Grove Koger

Today is the anniversary of the birth of painter Edo Murtić (EH doh MUR dik) who was born May 4, 1921, in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Croatia. Within a few years, the young man’s family moved to Zagreb (now the capital of Croatia), where he studied in the city’s Art Academy. Then, during World War II, he fought with Josip Tito’s Communist partisans against the invading Germans.

One of the key events in modern Yugoslav history was Tito’s break with Russian dictator Joseph Stalin after the war—a move that also signaled a break with Russia’s official (and stultifying) Socialist Realist artistic style and opened Yugoslavia to more progressive artistic influences. In Murtić’s case, it led the artist to the discovery of Abstract Expressionism. He met leading American painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning thanks to a Fulbright grant on a visit to New York City in the early 1950s, and in 1958 became the first Croatian artist to exhibit in the renowned Venice Biennale, largely on the basis of his abstract paintings. That same year, he also participated in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and, the following year, in documenta (as it styles itself) in Kassel, Germany.

Murtić’s abstract canvases are routinely praised as “lyrical,” but, with few exceptions, I don’t find them so. The artist seldom seems satisfied with his first bold painterly gestures, and what look like snarls (as Maggie succinctly describes them) of second and third thoughts drain off whatever energy might have been present initially. I prefer his simple watercolor landscapes, particularly those that he painted on the rocky Adriatic coast of Croatia in the early 1980s. It was small reproductions of several of these that my first wife and I bought in 1984 on the island of Hvar. Here, Murtić’s first quick impressions are his last, and they’re all the more satisfying for it.

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The watercolor at the top of today’s post is Kornati, Summer on the Adriatic, Yugoslavia (1981), and the second is Skoljić, Summer on the Adriatic, Yugoslavia (1982). The Kornati Archipelago lies off the coast of central Croatia, and Skoljić (also known as Gelavac) is an islet in the Zadar Archipelago, northwest of the Kornatis. The photograph of Murtić shows him as a young man.

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