Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, November 17, 2025 : Kosta Hakman, a Yugoslav and Bosnia and Herzegovina painter (#2420)

Monday, November 17, 2025

Artist of the Day, November 17, 2025 : Kosta Hakman, a Yugoslav and Bosnia and Herzegovina painter (#2420)

Kosta Hakman (1899 –1961) was a Yugoslav and Bosnia and Herzegovina painter.
Hakman was born in Bosanska Krupa, the third child of local judge Mihailo Hakman, who descended from Polish Catholic immigrants, and Darinka Đurić, a teacher of Bosnian Serb descent from Sarajevo. He had three brothers, Mihailo, Stefan and Nikola and two sisters, Jelena and Zora. He was baptized in the Serbian Orthodox faith.

The boy "of enormous height and brilliant intelligence" was soon noticed not only for his "gift for painting", and, as an excellent student, his talent for foreign languages, but also for his consciousness of "national belonging", which in his early years already brought him in touch with the political organization at school, one that was affiliated with the movement Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), a South Slavic liberation movement.

After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, fifteen-year-old Kosta Hakman was arrested by Austro-Hungarian occupiers and convicted. He served his ten-month prison sentence in Bihać. After being released Hakman continued his violently interrupted schooling in Tuzla, from 1915 to 1917, when he was drafted into the army service, and then, when the First World War ended, in Sarajevo, where he completed the First Gymnasium in 1919.

Hakman arrived in Prague in 1919. After successfully passing the admittance examination, he became a student of the Academic vytvarnich umeni (Academy of Fine Arts) in Prague. He was enrolled in the preparatory class of professor Vlaho Bukovac as a "Serb of the Orthodox Christian faith."

Hakman's first summer vacation in 1920 he spent in Tuzla, together with his friends from the Gymnasium, who also came home for the holidays when the academic year ended. Fascinated by their stories about the richness of the museum collections in what was until shortly before then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Hakman decided to continue his studies in Vienna. He wrote once more to the Managerial Board of Prosveta, asking them for assistance for traveling expenses in order to continue his studies.

Soon after his arrival, Hakman realized that the situation in the Austrian metropolis was not quite what he wanted either, although the abundant museums of Vienna gave him the chance to enrich his formal education. His disappointment was all the greater for having another unsuccessful, uncompleted school year behind him, and for the weakening of his reputation at Prosveta.

Thanks to the regular scholarship that he received in the autumn of 1921, Hakman went to Kraków and passed the admittance exam at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Hakman worked hard in Poland, which is vouched for by the great number of paintings he then created and awards that he received during his studies. He was awarded two prizes at his final examination—the first for landscape painting and the second for the painting of acts. Upon receiving his diploma, after a short trip to the Kingdom of Italy between 1924 and 1925.

Due to the selling of a great number of paintings and the improvement of his financial affairs, Hakman realized his dream — to go to Paris for the first time. He stayed in Paris for four years, during which time he came to Belgrade only once, in 1927, to take part in the VI Yugoslav Exhibition in Novi.

He became a member of the group OBLIK as early as 1927, immediately after it was founded. However, he had only one collective exhibition with the group—their first exhibition at the Belgrade Art Gallery, held from December 1929 to January 1930.

From May to August 1930, Hakman was in Paris once more, working hard and preparing for his next exhibition in Belgrade. Hakman held this third solo exhibition together with Sreten Stojanović in February 1931.

In 1938, he married Bosa Pavlović. In September of that same year, Hakman was deeply stricken by the death of his brother Stefan, whom he considered his "teacher" and "idol." His brother's death might have been the reason why Hakman painted little and exhibited rarely during the following two years, before World War II started.

The war years sharply divided the work of Kosta Hakman into two parts. A drastic cut was made by a time spent imprisoned in a German concentration camp in Dortmund that he was taken to in 1941 as a prisoner of war. Although he tried to spend the time there helping his friends by using his knowledge of the German language to protect them, or organizing painting courses for prisoners, Hakman was unable to endure the terrible camp ordeal. He was sent home very ill towards the very end of the war in 1944 with the transport of sick prisoners.

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