Bogoljub Jovanović

Bogoljub Jovanović completed the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1949 where he had two solo exhibitions in 1953: in the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia (ULUS) Gallery in January, and in the Graphic Collective Gallery in June. Both were supported in writing by critic Zoran Mišić and poet Vasko Popa in the accompanying catalogues, as well as reviews in the press by Miodrag B. Protić and Stanislav Vinaver. Towards the end of 1953 year, he went to Paris, and then in 1960 to New York, which made him for a long period cut exhibition-wise ties with the milieu of his artistic origins. The bulk of his early Belgrade period comprises paintings, drawings and tempera, predominantly made on the theme of self-portraiture, and then series of “small paintings on paper“ executed in tempera technique such as Magicians and Proverbs, as well as illustrations for the book Thaïs by Anatole France. A unique work in his oeuvre is the painting K-55 (1955), oil on canvas (195.5 cm x 128 cm), ownership of the Museum of Contemporary Arts, and its smaller version in tempera in the Noveski collection. Merit for the first revaluation of Jovanović goes to Stojan Ćelić who wrote “Subsequent Notes on the 1953 Exhibition by Bogoljub Jovanović in the Graphic Collective Gallery“, published in the Umetnost magazine, No. 21 (1970). A retrospective exhibition of his work, with hitherto available items, was staged owing to Ljiljana Ćinkul in the Gallery of the Graphic Arts Collective in October-November 2006. Judging by information from the artist’s biography, the painting K-55 and its version in tempera on paper were made in Paris, after Jovanović’s approach had temporarily quit the representations of his preceding figurative series (he would later return to figurativeness during his stay in New York). A visible situation of this painting is made by a multitude of small strokes which are vertically serialized one next to another or one after another, creating in this way a sort of “a weaving“ or “a tissue“, after which the stringing of these strokes is stopped on the edges for the background to emerge, and this background, there appears a separate visual situation, at the same time chaotic and orderly. Although this work is the one and only work (in two versions) in the artist’s opus as a material object, it is, in a conceptual sense quite sufficient to mark one of the key chapters in the history of abstract art in Serbia in the second part of the 20th century. This work is, therefore, fully abstract, and its very full title, in fact, is Composition 1955, by which it categorically avoids any possibility of invoking a reference outside the painterly and outside the visual.