosenthal, in its Studio Linie line. From his designs a large stage curtain was made for the Takarazuka Theatre in Tokyo (1980), as well as a woven wall hanging for the lecture hall of the Museum of Modern Art in Urawa, Japan (1983). In 1989, for the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Belgrade, municipalities of Zagorje, Gospić, Karlovac and Sisak presented the city with a mural by him for a building on Knez Mihailova Street.

From 1992 or 1993 until 1999 Rabuzin was a member of the Croatian Parliament for the Croatian Democratic Union, in the second and third assemblies. In 1996 he received the Varaždin County lifetime achievement award. Around 2002 he stopped painting.

Rabuzin died on 18 December 2008 in a hospital in Varaždin. He was buried on 22 December in the cemetery at Oštrica. Since 2011 a cultural centre named after him has operated in Novi Marof, and since 2016 the “Rabuzin Days” have been held there.