VIENNA.- The main theme of the exhibition, a joint project with the National Gallery of Slovenia, is a defining characteristic of Slovenian painting around 1900: the intensive engagement with color. Rarely has the study of its decorative effect, symbolism, expressive power, and technical application been at the heart of artistic developments to the same extent as it was in Slovenian painting from this period.

General Director Stella Rollig: The research conducted in preparation for this exhibition produced a wealth of new insights. We now have a much more nuanced picture of the influence of Slovenian artists in Vienna and a better understanding of their connections with their Austrian colleagues and with institutions such as the Belvedere. This also opened new art-historical perspectives on Slovenian painting, highlighting the modernity of the artists featured in the exhibition.

Following Jožef Tominc, the outstanding painter from the pre-1848 period, fascinating personalities such as Jožef Petkovšek and Ivana Kobilca stand out in the second half of the nineteenth century. Around 1900 the group known as the Slovenian Impressionists formed around artists Rihard Jakopič, Ivan Grohar, Matija Jama, and Matej Sternen. Their style influenced Slovenian art until 1918 and beyond.

Barbara Jaki, director and curator of the National Gallery of Slovenia: Vienna played a key role in recognizing the quality and originality of modern Slovenian painting. An exhibition at Vienna’s Galerie Miethke (1904) marked a turning point for the generation of artists born in the 1860s who aimed to raise national visibility within a multinational monarchy through modern Slovenian art.

Inspired by French Impressionism, Slovenian Impressionists also sought to capture a fleeting moment in nature. In addition, however, experiments with color, form, and brushwork became increasingly important in their work.

Slovenian painting from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is characterized by a pronounced tendency to design the picture plane as a decorative arrangement of colors. Paintings are often composed solely through a carefully devised combination of a few colors uniformly applied to denote different pictorial elements. This stylistic device was also employed by other artists, but a comparison with paintings in other countries from the same period makes it surprisingly clear that Slovenian painters explored color composition with far greater intensity and consistency than their peers elsewhere, said curator Markus Fellinger.

The show at the Lower Belvedere gives special attention to Slovenian artists’ ambivalent relationship to Austria and its capital Vienna. Many of these artists studied or lived for a time in Austria and were caught between conflicting feelings stemming from a sense of latent exclusion while at the same time being dependent on state funding. In this context, many documents from the Belvedere Archive shed a fresh, more nuanced light on the cultural-political ties between Vienna and Ljubljana.