Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, May 23, 2022: Vladimir Becić, a Croatian painter (#1576)

Monday, May 23, 2022

Artist of the Day, May 23, 2022: Vladimir Becić, a Croatian painter (#1576)

Vladimir Becić (1886–1954) was a Croatian painter, best known for his early work in Munich, which had a strong influence on the direction of modern art in Croatia.

Becić studied painting in Munich at the prestigious Academy of Arts along with Oskar Herman, Miroslav Kraljević and Josip Račić. This group of Croatian artists are known as the Munich Circle or Munich Four, and are very important figures in Croatian art of the 20th century. After Munich, Becić spent 2 years studying and working in Paris before returning to Zagreb in 1910.

During the First World War, Vladimir Becić worked as a war artist on the Salonika front producing a series of images of the soldiers and wounded. Following the end of the war, he spent time in a village near Sarajevo, where he painted landscapes and rural subjects in a style that used colour and tonal variations to depict form and space.

Becić initially studied law in Zagreb and attended private art school of Menci Clement Crnčić and Bela Čikoš Sesija. In 1905, he gave up his law studies for art, moving to Munich where he first studied with Heinrich Knirr, and then at the Academy of Arts. In 1909, he went to Paris where he enrolled in the Academy La Grande Chaumiére and worked as a draftsman at the magazine Le Rire. He returned to Zagreb in 1910, where he staged his first solo exhibit.

He exhibited his artworks as a part of Kingdom of Serbia's pavilion at International Exhibition of Art of 1911.

Becić then joined the Serbian army shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. He was then a war correspondent and artist for the magazine "L'Illustration" on the Salonika front, creating a series of images of the soldiers and the wounded. In 1919, he held his second solo exhibit, also in Zagreb.

From 1919 to 1923, Vladimir Becić lived and worked in the village of Blažuj near Sarajevo, producing a series of oils and watercolors of landscapes, peasants and shepherds that show an increasingly mature style of tonal painting using color forms for rounded volume and space. He then moved back to Zagreb, where he taught in the Academy of Fine Arts

Becić became a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1934, at that time called the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Art.

© 2022. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Vladimir Becić or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only