Description
Menci Clement Crnčić
Menci Clement Crnčić – Two boats painting available to buy at Grand Gallery EU. This painting is from the year 1906.
Dimension: 23×38 cm
Painting Technique: Oil on canvas
Painting style: Modern art
Menci Clement Crnčić video:
Croatian painter, printmaker, teacher and museum director, of Austrian birth. After graduating from the military academy in Vienna he studied painting at the academies of fine art in Vienna and Munich. For a short time he taught painting in the School of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb, but he left in 1894 to take up a scholarship at the academy in Vienna, studying etching and engraving.
He was the first artist in the Croatian graphic tradition to abandon a strictly linear style and use tonal variation to create contrasting areas of light and shade. He first established himself as a marine artist with a series of paintings of the Istrian peninsula and the Adriatic coast.
In 1903, with the painter Bela Cikos-Sesija (1864-1931), he opened the first private painting school in Zagreb, which eventually developed into the Academy of Fine Arts. He taught there until the end of his life.
By 1905, Crnčić was travelling to places around Europe in the company of other artists, studying and painting. In 1905 he visited Italy, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Germany and Austria. In 1907 he travelled down Italy to Naples, and in 1908 toured Bosnia and Herzegovina
Menci Clement Crnčić became a member of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1919 and was the Director of the Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters from 1920 to 1928.
His early work shows the influence of the Realism characteristic of the Munich circle of painters and uses a subdued palette. While painting his coastal landscapes en plein air, he gradually used bolder and brighter colours, and the influence of the Zagreb Colourist school of painting led by Vlaho Bukovac is also evident.
Menci Clement Crnčić is among the founders of modern Croatian painting, contributing greatly to its development, he promoted landscape painting, mainly seascapes, using light, colour, and soft strokes in an impressionist style. He was the founder of modern Croatian graphic art, and played an important role in teaching several generations of Croatian painters.
