14 December 2006 – 10 February 2007
Museum of modern and contemporary art, Rijeka, Dolac 1/II

Curated by Daina Glavocic
Multimedia segment curated by Branko Franceschi



Fiumans: Rijeka Situation 1920-1940 is an exhibition which in accord with contemporary museological practice, through a visual creation's vantage point, considers totality of social reality of a selected time period and space, providing also a material basis to understanding as to what extent and why these events are still powerfully present in collective subconscious, i.e. how do they reflect in cultural specifics of contemporary Rijeka.

Branko Franceschi


During the interwar period in Rijeka, two informal art groups were active paralely. The first consisted of painters and sculptors of bourgeois, conservative ideas, worldviews and works, whose members were mainly traditionally directed academic painters and autodidacts that have started their careers at the beginning of the 20th century, much before the WWI, but whose long-term activity pushed them into exhibiting well into the interwar period (Josip Moretti-Zajc, Francesco Pavacich, Giulio Lehmann, Oloferne Collavini, Felice Fabro De Santi). Their painting was traditional, with traces of academism, leaning towards postimpressionism, romantic expression or otherwise realistic, showing a few sparks of somewhat late Art Nouveau. It was mostly uninventive and responded to the average taste of then Rijeka audience of enriched merchants, clerks, seamen, industrialists...One of the most prestigious representatives of this painting was Carlo Ostrogovich.

After politically chaotic years of inter-regnum and anarchy following the WWI, Rijeka situation discernibly changed prior to the end of the third decade. It was actually a time when young Fiumanese artists returned home from their Budapest studies. On return home, Romolo Venucci (1927) and Ladislao de Gauss (1928) brought back a handful of new ideas, radically enriching Fiumanese art scene.
A main theoretical generator of these (positive) happenings at Fiumanese visual arts scene was Francesco Drenig, who publicly appeared and was renown under his pseudonym of Bruno Neri. He was a political activist, but also a writer, journalist, art critic, poet translator from Croatian, school professor and above all an important advisor and stimulator, a guide of the young ones, still incompletely mature and insufficiently (in)formed Fiumanese artists. Besides Drenig's intimate friend Marcello Ostrogovich, a nucleus of the group encompassed Venucci and de Gauss, along with painters Arnold, Raicich and most often Antoniazzo, as well as with young painters Safitch and Pfau. Occasionally, the circle was widened by some outsiders (more traditional, such as L. Susmel, F. Blanda, Collavini, Hajnal). In time this group and their works have came to be called avant-garde. At the exhibitions, their works were separated from the others due to different approach and depiction of the painted contents, as well as due to inclination of some of these individuals towards futurism and abstraction.

Daina Glavocic

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MUSEUM OF MODERN
AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Rijeka
Dolac 1/II, Rijeka, Croatia
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