Nevena Martinović
THE PAINTING OF KOSARA BOKŠAN: A JOURNEY THROUGH NATURE TOWARD SELF
Academy. The Zadar Group.
The life and creative activity of Kosara Bokšan were early defined by her entry into the first after-war class of Professor Ivan Tabaković at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts. At the time of hard social realism, Kosa Bokšan joined the group of young people who refused to accept the academic programme set by the state and the Communist Party. Encouraged by Tabaković’s then „anti-pedagogical approach to free thinking in art, they left the academic programme in the summer term, in order to paint on their own and freely.
The sojourn of the group of colleagues and friends in devastated Zadar, on the Adriatic coast, from March/April to August/September 1947, grew into a historic example of one of the first collective acts of rebellion against the limitations of the freedom of creation in the new state. Apart from Kosa Bokšan, the following colleagues from her class were members of the Zadar Group: Petar Omčikus, Milorad Bata Mihailović, Ljubinka Jovanović, Miodrag Mića Popović, Vera Božičković, Mileta Andrejević, and their friends Bora Grujić and Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz. Although short-lived, the Zadar episode had an important role in determining Kosa’s personal and professional destiny. First of all, they worked on establishing their own, personal and professional credo – on the rejection of limitations and suffocation of the freedom of choice of ideas and the manner of their expression. The demonstration of such a stance with the repudiation of their academic duties was understood as a direct confrontation to the institution and the system; the majority of the members of the Zadar adventure, including Kosa, led to a tiresome and humiliating performance of expulsion from the Academy, new admission, and final individual abandonment of studies. In her and Omčikus’ case the repercussions referred to isolation from the art society in Serbia and in the early fifties they began their life in Rijeka, where they got married and continued their professional painterly activity as members of the federal art association. Although the Zadar group did not have one and the same art programme, all members of the group were unified in their reversal to the pre-war modernist model of painting. Kosa’s early landscapes, figurative groups, portraits and self-portraits, paintings of realistic provenance supplemented by the “expressionistic charge“ were displayed at her first solo exhibition in Belgrade, in 1952. With her painting and her engagement within the boundaries of her profession (as a member of the Zadar Group and the group of Eleven Artists) Kosara Bokšan took part in the critical phase of the struggle for the renewal of modernist tradition in Serbian post-war art. Finally, some aspects of the Zadar experience had a most encompassing effect on Kosa – such as her lasting love of the Mediterranean region and life there.
Paris. Abstract Art.
Having chosen, in their youth, the path of personal and professional integrity, Kosa Bokšan and Petar Omčikus decided soon after Kosa’s first solo exhibition, to continue their life and artistic development in Paris. Together with their best man, Bata Mihailović, and his wife, Ljubinka Jovanović, they were the first painters after the war to change the Belgrade art scene for the Paris one for a longer period of time; in the following decade, they drastically transformed their painting under the influence of high modernism into the mature language of painterly abstraction.
Only two years after their arrival in Paris, Kosa’s painting Orange Abstraction (1954) was shortlisted for Prix de Dôme and was shown at the exhibition organised in that legendary meeting point of artists in Montparnasse. The path from a traditional landscape and portrait to a painting formally devoid of all referential points to the outer world, led, in case of Kosa Bokšan, first through the painting of moderate geometrisation. It was the middle line of abstraction, between the “painting of French tradition” and the new phenomena of lyrical abstraction and informel. The compositions containing geometricized areas executed in thick or layered pigment, where the strokes and/or physical characteristics of the painted matter remained visible – synthesized certain qualities of the old and new models of abstract painting. Kosa could have seen exceptional examples of this kind of painting in the works of Serge Poliakoff who lived in the same hotel with her and Omčikus and exhibited in Gallery Jeanne Bucher, where they used to go often and became friends with some of the artists who gathered there. For an artist who suddenly entered the world of abstraction from the world of representational painting, this model of plastic thinking was relatively attractive because it offered the possibility of objective departures and nourished the elements of form and composition. Still, judging by the titles of Kosa’s early abstract paintings, to which her Composition and Orange Abstraction belong, it was clear that she had been liberated from non-painterly references by defining the content exclusively by plastic elements and their pure relations – the surface, colour and the line. Those were the works which, notwithstanding their closeness to the works by Poliakoff from the same years, demonstrated an absolute understanding of one model of painterly abstraction and her mature realisation of all of its segments. Anyway, her participation at the exhibition in the café La Dôme was an aspect of official recognition of Kosa’s mastering of the autonomous world of painting and also her full integration into the developments of the contemporary Parisian scene.
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(Complete text in printed edion)
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