Oton Gliha

Oton Gliha was a Croatian painter who graduated from the Zagreb Academy of Art and spent time in Paris. In his early years, he painted portraits and still lifes using not very bright colours. His landscapes expressed Paul Cézanne's construction of paintings, his portraits pointed out only the most important features of forms, and his still life made the material so thick that they became almost reliefs.

Oton Gliha was born on May 21, 1914 in Croatia, the Slovenian temporary abode of his family with its roots in Istria, whose residence was dictated by his father's civil service. He lived in Slavonia until he was ten, and later moved to Zagreb where he completed his secondary education and his study at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1937. He studied with the professors Maksimilijan Vanka, Marino Tartaglia and Ljubo Babi. He then went to Paris, Vienna and Munich to enhance his studies. After getting married to his study colleague, the painter Mila Kumbatovi, he embraced her native island of Krk as his own, undertook pilgrimages there and continued looking for stimulation for his painting expression in its coastal landscapes. Because he had made his living from painting throughout his life, unrestrained by pedagogical or, indeed, any other service, Gliha used to leave Zagreb during the sultry summer and cold wintry days to spend many months in Omišalj (on Krk) and sometimes undertook study sojourns abroad (Italy in 1952 and 1961, and the USA in 1958 and 1979).

"I once experienced the picture of that landscape from Krk, furrowed by dry stone walls as an old table with Glagolitic script carved upon it. This association might seem strange, funny even, but for me it became fatal at that moment. It helped me unravel all that excitement that I used to carry within myself, observing that strange geometry, architecture and sculpture that man had unconsciously created in his struggle with stone. By making the mean earth free of stone, the man used the same stone to put it back to captivity, by fencing it off by dry stone walls. When I stand within them I feel, I don't know why, very happy and filled by some silent festive joy. I feel the presence of a multitude of people and can hear their voices. The time seems to have come to a standstill, reality becomes unreal. The faraway past seems to be the present; the present and future seem like the past: I experience an intense feeling of the presence of eternity. This spiritual state gives me power and stamina."

This is how Gliha's DRY STONE WALLS (called Gromace) have come to be painted; parallelograms, triangles, circles and various other forms have been caught by oil paint or other graphic techniques, creating a fantastic whirlpool of rhythm, lines and surfaces. Once, the colours would be lively and joyful like the Sun, on another occasion they would be monochrome and sad like the surface of the Moon. The painting from the Modern Gallery in Zagreb, marked 5 – 71, belongs to Gliha's best works where he investigates the depth of the picture's space, the effect of light on the ethereal quality of the atmosphere and the colouristic accents upon the plasticity of the form. It is a painting from Gliha's classic 60s and 70s, when his style spoke out in its full maturity and problem topicality. The painting of Oton Gliha in the corpus of 20th century modern art is a completely isolated phenomenon. His painting has an identifiable motif, and at the same time it has become the motif of painting art. In the closing words of the Preface to the catalogue of one of Gliha's last one-man exhibitions (MGM Gradec, 1989), Zdenko Tonkovi, one of the best connoisseurs of the painter's opus, points out that Gliha created something constant from the informel, in the sense of what Cézanne wanted to do from Impressionism. As Tonkovi suggests, the poetics and materialization of Gliha's paintings should make us recognize the painter's gene that we can find in the works of all great painters when they have reached the peak of their life's perception.

Dry stone walls as a motif, inspiration and painting code enabled Oton Gliha to discover the genuine, autochthonous painter's world that has made Croatian painting part of the general history of art. It does not hurt to note that the Guggenheim Museum in New York bought one of Gliha's paintings as early as 1958, and that the painter had one-man exhibitions in the leading modern art galleries in Turin, 1960; São Paulo, 1961 and Milan, in 1964. He participated at the 31st and 32nd Biennale in Venice and he also painted his dry stone walls on large compositions for public venues: – like the frescos in the Federal Executive Council in Belgrade, 1962, the mosaic in the lounge of the Krk airport, 1970, and the festive curtain of the National Theatre in Rijeka, 1981.

Oton Gliha died in Zagreb on June 19, 1999.

Additional information

Miroslav Krleža (ISBN 953–157–102–3) was published in 1998. The book contains detailed studies on Oton Gliha, as well as 12 paintings, 176 oils on canvas and an abundance of documentary material. The book lists all of his major local and international exhibitions, reviews, articles and interviews in local and international media.

The monograph was published less than two years after the painter's death; it contains all the relevant works of Gliha's rich opus. There are only two or three paintings missing, as they were not available to the publisher. We can therefore say that the monograph represents a complete document of Gliha's art.

Oton Gliha's work makes him a very specific participant in the adventure of modern art. The fate connected him with gromače (dry stone walls) and he maintained his loyalty to them throughout his lifetime. Gliha painted other motifs, too (landscapes, portraits, still life...), but his entire opus, that ranks him among the renown European painters of the 20th century, is linked with the landscape of the island of Krk and with – gromače.

Note

One of those missing paintings is held by an American, Dr. John Griffin, of Lighthouse Point, Florida, USA. He acquired his Gromace painting in 1966 while in Washington, D.C.. He obtained it from an American socialite who bought the painting directly from Oton Gliha while she was visiting Prague. Gliha accepted $1,500 cash from her for the painting. He told her that the painting was worth much more but he needed U.S. dollars to buy an automobile.