Зора Петровић (1894–1962)

Abstract

Зора Петровић (1894–1962) је сликарка која је својим јединственимуметничким језиком, препознатљивим по снажном, енергичном гесту,широким и страсним потезима, са доста густе пасте, изражајног колоритаобележила време у којем је стварала. Круг мотива и тема у сликарствуЗоре Петровић производ је мешања утицаја ригидних правила на којимасе темељио програм традиционалне едукације будућег сликара, с једне,и модерне уметности схваћене као оне која и у тематском и у техничкомсмислу на адекватан начин рефлектује променљиву и контрадикторнуприроду модерног живота, с друге стране. Њен приступ уметности сва-како није био усмерен ка радикалном мењању света путем иновацијеуметничког језика, али јесте у оквирима традиционалнe уметничке дис-циплине и језика те дисциплине разоткривао механизме патријархалнехетеро-културе и развијао се кроз активно преиспитивање успостављенихи нормативизованих граница родних идентитета, њихових учинака иконачно кроз њихову деконструкцију.

Zora Petrović (1894–1962) was a painter who, with her unique artistic language,known for her strong, energetic gesture, wide and passionate brush strokes, and plentyof thick paste and expressive colors, marked the time in which she created. She acquiredher education in Belgrade and Pest in the years before, during and immediatelyafter the First World War, whereas in the mid-1920s, like many of her colleagues, shewent to Paris for a one-year professional training. Her dual career path of an art pedagogue,from a “teacher of skills” to the post of full professor, and an artist began in late1920 and early 1921, and ended with her death on 26 May 1962. Zora Petrović paintedtirelessly: her solo exhibitions were an opportunity to present to the general publicwhat she did and how her painting was evolving, whereas group exhibitions were anopportunity to compare and contextualize her own painting within the current trendsin Serbian and Yugoslav art, i.e. the opportunity to be present and her work to be visible,recognized, mapped and meaningful. During her long art career, Zora earned aDiplome de Médaille d’Argent for her exhibition held in the Pavilion of the Kingdom ofYugoslavia at Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques in Paris, in 1937; wasthe recipient of the 1956 October Award for her artworks exhibited at her seventh soloexhibition in the “Cvijeta Zuzorić” Art Pavilion in Belgrade in 1955. In 1958, by decree ofthe president of the FPRY, Josip Broz Tito, she was awarded the Order of Labour withRed Banner. In 1961, she was elected a corresponding member of the Serbian Academyof Sciences and Arts, thus becoming the fourth woman after Katarina Ivanović, IsidoraSekulić and Desanka Maksimović, to whom this male-only club opened its doors.The range of motifs and themes in Zora Petrović’s paintings is a result of the synthesisof influences of rigid rules imposed by traditional art training curricula andmodern art, thematically and technically understood as the art adequately reflectingthe changing and contradictory nature of modern life. Zora Petrović herself reflectedupon art and her painting within the framework of traditional principles based on selectivity,partiality and the policy of exclusion and those that linked art with ‘aestheticexperience’, considered as something universal, natural, unchangeable and, ultimately,detached from social context and ideology. Her painting practice evolved through hergradual moving away from academic art and her adoption of ideas that would lead herto a modernist conceptualization of a painting as a medium based on its own distinctive,unchangeable qualities. Zora Petrović first accepted the general assumptions suggestedby the early modern painting that color was not an addition to form, the processof emancipation of color from its traditional purely descriptive function, as well asfluctuations around the local color tone. In addition, she changed the technique of applyingpaint on canvas and as of the late 1920s her move became wider, more dynamic,more energetic, more unrestrained; it was the move that emphasized the materiality of paint or transformed paint into a vital and independent plastic structure. In the late1930s, after having used dark color palettes for many years, even though she startedusing bright color palettes and pure colors, she did not completely abandon hue colormodulation. She applied the warm tones first and ended with the cold ones, that is,she mainly applied a cold tone over a warm background, increasing the intensity of thecolor with complementary relations (usually red and green). In literature, this reversalis interpreted as a consequence of two influences that Zora Petrović herself identified.They both belong to the visual heritage of the Balkans, whereas there is no consensuson whether they are both relevant or just one of them. Given that, in the late 1930s, ZoraPetrović turned to the motif of ordinary women wearing (everyday, or work clothes)folk costumes (due to the shortage or reluctance of male models); the color effectsof their attire were consensually and unanimously recognized as the first influence.Although the second influence came from Serbian medieval frescoes and whilst theunderpaintings (especially of the incarnate, together with the shift from warm, redorange-ochre tones to green shadows, including the brown and hazy olive-green circlesunder the eyes, and the fullness of pure colors, the modeling with coloring methods,large areas covered in color of the same value and intensity, contours separatingthe motifs from the background and the harmony of complementary and simultaneouscontrasts) could be linked to the medieval Eastern Christian painting tradition, it is notthe connection that one can easily notice when looking at her painting but is, in fact,consciously searched for and inscribed. The characteristics observed in the paintingsof Zora Petrović represent, first and foremost, an amalgam of early modernist paintingexpressions, whereas the question on more specific circumstances and reasons, whichmade the artist legitimize the distinctiveness of her artistic work by connecting it tothe medieval painting tradition, remains open for some future research. The harsh,raw and at the same time skillful painting technique of Zora Petrović, along with thereferences to folk artistic expression and with perhaps her own view on the medievalEastern Christian painting tradition, also brings her painting closer to the logic ofprimitivism. The color, as a trace of wide, layered, spontaneous, curvy, unsystematic,energetically performed brush strokes, becomes a matter that possesses the qualityof a ‘wild’ expression, i.e. the value of untamed fluidity that breaks the psychologicalboundaries between the inner and outer being, but also the boundaries between oneselfand the others. That is why her female nudes caused a discomfort which could havebeen overcome only through a highly developed formal language of art criticism, whichas a masculine discourse, disciplined, consolidated, established boundaries, preservingthe integrity of culture from the potential risk of the work of matter. Even thoughthe implications of her painting can be considered as feminist, in the sense that itpossesses the potential to destabilize the meanings and values of patriarchal culturethat are based on men’s control over women’s labor, their sensuality, as well as over theways and possibilities of their access to symbolic representation, Zora Petrović’s artcould not be described as feminist art. Even though her approach to art certainly wasnot aiming at radically changing the world through the innovation of artistic language,it did unveil the mechanisms of patriarchal heterosexual culture, within the frameworksof traditional artistic discipline and the language of that discipline, and evolvedthrough an active re-examination of the established and normativised boundaries ofgender identities, their effects and finally through their deconstruction.