Stella Skopal

Biography

In 1927, in the central niche of the Medulić café in Zagreb, then a very well-known place, a ceramic sculpture 165 centimetres high was installed: an amorous couple making music. Its author, Stella Skopal, was twenty-three.

She was born in Zagreb on 18 July 1904 into a Jewish family. From 1924 to 1928 she studied at the Royal Academy of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb, where her teachers included Rudolf Valdec, Hinko Juhn, Ivo Kerdić and Frano Kršinić. She went on to study ceramics in Vienna in 1929, and in 1933–1934 at the private school of Hertha Bucher. The couple for the Medulić was modelled on the work of Juhn, her professor. Little is known about her earliest years; the art historian Marina Baričević regards this piece as her first notable work.

From 1927 to 1939 Skopal made about twenty fireplaces and stoves for the apartments, mansions and villas of well-to-do Zagreb residents, mostly Jewish families. She worked with the architects Mladen Kauzlarić, Zdenko Strižić and Stjepan Gomboš. The forms drew on the Bauhaus and Art Deco, and, as has been noted, no two stoves are alike. Particular attention goes to the fireplace with skilfully modelled figures of dancing women in the Blühweiss family apartment at 2 Domagojeva Street.

In those same years she also made small decorative sculpture. Among it are a figure of Don Quixote and a Secession-style miniature, “Girls Playing Instruments”, which drew praise, abroad as well.

In 1938 Skopal became the first in Croatia to make ceramic jewellery. From the early 1940s to the mid-1950s she produced a good number of ceramic tables, of which only a few survive. The art critic Grgo Gamulin called them new and pure design, still little known to the public and left without protection.

The war changed everything. As a Jew, Skopal was sent to Treviso, in Italy, to the Gabianelli ceramic factory, where she kept working. After Italy’s capitulation in 1943 she found herself in Bari and joined the Partisans, the Yugoslav resistance movement: she worked in an Allied military hospital, where she helped in the rehabilitation of wounded Americans. The portrait “Head of a Black Man” was apparently made then. In 1944 she joined a group of artist-Partisans in Cozzano, where she worked as a ceramist for most of the year, and by the end of the year she was with the regional People’s Liberation Committee for Dalmatia. Small compositions of a pathetic tone appeared then, about sufferings she had herself experienced. Baričević regards these pieces as a separate part of her oeuvre, unconnected with her sculpture before and after the war.

From 1945 to 1965 Skopal taught at the School of Applied Arts in Zagreb: modelling and shaping forms on the potter’s wheel. Many Croatian applied artists studied under her, and for some of them she found work in ceramic factories while they were still at school.

In 1951–1956, besides tables and tableware, she modelled her first porcelain bottles, restrained and almost minimalist. From 1956 she worked with the firm Jugokeramika (now Inker), making models of bottles for the Maraska liqueurs and spirits, for which she received a number of commendations at home and abroad. Yet the bulk of her work consists of things for daily life: bowls, jugs, tea and coffee services, vases, lamps, candlesticks, tobacco jars. In them she combined prehistoric and folk pottery traditions with the taste of her own time. Gamulin wrote that these objects had in effect become works with a function “beyond the everyday”, of the kind proper to art.

In 1975 Skopal received the Vladimir Nazor Award for lifetime achievement. Many of her works vanished without trace during her lifetime; what remains is held by the Museum of Arts and Crafts, the Croatian History Museum, the Croatian National Theatre, the Jewish Community of Zagreb, the Art Gallery in Split and private collectors.

Stella Skopal died in Zagreb on 24 December 1992 and was buried at Mirogoj Cemetery.