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Ješa Denegri, "Aleksandar Srnec's Historical Achievement" |ENGLISH]

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JEŠA DENEGRI

ALEKSANDAR SRNEC'S HISTORICAL ACHIEVEMENT


   The time frame of Croatian contemporary art in which the work of Aleksandar Srnec emerged, developed and took on its final form, covers the period approximately between 1950 and 1970, i.e. the period of the first two decades in the second half of the twentieth century. The art formations in which Srnec directly took part are the phenomena of the EXAT 511 group at the beginning of the fifties and the Croatian branch of the international movement New Tendencies2 at the beginning of and during the sixties. In both of them and in this entire art complex, Srnec assumed a very prominent historical place in problem-related as well as value-related terms. As far as the typology of artistic languages goes, Srnec’s work encompasses instances of early post-war abstraction in the technique of painting and works on paper during the formative EXAT period. Later on, it is rearranged towards technically more advanced linguistic models of neo-constructivist metal objects, as well as objects and ambiences of kinetic and luminokinetic art at the time of belonging to the New Tendencies movement3 Within this time, linguistic, and problem coordinates – as well as within the larger scope of the highly complex political, social, and cultural circumstances of that epoch – Srnec’s individual artistic existence took its course, conditioned by and interwoven with numerous existential and human relations and finally shaped into an especially exciting artistic fate which demands and deserves a thorough historical examination.

 

 The emergence of the EXAT 51 group


 Without regard to possible different interpretations of details and even some recent revisions of assessments concerning the emergence of the EXAT 51 group, it is beyond doubt that this work and human association of architects, designers, and painters – which included Srnec as a member and which announced its existence to the Croatian art public by a Manifesto published in Zagreb in December 1951 – represents a major historical turning point in the culture and art of its environment. This is so for the following reasons: because of the consequential efforts in favour of the experiment in art at the time when such an attitude was considered politically incorrect, for advocating the legitimacy of abstraction shortly after the canon of socialist realism had been installed as official art, for believing into equality of the so-called pure and applied art, supporting in this way not only spiritual, but also material restoration of elementary living conditions in its environment that suffered a pronounced shortage of everything in the early post-war period. Trying to act in several parallel disciplines, in the spirit of the idea of “art synthesis”, the members of this group did not encounter favourable practical and operative conditions, so that they, like an emblematic mark of the entire group’s ideology, publicly exhibited the abstract painting of four of its members – Kristl, Picelj, Rašica, and Srnec, in Zagreb and Belgrade from February to April 1953, attracting in this way the considerable and markedly polarised polemic attention of that time’s domestic art scene and wider public. The consequences of publishing the Manifesto and EXAT painters’ exhibition were far-reaching. In their basic achievements, they can be summarized in the following: although it was certainly not the only evidence of that time’s post-social-realistic restoration of the society’s art life, by the exhibition of the EXAT 51 group a new historical chapter in Croatian art was opened at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century; within the framework of the EXAT, the notion of the artist was changed – apart from being a new breed of painter, he was the same kind of innovative author in the fields of architecture, city-planning, graphic and industrial design, stage design, and animated film, reaching all the way to art education and theory. To be all that, one must have a conscience that as its own tradition acknowledges the operative heritage of Bauhaus, De Stijl, and the Russian constructivist and productivist avant-garde, while in his contemporary world he moves in parallel with programmatically akin phenomena in some European cultural environments, characterised by “art synthesis”, also at the beginning and the middle of the 1950s.

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">  However, the basis of the EXAT 51 phenomenon is not only the idea of abstraction and the concept of “art synthesis”; it is rather, and in the foundation of everything, a very concrete interest association of many at that time very agile young people, so that it shows absolutely lively chronicles of their gathering and associating.

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">    The earliest known details from pre-EXAT history are connected with Picelj’s and Srnec’s acquaintance at the Academy of Art in Zagreb 1942, where at the same time Ivan Kožarić, Josip Vaništa, and Ivo Kalina also studied. With Kalina, Picelj, and Srnec formed a short-lasting students’ group, Ipikas (named after its members’ initials), which had no public appearances. After interrupting their studies because of the war, Picelj and Srnec returned to the Academy in 1945. Picelj soon abandoned his studies, in 1946, while Srnec, who had in the meantime spent a year studying architecture at the Academy, remained there until 1949, but then abandoned it for good. Acting in this manner, they both became the first conscious renegades from that time’s academic schooling. In 1947, Picelj and Srnec met Vjenceslav Richter; this trio constituted the initial core of the future EXAT. The pre-EXAT period was filled with their successful participation at designing numerous exhibition venues and trade fairs in Yugoslavia and abroad. Striving towards the unity of architectural solutions and the exhibits they housed, Richter, as their primary creator, considered these interventions experiments and examples of the otherwise practically unrealisable idea of “art synthesis”. Travels abroad connected with such activities, which were rare opportunities at that time, essentially contributed to the improvement of Richter’s, Picelj’s, and Srnec’s views of art and life experience. From 1948 to 1950 the circle of future EXAT members was broadened by the joining of the architects Bernardo Bernardi, Zdravko Bregovac, Božidar Rašica, and Vladimir Zarahović. This is the crew that signed the Manifesto of 1951. As the painter Vlado Kristl entered the circle along with Picelj, Rašica, and Srnec, the quartet of participants of the first historical exhibition of abstract art in Zagreb and Belgrade in 1953 was formed. However, even earlier than at home, Picelj, Rašica,and Srnec exhibited their works at the Salon des Rèalites Nouvelles in Paris in 1952, which was the first appearance of Croatian (and that time’s Yugoslav) artists abroad without the permission and mediation of official cultural and political bodies. The last events with characteristics and traces of the EXAT gathering were the participations of the four protagonists in the first abstract art exhibition of 1953 at the Salon 54, 1954 and Salon 59, 1959 in Rijeka, at the exhibition Contemporary Painters from Yugoslavia in Dubrovnik 1956, while the final date of this entire connection is considered to be Srnec’s and Picelj’s joint exhibition in Belgrade 1956.

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">   The first half of the 1950s – i.e., the time between the announcement of the EXAT 51 group Manifesto and the exhibition Picelj–Srnec in 1956 – was a very tumultuous and in many of its consequences a decisive period in recent Croatian art history. Apart from the EXAT, other important events and participants of that time on the Croatian art scene are two of Antun Motika’s individual exhibitions in 1952 and 1953, the Stančić–Vaništa joint exhibition in 1953, Murtić’s cycle The America Experience, also in 1953, among the sculpture exhibitions of Angeli Radovani, Bakić, Kožarić, and Džamonja, and among painters Dulčić, Gliha, and Ivančić, concluded with the appearance of Gattin’s early works. In this context, the painting of the EXAT members is only one of the factors of the atmosphere of domestic pluralistic art in the first half of the fifties, but in this entire atmosphere, the EXAT 51 group represents a unique phenomenon without comparison or immediate predecessors in domestic art heritage, as well as without contemporary congenial artists. Because of this, it is an important problem innovation in the visual and design culture of its environment, which is a wider notion than just art. With EXAT and only with this group appears the detachment of conceptual paradigms from understanding art as the personal vocation of individual engagement in the sign of different linguistic solutions of artistic subjectivism towards understanding art as a programmatic performance in the name of the idea of abstraction and the project of “art synthesis”. At the time when this group appeared, this was, apart from being a typological and stylistic category, a certain polarised ideological standpoint. That is why the appearance of EXAT gave rise to – or happened by chance in the environment of – a polemic, ideologically biased climate, which then, but also later, could be read from different viewpoints in respect to the dilemma over whether the constructive mentality of the EXAT was integrative in relation to that time’s ruling order, or it was autonomous, even renegade in relation to that order. Between these two ideological extremes it seems most realistic to assess and evaluate EXAT’s position as a position of independent, self-conscious, diligent and gifted, in their mentality urban and cosmopolitan – i.e., generally advanced and able – young persons who in their time and environment tried to act in a positive and stimulative way. They did not do this to join the then prevailing political climate and its consequences in practice, but they had their own reasons and made their own contributions to the general betterment of the society, expressing themselves in their work, not counting on privileges they might get by joining and active participation in the rank organisation and other pragmatic assets of that time’s ruling artistic and cultural organisation. In this organisation, primary positions with privileged status belonged to the art of the local mainstream, in typological terms described by the notion of “post-war moderate modernism” (with the terminological variants of “socialist modernism and “socialist aestheticism”). The phenomenon of “moderate modernism” in the conditions of socialist realism was considered by Miško Šuvaković as “satisfying the demands of art autonomy, but also the need of the ruling political and Communist Party system that art should be neutralised in the aesthetic, artistic, cultural, social, and political sense”4. Occurrences like EXAT, the domestic branch of the New Tendencies movement, Gorgona, radical informal painting, all the way to the new art practice of the seventies – actually the entire complex of art events in some critical interpretations encompassed by the notion of the second line” – stand aside, out of the stream of domestic “moderate modernism”, because they evaded injudicious inclusion in the ruling cultural and artistic system and thereby, in the last consequence, also in the political system, trying to attain an adequately self-determining place in this system, and in relation to it also independent, opposed, and alternative. Therefore, we cannot speak about the alleged privileged position of the EXAT within the framework of the concrete artistic, cultural, and political circumstances of that environment and time, but we can primarily speak about the independent human and moral integrity of this group’s members in the existing circumstances, which all of them, in different ways, including Srnec on equal footing, realised and confirmed by their entire work and behaviour in the historical circumstances of their time.

 

 Painting and object. Spatial Modulator from the EXAT period


   The painting production of the four EXAT members was supported by the Manifesto according to which the members of the group programmatically explicitly supported abstract art as the common denominator that each one of the four understood and realised in practice in his own special way. It is usually stated that the painting of the EXAT members is closest to the language category of post-war geometric abstraction; this assertion is justified by Picelj’s and Kristl’s painting from the beginning of the fifties. However, this idea must be doubted, and with reason. When we simultaneously observe the painting of the other two from the EXAT circle, Rašica and Srnec, the language qualities of their painting makes the classification under geometric abstraction very doubtful. This particularly refers to Srnec’s painting at the time of the EXAT, which is to the greatest part really abstract, but not geometric, especially in the beginning, when it shows numerous spontaneous lyrical and linear properties instead of rationally controlled and formal ones.

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">   In his earlier painting formation, Srnec does not reveal the experience of cubist learning; the experience of moderate surrealistic automatism is closer to him, so that in some solutions he is reminiscent of Mirò, but in some of the experiences of lyrical abstraction he is on the line of the late Kandinsky, reaching to contemporary instances of this kind of painter language. Line instead of form, bundles of lines drawn with pen and Indian ink on a paper in a curved flow, coming from the outside into the centre of the white surface – this is the most common motif of Srnec’s numerous early drawings and rare oils on canvas, such as the 1954 Composition U-P 14. In the series of works on paper, the element of dynamically animated line is on the whiteness of the surface joined with the visually striking painted spot, and in some of these works among the lines and spots a free geometric form is intertwined, achieved by printing the texture of a piece of cloth along the outer layer, covered by printing ink. In other drawings and gouaches, also from the first half of the fifties, in the vicinity of lines and forms we can distinguish biomorphic organic configurations, showing that the formation of the early Srnec is at that time still heterogeneous in terms of language and methodically unstable, but in turn it is very imaginative and daring in its variety of solutions, in some instances demonstrating most radical steps in the entirety of the painting and drawing production of the EXAT members.

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">   An especially radical formal solution, beyond the borders of disciplines of painting and drawing is the object in wood and metal called Spatial Modulator from 1953, in its concept and realisation one of the key steps in the problem emancipation of the entire Croatian art of the historical period in which this work was created. Basically, the same curved and animated lines from the surface of the painting and drawing have here been transferred into the material of curved metal wire. In this way, the lines grew from the immaterial trace of the brush and pen on canvas and paper into their tactile material concretisation. Therefore, such a work of art is a newly created object in real material and real space. It is a creation of the artist’s mind and his hands in the shaping of the means he uses, out of the array of classical painter’s, drawer’s, or sculptor’s aids; he uses ready-made industrial material adjusted to his own artistic concept. Therefore, such a work may emerge on the other side of the existing categories of painting, drawing, or sculpture, becoming an aesthetic and artistic object (objet d’art), which basically is the disciplinary innovative property of Srnec’s Spatial Modulator. This creation has a special place among his works also because it can be understood as a distant announcement of the artist’s actions that followed an entire decade later. Namely, Spatial Modulator is a direct anticipation of Srnec’s static and kinetic objects and the most convincing confirmation that his later development stages were not caused by external influences, but that their beginnings already contained sufficiently founded testing in the artist’s earlier own concepts and technical experiments.

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">   Considering the number of works, Srnec is the most productive painter among the members of the EXAT. After a break during 1954, a year that produced no known work by Srnec, his production markedly grew during 1955–1956, branching off in several, according to formal properties, different typological groups. One of them was characterised by light coloured backgrounds with painted or collaged regular or irregular painted forms, freely distributed over the surface like some abstract islands gathered in equally abstract archipelagos. The other group are gouaches on dark backgrounds, with triangles as the most common geometric figure, interconnected by straight or curved lines in unforeseeable, unbalanced composition complexes, following the principle of caused accident. The third group of these works consists of multicoloured triangles and quadrangles on a surface, scattered in the way as if they were frozen frames of an animated film and only a moment before or after the situation found in the picture these forms might assume a completely different position and distribution. Finally, a separate group among these works is constituted by two almost minimalist gouaches with light yellow backgrounds; one of them, the one with only a single rectangular form and a straight slanting line, drawn with the help of a ruler, represents the most succinct formal composition not only within Srnec’s and EXAT’s painting production, but also in the entire previous history of Croatian art.

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">   Srnec’s painting during the EXAT period completely confirms the assertion that the notion of painting among the members of this group did not emerge as a consequence of the operational elaboration of the previous programmatic foundation of the abstract art concept represented in theory by this group, but from the direct practice, talent, individual ability and recognisability of the participants in their common artistic and conceptual choice. Srnec’s part in this enterprise is quantitatively the largest one (more than sixty finished paintings and drawings with a number of smaller formats in different techniques); it is very diversified in language; instead of being rationally supervised it is markedly imaginative, manifold in style, and together with the unique creation among his works, Spatial Modulator, his share is worthy of the highest problem-related and value-related standards in Croatian art of the first post-war decade.

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor"> The painting of the EXAT 51 group, in the entirety of the union and the diversity of its members, including Srnec’s painting, represents a very noticeable typological and conceptual detachment both from the immediately preceding ideology and practice of socialist realism and from the domestic tradition of intimism and colourism between the two wars, and then also their post-war continuations and consequences. The painting of the EXAT members by no means owes this detachment to an a priori inclination to abstraction, non-figurativeness, non-substantiality, and non-referentiality of the language of painting as opposed to the predominantly figurative, substantial, and associative motifs of the majority of simultaneous painting occurrences, but, before that, it achieves this by its different understanding of basic postulates and basic elements of the painting medium such as the concept of the planar picture space, the  two-dimensional treatment of the picture field, the visual energy of painted forms, the technique of applying colour matter, and the compact, smooth instead of dispersive pictorial set-up of the structural layer. Back at the time of EXAT’s existence, its member and best educated participant in the theoretical respect, Zvonimir Radić, in the chapters Discovery of new plastic reality and New integration method, in the text The Art of Shaping, by his following assertions formulated the understanding of the nature of painting in which the properties of painting at the entire group level are recognizable, thus also of Srnec’s painting procedure: “Contemporary artists were the first to discover that colour is something concrete, which means detached from conventional-representative descriptiveness of nature, something truly incomparable and individual, independent and solely capable of conveying its own meaning as an entirely irreplaceable existence”. And further: “Space is understood as existing in the form of a gravitational field established by energies set in motion by relations of visual origins, synchronised in a simultaneous exclusive universe…” And finally: “Each spatial point is determined by the gravitational tension of all present visual elements, i.e. their plastic energies, disregarding their intensity and distance. Instead of mass in absolute space, instead of volumes of solid bodies that simultaneously build, dissolve, and negate the space, comes the activity of energy devoid of volume, and between them, the tension of eternal movement…”5


" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor"> 

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor"> From EXAT to New Tendencies

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">   In their work biographies, Picelj’s and Srnec’s Belgrade exhibition is considered the last time point of a gathering of the individual EXAT representatives, a group that has never been declaratively founded and never dismissed. It is considered to be the intersection point of the EXAT and post-EXAT periods in the activity of its former participants. But at this point in time we encounter something that is much more than a mere exhibition note and date in the biographical references of the two artists. The final end of EXAT’s existence can be understood as a symptom of deep-rooted changes in the spiritual attitude of the domestic art environment, which is also the end of the enthusiasm characteristic of the period of post-war renovation in which EXAT was one of the cultural emblems. After that commenced the announcement, and soon also the escalation of the epochal spiritual climate of scepticism, nihilism, and “estrangement”, which in the Croatian art environment was to have its cultural emblems in the appearances of the radical informal painting (with early Gattin from 1956 onwards) and the Gorgona group (with the first mention of its existence in 1959). Another awakening of constructive spirit in the changed social and political circumstances of the new historical moment, mirrored in the then contemporary language of the post-informal art period, came to Zagreb during the sixties of the past century with a series of exhibitions of the international New Tendencies movement. Srnec, together with the earlier EXAT members Picelj, Richter, and Kristl, and also Knifer, Bakić, and Šutej, was one of the participants at its second exhibition in 1963.

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">    At the time of EXAT’s final falling apart and new gathering of four former members of this group within the New Tendencies movement, i.e. the time between 1956 and 1963, Srnec’s opus was not even nearly as intensive and productive as before. But in respect to exhibiting his work, he was more present abroad than in his home environment. The most important exhibition data from this period of Srnec’s work biography are Srnec’s participation in the exhibition Yugoslav Contemporary Art in the Creuze Gallery in Paris in 1959 and three subsequent exhibitions of the team Bakić–Picelj–Srnec, the first one in the Denise René Gallery in Paris 1959 (with the forewords to the catalogue by Michel Seuphor and Victor Vasarely), and the next two in the Drian Galleries in London 1960 and 1961. During that period, at home Srnec participated only in the exhibition Yugoslav Contemporary Painters (on the occasion of the AICA Congress) in Dubrovnik 1956, at the Rijeka Salons in 1954 and 1959, with his works from the EXAT period at the exhibition 60 Years of Painting and Sculpture in Croatia in Zagreb 1961, and finally at exhibition 27 Contemporary Artists at Visual Arts Autumn in Sombor before the end of 1962. The modest scope of this exhibition data shows certain Srnec’s seclusion during the early post-EXAT years, at the time when the majority of active participants of the domestic post-war art scene was preoccupied with entirely different language forms. The ideas of EXAT had no followers and new members; they remained in the shadow of inner continuities instead of the limelight of public exhibitions and visible roles of former members of this group. However, for most of them this was a time of testing their own beliefs and soon came a time of encompassing the accumulation of forebodings and concepts, potentials and energies, also of some trial realisations, which, especially in Srnec’s case, seemingly suddenly from the outside, but actually prepared deeply, through the restoration of his own language, flared up in the second half of the 1960s.


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" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor"> The atmosphere outside New Tendencies

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">   After the falling out of the EXAT group, Srnec painted less and less, mostly supporting himself with graphic design. He started making his first reliefs in painted wood, then in metal, for which he got the impetus from occasional commissions for wall objects in the interiors of architectural structures of hotels on the Adriatic coast (one example being Hotel Ambasador in Opatija). However, in this kind of work he saw nothing more than executing his commissions. During that time, his production did not take on an adequate language and problem context until he was included in the second exhibition of New Tendencies in the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 1963. This took place in the atmosphere of the then current international movement in the situation “after informal painting” on the European art scene in the beginning of the 1960s. The participation of Kristl, Picelj, Richter, and Srnec at the above-mentioned exhibition was important to these artists because it was a regathering of former EXAT members exactly ten years after the first exhibition of four painters from this group (Rašica was absent, the only one who had abandoned art, devoting himself completely to his primary profession as architect and city-planner), this time in another and different, not any more local, but international artistic environment. At the second New Tendencies exhibition, Srnec displayed the objects PSY XI and PSY XII, 1963, both in wood and plexiglas, and thus opened an entire series of subsequent appearances that in the sixties brought him to the top of the experimental wing of Yugoslav contemporary art and simultaneously provided him with respectable international references. Among Srnec’s appearances in that period were individual exhibitions at the following venues: the Students’ Centre Gallery in Zagreb, 1967; the Gallery of Youth Centre in Belgrade, 1968; two subsequent exhibitions in Zagreb’s Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1969 and 1971; the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, 1971; and finally, the Nova Gallery in Zagreb, 1977. He also participated in group exhibitions abroad: New Tendencies in Leverkusen, 1964; Perpetuum mobile in L’Obelisco Gallery in Rome, 1965; Actual Alternatives 3 in L’Aquila, 1968; Constructive Art: Elements + Principles in Nuremberg, 1969; Art as Play – Play as Art in Recklinghausen; 1969; New Tendencies in Gelsenkirchen, 1969; and Research and Project – Propositions for an Experimental Exhibition at the central pavilion of the 35th Venice Biennale, 1970 (at that time Srnec’s Multiple, plexiglas with electric motor, was executed in Biennale production, in 100 copies).

" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">" data-cke-real-node-type="1" alt="Sidro" title="Sidro" align="" src="http://avantgarde-museum.com/production/_assets/_packages/admin/js/ckeditor/plugins/fakeobjects/images/spacer.gif?t=E2PC" data-cke-real-element-type="anchor">   In the context of New Tendencies, Srnec joined the second Zagreb exhibition of this international movement, participating together with three of the earlier members of EXAT (Kristl, Picelj, and Richter) as well as three more domestic artists: Bakić, Knifer, and Šutej. He found himself in the very heated atmosphere of conceptual and theoretical turbulence that caught this art movement in its evolution from the initial 1961 exhibition to the process of language and conceptual homogenization that reached its peak at the time and in the problem profile of the second Zagreb exhibition in 1963, when within this movement viewpoints like the ones in the introductory catalogue text by Matko Meštrović, The Ideology of New Tendencies, and François Morellet’s and François Molnar’s publications on this occasion, titled For Progressive Abstract Art, became dominant. However, knowing Srnec’s previous work and mentality, we should not expect that he could be familiar and in agreement with the then theoretical and ideological goals of this movement. On the contrary, he joined the New Tendencies exhibition more out of solidarity and friendship with his former EXAT colleagues, who also participated more due to the persuasion and invitation of the organiser than out of faith in belonging to this movement. Everything that Srnec did in art then and later on was his entirely personal choice and the path in art that only momentarily touched the phenomenon of New Tendencies, and after that proceeded individually and in parallel, by no means feeling obliged to the conditions that could be imposed on him by his brief participation in the stream of the movement. In his fundamental artistic nature Srnec has been an intuitive experimenter, a real and true artistic homo ludens, anything but the laboratory “researcher” and scientific programmer that he is alleged to be, and not in the least a politically engaged activist. All this was unified in an artistic character concordant with the spirit of advanced industrial civilization, which was desired or even demanded by some theoreticians and ideologists of the New Tendencies movement at one stage of its inner restructuring. Srnec was actually using material means and technical procedures that contributed to the fact that the design solutions of some of his works in their appearance are reminiscent of a machine, a screen, or a model of an architectural structure, but in the very core of the character of his art they are always rather products of artistic imagination and the outcome of artistic play that to the artist, enchanted and inspired by experiments with uncertain outcomes and discoveries surprising even to himself, provides immeasurable inner pleasure with the miracle of creating art only in his own way. Srnec’s key achievement in art during his post-EXAT period is the series of objects and ambiences under the common title Luminoplastics, typologically akin to the language of kinetic and luminokinetic art, so that with this series Srnec at one moment coincided with Zagreb exhibitions of the New Tendencies movement, but soon left it behind and surpassed its temporal and problem scope.

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Luminoplastic


With his objects and ambiences of luminokinetic art under the name of Luminoplastic, by the mid-sixties, for the second time, after participating in the historical breakthrough of abstraction in the EXAT period at the beginning of the fifties, Srnec assumed the most prominent problem positions on the Croatian (and that time’s entire Yugoslav) art scene. His Luminoplastic ushered in a form of art work that was new to that scene: unlike products of painting and sculpture, which are static objects, this type of art is an event in real motion, a changeable situation in time and space, an event instead of a state. It enters the exhibiting environment occupying it as a whole, unlike the detached and immobile position of a painting on a wall or a sculpture on its base. It grows into a full ambience only when, because of the effect of artificial light, the entire exhibition space becomes dimmed; due to that, the spectator’s observation field loses the measures determining physical and material boundaries of a dynamic space-time art situation. With kinetic objects and ambiences from the Luminoplastic series (1 – 1965/1967, 2 - 1967/1968, 3 – 1968, 4 – 1969, 5 – 1971), Srnec joined the large family of experimenters with real movement in real space illuminated by real light in twentieth-century European and world art, which as pioneers of this stream in art includes the Russian constructivists Tatlin, Rodchenko, and Gabo; the Bauhaus authors Moholy-Nagy and Hirschfeld-Mack; Calder and the post-war protagonists, Srnec’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries such as Malina, Lippold, Lijn, Schöffer, Tinguely, Takis, Soto, Palatnik, Agam, Morellet, Le Parc, Stein, Garcia-Rossi, Demarco, Boto, Vardanega, Lassus, Mack, Piene, von Graevenitz, Luther, Gerstner, Equipo 57, Calos, Colombo, De Vecchi, Boriani, Varisco, Biasi, Massironi, Gruppo MID, Dobeš, Flavin, and others.

Srnec did not reach his initial idea that in the end brought kinetic and luminokinetic objects and ambiences by following any of his predecessors, but through his own separate experience he drew from his short engagement in the field of experimental film. About this experience we can quote the words of Božo Beck:

First, in 1959, he made stage designs for three puppet films and then continued this work in collaboration with Dragutin Vunak, making the animated film The Man and the ShadowT in 1960. This collaboration revealed him and demonstrated the possibilities this medium offers, which incited him to conceive and complete a screenplay for an abstract film about a red rectangle, entitled Equals Infinity (= ∞, 1960), which unfortunately has never been realised. This contact, although almost incidental, was still very inspiring to him, we could say even crucial. Untested possibilities of moving light and different moving speeds connected to one or more sources of coloured light got his attention and from 1962 directed his interest towards luminokinetics.6

An extension and elaboration of these memories of Srnec’s beginnings of involvement with luminokinetic experiments can be found in Vera Horvat-Pintarić’s evidence:

The film’s topic is the story of a red rectangle animated by a series of images in which transformations of lines and surfaces, light and colour, emptiness and fullness develop on a conceptual background based on dramaturgically organised visual occurrences. At that time, looking for a possibility of creating movement directly, and not by means of “ten thousand” of animated drawings, Srnec operated the film camera himself and recorded the movements of light that he created by moving the filter in the projector and by back-projection on a transparent screen.7

These testimonies were fully confirmed by the recent publication of the entire screenplay of the animated film Equals Infinity.8 In this screenplay, dated October 12th, 1960, Srnec minutely, frame by frame, of which there are 22 and each is accompanied by a text on montage procedure, elaborates the screenplay of a plot whose protagonists are particular entities of the artist’s former abstract painting, like curved intersecting lines and squares in several colours. The aim of this operation lies in their setting in motion in time animation of three to five minutes duration. This obviously refers to the formal repertoire of Srnec’s painting from his EXAT period, which, according to this screenplay, is foreseen to be set in motion by means of animated film technique. Hence the idea that the concept of this screenplay is not an animated film concordant with the aesthetic of the famous Zagreb School of Animated Film, but that he used the procedure characteristic of the film animation medium with the primary reason of setting in motion and dynamicizing the formal repertoire of his own abstract painting, as this was correctly noted by Radovan Ivančević upon the publication of this screenplay. Before he executed his first kinetic and luminokinetic works, Srnec envisaged the setting in motion of his previous static painting compositions, looking for an adequate media way to do this, and finding no other solutions, he resorted to animated film technology. Not being able to optimally realise this idea at that point, he left it in the unfinished phase of a screenplay and soon turned to completely different investigations, which in a short time led him to the idea and realisation of the first version of Luminoplastic.

The genesis of Luminoplastic, heralded in the screenplay for the animated film Equals Infinite, shows Srnec’s insatiable curiosity which aside from any verified expectations entirely leaves itself to the uncertainty of search, not knowing, of course, where and how far these experiments might lead him. However, he knew that he could not stop just at the point of painting solutions in his atelier, but he wanted to explore the ways how to overcome and shape them into an integral language system, in this case into a system of kinetic and luminokinetic art. He also knew that such discoveries have to be presented publicly, and was conscious of the fact that they moved and widened the boundaries of existing art notions in his own environment.

Srnec’s first Mobile was created in 1964, and this unusual non-functional machine as a work of art, at that time still not using sources of artificial light, was moved by activating an electric motor built into the base underneath the axis of the vertical carriers of three rotating circular forms. After it had been presented on February 26th in the Rijeka Modern Gallery in its initial form, under the name Phonoplastic Screen, the first projection of the work called Luminoplastic took place at Srnec’s individual exhibition in the Students’ Centre Gallery in Zagreb between April and May 1967. The construction of the first Luminoplastic was absolutely simple in the technical sense: it consisted of a motor-powered movable screen of bent wire onto which from a static source rays of light were projected through multicoloured filters, which in the darkened surrounding space caused that the spectator observed and experienced continuously changeable illuminated linear configurations of unceasing, i.e. accelerated or slowed down rhythm of movement. In the following versions of Luminoplastic, founded on the identical technical principle of their activation, the screen form was always different: once it was a plexiglas circle with built-in aluminium rods of different lengths, another time it was a cube, also made of plexiglas, and on such different moving screens light was projected from static sources. Thanks to the effect of screen dematerialization in darkened space, only single or multicoloured non-material movable light reflections remained visible. The possibilities of such projections, although in their appearance surprising and amazing, were still basically limited by the modest technical potential of luminoplastic

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