I’ve finished the chronological run of my Balkans posts, but there is still plenty that I feel the need to witter on about. This news will no doubt excite all three regular readers.
This work at the National Museum of Serbia, which I found moderately unsettling, is Portrait of an Unknown Man, painted by Vladimir Veličković (1935–2019) in 1963 using oil and tempera on canvas. The unidentified figure stands in profile with his arms folded around what appears to be a book or rectangular board of some sort. His body remains recognisably human, but his face has been rubbed, scraped and darkened until much of his identity appears to be disintegrating. This isn’t the sort of thing that I’d hang on my wall, even if I had the ability to put artwork up, which it’s not entirely clear that I do.
Veličković was born in Belgrade in 1935 and originally trained as an architect before establishing himself as an artist. This painting dates from the beginning of his professional career and the year of his first solo exhibition. He became known for paintings involving violence, fear and the vulnerability of the human body, which doesn’t feel like an entirely optimistic artistic direction.
The painting comes from the endowment collection of Dr Jakov Smodlaka and is an example of the unexpectedly challenging modern art displayed among the museum’s more traditional portraits. I wasn’t especially keen on it, nor could I find a meaning that spoke to me. That perhaps says more about my expectation that every artwork should communicate something recognisable than it does about Veličković’s intentions. Museums and galleries would become exhausting if I felt obliged to understand and enthusiastically admire everything, although that has never previously stopped me writing about it.