Milena Zlatar
JOŽE TISNIKAR
Painter, born 1928 in Mislinja,
lives and works in Slovenj Gradec.
Four artists have left a
distinct mark on Slovenj Gradec: composer Hugo Wolf , poet Ernest Goll
, sculptor Franc Berneker , and painter Jože Tisnikar. Of course we could
list many other significant artists and tell of the creative potential
of their lives. However, it was precisely these four who gave a special
emotional pulse to Slovenj Gradec: loneliness and traumatism in the experience
of existential insight. The life story of each one could begin with the
words: "There was something about his character…" Fateful experiences and
realisations led them to creation; they were split between the banality
of the everyday and the sublime emanation of sounds, words and images.
Their lives and works will never be entirely elucidated; rather they will
remain the subjects of manifold studies frequently dealing with the fringes
of commonplace life stories. This is especially true of Jože Tisnikar.
The tragedy of the composer
and the poet are wrapped in the mysticism of the slow death of the composer,
and the poet's decision to resolve his own physical existence. Franc Berneker,
the first modern Slovene sculptor, also ended his life in oblivion and
isolation. It seems as though Tisnikar has combined the fates of the three
artists into one creative force, as though he defeated Hades and returned
to this world. The transformation of their existential traumas into works
of art figures in the ontological perception of the world that produces
artists. Even today, in the era of modern visual communication and the
modernist articulation of fine art inscription, narrative composes a significant
component of formal and aesthetic norms. The personal views of a musicologist,
literary historian, art historian, and sociologist (as well as experts
from other domains), together with the critical contribution of every single
branch of knowledge, help create an understanding of these works. Despite
the time distance, this art remains consistent with the era in which the
artist, the observer or even both, lived. Therefore, judgements and explanations,
which are never definitive, depend on the time distance and social factors
upon which the artist and the observer are hinged. It is this unambiguous
quality that enables a piece of art to live through all social transmutations.
Practically every Slovene
critic of note has written about Tisnikar, and hardly any other Slovene
artist has been paid so much attention during his life. Nevertheless, Tisnikar
has been isolated, as though he carried the burden of his singularity and
stigma precisely because it was so difficult to place him into any category
of style. The historical distance of the recent past has not yet refined
the elements that shadow the painter with the excessive adoration of authenticity
and originality, which in the Sixties was promoted by discoverers of the
so-called ‘na?ve painters’. It was precisely because of the promotion of
this phenomenon that Tisnikar was noticed so early, that he was given the
opportunity to exhibit, while the notion of existentialism was overlooked.
Social conditions in the late Sixties were also not open to abstract art,
and expressionist style was considered to be outdated. In the first decade
after World War II something of a crisis even developed on the Slovene
fine art scene. The crisis was not due to the artists themselves, but rather
to the incompetence of Slovene fine art criticism, which theoretically
was expected to form and explain new developments in the field of art.
Four decades of Tisnikar’s
personal and artistic growth, his solitude and social recognition,
correspond to the development and maturing of the Slovene fine art scene.
This art scene was defined both by social factors of the post-war period
and the development of Slovene art, which, despite the fact that traditionally
and geographically it belonged to the heart of Western European civilisation,
lagged behind modernist currents. Like any decade following great social
upheaval (wars, revolutions), the Fifties were also enchanted years. However,
society soon became tired of celebrating the victory, the pressure to acknowledge
only the ideals of Socialist Realism subsided, and artists were able to
establish discourse based upon the modern aesthetic experiences of European
art. The by-product of this process was the divergence from and misunderstanding
of this practice as a reflection of all contradictory social development.
This also helps us to understand the rejection of expressive fine art rooted
in the existentialist pattern of creativity. The social milieu of
the time was not ready to accept this kind of categorisation, and Slovene
fine art criticism did not place Tisnikar within the expressive field of
creativity until many years later. Slovene (post-)Expressionism smouldered
too long in marginal intellectual and artistic circles, its growth later
interrupted by World War II. The tragic experience of the war-time epic
upon which the Slovene nation would feed was later replaced by the heroic
glorification of the labour achievements of socialist society, the era
of Socialist Realism. Nevertheless, some Slovene artists have preserved
the poetics of their own individual fine art , and their creative concepts
remained independent of both Socialist Realism and the approaching Modernism.
These artists actually saved the image of Slovene fine art in the first
decade after the war. They preserved a singular and committed relationship
with the spiritual atmosphere of the time, especially in regard to Slovene
geographical, cultural and historical peculiarities, which were comprised
predominantly of specific views of figurativeness and the contextual interpretation
of fine art. We can discern post-Expressionist tendencies, primarily in
the domains of literature and fine art, in which Expressionism again reached
a prominent level. Foreign models were not so important, although
they enabled access to other aesthetic practices of modern visual representation,
which were slow to take root in our surroundings – not until the Seventies
did this undergo significant change.
In such circumstances, the
first few generations of graduates from the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts
(established in 1948) found themselves in a troublesome situation. They
endeavoured to get foreign scholarships, but only a few were granted the
opportunity to come into contact with European art centres; study in Paris
was especially tempting. As for all the rest, if they failed to respond
to orders and the need for heroic monuments (sculptors were even worse
off than painters in this regard) they were destined for pedagogical work.
Surprising as it might be,
this also begins the story of the development of the advantageous cultural
climate in Slovenj Gradec, where Jože Tisnikar embarked on his artistic
path. His mentor Karel Pečko, academic painter and renowned gallery owner,
started to organise fine art exhibitions , which attracted domestic and
foreign artists to Slovenj Gradec. This enabled domestic artists to establish
a connection to modern fine art creativity and to critically compare their
own creations with the achievements of internationally renowned artists.
Tisnikar did not have an academic education in fine art, he was only able
to encounter it in reproductions and during his visits to the museum and
churches rich with fine art in Slovenj Gradec and its surroundings, which
were run by the parish priest Jakob Soklič . Thus he found the lively pulse
of fine art in the city more than stimulating. He began to copy the works
of older masters, but this did not fulfil his creative aims, for his inherent
spiritual essence was something quite different. From the early beginning,
it led his artistic skill in drawing and painting towards a peculiar style
of form and, later, singular use of colour. Tisnikar developed a discernible
and unique style of painting from the very onset, and it would have been
impossible to erase it, even had he received formal education at a fine
arts academy, or had he painted in the manner of numerous amateur painters
– which would have been much more acceptable to a small-town scene.
The tragic experience
of life, which originated in the hospital prosection room and merged with
the fertile soil of the specific environment in which he grew up, became
the motivating force of his elemental fine art narration with hardly any
comparison in the space of Slovene fine art. It was an asylum, into which
he would retreat in moments of crisis, although not in search of a therapeutic
effect, but rather of the subconscious metaphysical perception of passing,
which became his own personal mythology. The prospering cultural atmosphere
of Slovenj Gradec, together with the crucial fact that in 1951 he started
to work in the prosection room as an apprentice in dissection, only helped
Tisnikar enter the local fine arts scene. The comprehension of the transitory
nature of humanity and his reflections on life led Tisnikar into the world
of enchantment. Moments of catharsis followed; filled with cognisance and
energy, he had to express himself. Thus he drew and painted. Forms were
pouring out of him; at the start he merely drew, and only later did he
begin using colour. Motifs from the environment that characterised him
so strongly and changed his life, started spontaneously to predominate.
In 1955, he created
his first painting from the hospital surroundings, entitled The Autopsy.
Dr. Stane Strnad , director of the hospital, saw Tisnikar’s paintings and
noted their simplicity and Tisnikar’s incredible creative potential. He
informed his friend, painter Karel Pečko, about the artist. With the latter
as his mentor, Tisnikar became more self-aware, but nevertheless he had
to live through long years of doubt, positive reviews and social recognition
came only much later. Today it is an undeniable fact that Tisnikar
is one of the most unique Slovene painters, a charismatic personality,
but still a solitary »traveller« comparable to no one else. He has neither
idols nor imitators, since for many people the field of his creativity
- death as an iconographic theme - is taboo, one which they can not and
will not approach, at least not in the manner adopted by Tisnikar himself.
Fine art critics have placed him in proximity to a category of expressive
existentialist artists, known as »dark modernism«. But each one of
the Slovene painters relatively close to Tisnikar (Marij Pregelj, Gabrijel
Stupica, France Mihelič, Zoran Mušič, and of the younger generation Zdenko
Huzjan in particular ) is so singular, and Tisnikar so unique in his life
experience, that comparison only proves their incomparability.
What makes the expressionist
poetics with existentialist additions, and even the surrealistic and phantasmal
poetics from the late nineties, so specifically Tisnikarian and incomparable
with any other poetics? First of all, it does not deal with a crisis of
values in certain social surroundings, it does not narrate grand stories
and social analyses of living surroundings seen through critical optics.
It is so commonplace that even the great philosophical existential themes
of absurdity, anxiety, death, and nothingness, become a part of life.
Tisnikar has preserved
his suggestive fine art inscription to date, perpetually building a strong
fine art image of his exceptional opus, which did not dissolve into emptiness.
As to iconography, he dedicated himself to the themes connected with the
cessation of life; even when depicting scenes of everyday human life, one
can feel the specific perception of human transitoriness and loneliness.
His paintings, however, do not invoke depression. The fate of Tisnikar’s
personalities is tragic, but at the same time it brings hope. Like Prometheus,
who taught people numerous skills and provoked the anger of the gods with
his philanthrophy, Tisnikar’s ‘gods’ are also divinities, although tragic,
that serve people and revive their faith and hope. They do not provoke
anxiety, rather they attract and excite us, for they speak of life, inevitably
composed of two opposing principles: life and death.
People frequently
have difficulties in comprehending the life cycle with death as one of
its poles; they need a mediator who eases their passage in both the physical
and spiritual sense. Precisely because of the unavoidable transition, and
their fear of it, the world of human cognition is still opposed to scientific
findings, even at the threshold of the 21st century. Sometimes we are not
very far from medieval mystical explanations, mixed with pre-Christian
ideas about life and death. Tisnikar himself is a mediator between the
public and his works – he is the priest who initiates us to his own world.
Tisnikar’s works evoke questions
about the meaning of life. These questions are also reflected in the verse
of Ernst Goll, whose poem The Course of Life reveals individual experience
and bitter subjective sentiments about life. It begins and ends with the
words, »We know nothing of time and space, we journey in an endless circle«.
Tisnikar succeeded in persuasively
translating his feelings of passing and catharsis into the language of
art. However, the philosophical and psycho-sociological analyses are not
sufficient to place him in the context of art history. Tisnikar, however,
has proven to be an excellent painter. He mastered the skill of the métier,
developed a feeling for composition and, with remarkable skill, grasped
the illusion of space. The selection of works at the retrospective exhibition
enables us to follow the logic of his artistic development and his solution
of entirely formal problems. Paintings with accentuated plane surfaces
and colour as merely an accidental companion to the drawing, characterise
his early period. The drawing is the most spontaneous method of recording
the artist’s thoughts, it is the language with which he expresses and embodies
those thoughts. In the beginning, he had not thoroughly mastered
the technique of painting, but this fact only enhanced the expressive effect.
Monotypes from the sixties are particularly exceptional expressions of
his elemental messages. The seventies were a period of his growth in the
direction of plastic spatial elaboration, and the study of colour exploration
also gained new significance. It seems as though the distinctive Tisnikar
green developed spontaneously in connection with motifs from the
prosection room. We see the satiation of colour pigments which, together
with organic binders (egg tempera), enwrap a ‘heavy’ light that floods
across the canvas, rises from an unknown spring, and makes the setting
mysterious. It would be rather superficial to claim that this is theatrical
light, the light that effectively constructs the fine art setting. Sometimes
it appears as a mere ray of light – a flash of wit that carries us into
the irrational world. This kind of light, together with the hues of layered
colours, can create a surreal world, such as the one depicted by the great
Belgian painter René Magritte, and similar to the symbolic essence of the
‘customs officer’ Henri Rousseau. Nevertheless, Tisnikar’s paintings retain
the intense drama of inner suffering as a consequence of the tragedy of
life. We could speak of the bipolarity of his paintings, of their earthly
and spiritual sides. The earthly is portrayed in expressive forms, with
linear and colour deformation, while the spiritual is represented by the
light and symbolism of the depicted persons. Like the title of Paul Gauguin’s
painting with its philosophical and religious motifs, the following questions
come to mind, »Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?«
Thus we can discern common
points with symbolism, which endeavoured to implant a perception of the
world, in which inherent and suggested reality would become an authentic
value. The message should be read through symbolism, for a symbol is beyond
both actual and illusory presence. Such suggestiveness and mystery is manifested
in Tisnikar’s works in entirely ordinary and seemingly clearly comprehensible
scenes. In contrast to Edvard Munch, Tisnikar depicts psychic situations
and demeanour. The impetus of Munch’s Expressionism was the general crisis
of values and his reaction to it, while Tisnikar’s impetus is found in
his personal bearing in the face of existential problems . However, he
could only establish a secluded dialogue. It is therefore not a coincidence
that Tisnikar mainly depicts himself, even when he is not aware of it.
It is known that self-portraits are the favoured means of introspective
psychological exploration, that they reflect the artist’s view of life’s
philosophies and actual experiences. All Tisnikar’s characters express
existential strain, intensified through his personal tragic, and
for that reason he almost always depicts himself. Even the Christ figure
(simultaneously suffering and victorious) is Tisnikar himself. He even
dared to disfigure Christ, to cut off his hand, which is an apparent and
intentional shift away from the known depictions of Christ. The depicted
figures do not portray any differences between men and women, they do not
even feature their age. Time is extended to infinity, and thus the definition
of age is not necessary. Tisnikar’s figurativeness includes not only depictions
of people, but also animals: bats, mice, rats, horses, crows, cats, crickets,
and others – both as apparitions and real beings. The recognition of the
transitoriness of every single thing, dead or alive, is always unmistakable,
but it is expressed so subtly that it does not disturb us. Animism or soul,
is the moving force of the world, it shows itself through the sublime and
mysterious excursions of human life. His love scenes bear no erotic connotations.
Tisnikar is not carnal. Everything he painted gained in the next moment
some superior air, feasts in village pubs changed, just like the moments
in the prosection room, or processions at funerals. Everything became equally
calm, placid and dignified. The poor man drowning his sorrows in his drink
and staring bluntly at us is not a banal scene, but an allegory of the
recognition that there are other, different worlds. Thus there is hope
for and faith in deliverance. Perhaps this is the answer to the mystery
of why Tisnikar’s paintings attract us so irresistibly. They are so human,
but at the same time so divine. To date, Tisnikar has succeeded in preserving
his strong expressive charge, although his life has changed entirely. He
reacts subtly to the developments around him. His motifs in the eighties
and nineties have apparently become moderate and his memento mori hardly
audible. Is that so!? Why can we not hear the artist cry: the string of
refugees; the dead fields of the Transylvanian Count Dracula (the
painting made in 1998 - does it not prophetically predict the Balkan death
dance?!); Gypsy villages, and people living on the fringe of civilisation;
cats slaughtered by a nameless executioner; Adam and Eve in the middle
of a wasteland; the herald of Savonarola’s penance in a medieval
town where people hide behind masks … carnivals. People dance and prance,
like moths they spin around the doomed ballroom, and roast in the fires
of their own vanity and apathy. Tisnikar has assumed the role of observer,
this is no longer his own catharsis. Human apathy regarding the misfortunes
of other people has unconsciously touched him. He paints fervently. Gone
are the traces of colourful layering and spending hour after hour smoothing
the surface. Now each stroke of his brush is discernible, the instrument
glides easily across the surface. He stopped cutting into the substance,
his figures are not released from him with pain. He has changed, he is
now a prophet inscribing his visions. The thoroughness of his creations
should be explored in steps. The hidden symbolism of objects and humans,
and accentuated colours (the appearance of red after 1990!) appear slowly,
through contemplative perusal of a painting. The setting is elevated to
the level of the stage, or contrarily, lowered to the very bottom margin
of the painting. Frequently, two-thirds of the pictorial field is left
to the extraordinary ‘landscape’ or urban milieu. He has spontaneously
seized the existential issues of contemporary man. Regardless of the traditional
account of painting as a means of expression, he addresses the audience
of fine art in many different ways. One of the most prominent is the apparent
flirtation with the world of motifs that everybody can understand, but
which also conveys deeper meanings. It is therefore not a coincidence that
his motifs are divided into numerous sets, such as Mothers, Husbands and
Wives, Crucifixes, Oblivion, Painter, People and Horses, One-eyed, Births,
The Mourning, Journeys, Crows, etc. Recently, he even added some
new ones, such as Gypsies, Carnivals, Adam and Eve, Animals and the ubiquitous
Self-portrait. We should not, however, overlook the specific landscape
which has earned the artist’s special attention ever since the seventies.
Imprecisely outlined and even less locally defined, it is nevertheless
grand, for it will exist longer than man himself – it is the landscape
after the cataclysm.