22.03.1885–19.06.1908
Josip Račić
Josip Račić (1885–1908) learned lithography in Zagreb, then studied in Munich at Anton Ažbe's school and at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he joined a group of Croatian painters known as the Munich Circle. Almost everything that survives was painted in a few student years: portraits of 1907 and Paris watercolours of 1908. He was twenty-three when he died in Paris.
Biography
The first posthumous exhibition of Račić's work opened in Zagreb in 1920, twelve years after his death. It was arranged by Ljubo Babić, at the Museum of Arts and Crafts.
Račić was born on 22 March 1885 in Horvati, then a village near Zagreb and now part of the city (the districts of Knežija and Srednjaci). From 1892 to 1896 he attended the lower town elementary school for boys in Samostanska ulica, where his drawing master was the artist Oton Iveković. He then studied until 1900 at the Royal High School in Zagreb, whose building now houses the Mimara Museum. From 1900 to 1903 he learned lithography in the Zagreb studio of Vladimir Rožankowsky, a master craftsman and the studio's owner. In 1904 Račić went to Munich, to the school of the Slovene painter Anton Ažbe. Ažbe, as the story goes, noticed his talent fairly quickly and advised him to keep working. In 1905 Račić was briefly employed as a lithographer by the Berlin firm Deutsches Verlag R. Bong und Comp, but later that year he returned to Munich and entered the Academy of Fine Arts. He studied there for three years, until 1908, under Johann and Ludwig Herterich and Hugo von Habermann. Munich was then one of the centres of European art, where realism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism and Jugendstil existed side by side.
At the Academy Račić formed a group with Miroslav Kraljević, Vladimir Becić and Oskar Herman, which was called Die Kroatische Schule (the Croatian School); in Croatian art history they are known as the Munich Circle and the Munich Four. They took their lead from Wilhelm Leibl and Édouard Manet, whose work they were able to see in Munich in 1907, and from older masters: Frans Hals, Goya and Velázquez. Račić himself painted portraits at this time: “Man with a Scarf”, the two “Portraits of an Old Friend”, “Old Man in a Red Waistcoat”, “Lady in White”, “Portrait of Sister Pepica” and “Female Nude” all date from 1907. His painting is noted for its firm tonal construction, full modelling of form and attention to the inner state of the sitters.
In 1908 he moved to Paris. He copied at the Louvre and painted parks, riverbanks, café scenes, portraits and self-portraits. “Pont des Arts”, “Mother and Child” and the watercolours “In the Café”, “In the Park”, “In Front of the Mirror” and two versions of “On the Boulevard” belong to that year.
Račić died in Paris in June 1908, in a hotel room, of gunshot wounds. The sources differ on the date: 19 June is the more common, 20 June is given occasionally. The reasons for what happened remain unclear. It seems to me that little can be said about the artist's last weeks, and anything beyond these facts remains conjecture.
The body of surviving work is small, and some attributions are disputed. In 2008, on the centenary of his death, the Modern Gallery in Zagreb held the first full retrospective, with more than a hundred works: oils, watercolours and drawings, along with childhood drawings, letters and photographs. A year later an exhibition followed at the Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik. His paintings are part of the permanent display of the Modern Gallery in Zagreb, and since 1992 the Josip Račić Gallery in Zagreb has borne his name. An annual prize of the same name was awarded by the newspaper Vjesnik.
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