PETROVIĆ, Nadežda

Serbian painter, critic and exhibition organizer. She studied painting at an early age with her father, a drawing teacher, and became a teacher herself. In 1898 she went to Munich and studied first in the studio of F. Haas and in the school led by Anton Ažbe (1862-1905), then under Julius Exter (1863-1930), whose plein-air practice was discernible in her early works.

Between 1900 and 1910 she taught drawing at the women’s school of arts in Belgrade, painted in an Impressionist style and wrote articles of art criticism. In 1905 she founded an artists’ colony in Siceva. In 1910-12 she was in Paris, painted views of the city and became influenced by the Fauves. In 1914 she volunteered in the First World War and died of typhoid.

Her work is characteristic of the period between Impressionism and Expressionism. As a conscious originator of Serbian modern art who had good knowledge of early and contemporary European art, she sought a visual vocabulary of her own that would reflect her native countryside. Most forceful in this respect are her Sumadija landscapes. Her works feature impetuous brushstrokes that bear comparison with Art informel, and expressionistic contrasts in colour (e.g. Tree in the Forest, 1902; Belgrade, National Museum). Her pictures often became two-dimensional surfaces, in which all sense of space was lost in large, intermingling sweeps of colour.

Lady with a White Parasol

Nadežda Petrović’s practice as a painter and writings as critic were alike aimed at furthering the cause of Modernism as vigorously as possible. She spent the years from 1910 to 1912 in Paris, meeting the Fauves and exhibiting, like them, at the autumn Salon. Pictures she later painted back in Serbia, such as the bright, generously sketched, resplendent Lady with a White Parasol, are Impressionism of a fine, pure order.

Bois de Boulogne

Lady with a White Parasol