Casual Sensuality of Adult People in the Works of Vasko Lipovac, Part One

Vasko Lipovac (1931-2006) was a Croatian painter, sculptor, printmaker, designer, illustrator, and scenographer, famous for his figurative works in different techniques. His corpulent amorous men and women sometimes remind of those in satirical sketches of George Grosz.

Vasko Lipovac (Wikipedia.org)

Early Years

Lipovac was born in a small place in Montenegro. He was the fifth child in a family of wealthy merchant and shipping agent Spasoje Lipovac. His mother, Antica Lui, was a daughter of a landowner. In Real Grammar School, where Vasko Lipovac was studying as a kid, his natural talent was supported and developed by painter Mato Đuranović. In 1950, Lipovac enrolled in the Academy of Applied Arts in Zagreb. From the start of his studies, he wanted to be a sculptor but soon changed his mind and began studying as a painter. After graduation, Lipovac attended courses of Croatian professor Krsto Hegedušić.

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Chemistry In Industry

In 1959, right before a year in the army, Lipovac had married. After his military service, the artist had been working for two years (1964-1966) as an art editor assistant of “Chemistry in Industry” magazine. Notably, it was the only full-time job he ever had.

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Inexhaustible Exuberance

Most of his life, Lipovac spent in the Mediterranean climate. The cartoonish characters of his drawings and sculptural compositions are often can be seen sunbathing or swimming in the sea. Balancing between abstractionism and figuration, Lipovac depicted ordinary but nice people who tried to get their simple pleasures. The artist had been exhibited since 1956 in a hundred solo and near two hundred group exhibitions at home and abroad. He worked with high-polished metal, polychromous wood, enamel, terracotta, and polyester. He also was a theatric designer. This multi-talented personality was honored with many awards.

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Prosperity and Potential

Reading about famous artists, we got used to learning about their complications, tragedies, and post-mortal triumph. We connect their diseases, inhibition, and poverty with creative productivity. However, this logic fails when compared to the lives of Lipovac-like artists who were acknowledged soon after the beginning of their artistic careers. Moreover, looking at Lipovac works, we don’t realize the catastrophic essence of the time he lived in because his smooth sculptures and paintings seem very soothing. The characters of Lipovac are attractive in their bourgeoisie conflictless regularity. Not being Shakespearean, they remind of Rubens, Titian, and Modigliani figures.

Three Entertaining Graces in spirit of George Grosz. Vasko Lipovac. Erotika (catalogue), 2008, p. 101

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In the World of Regular Intimacy

As Ante Tomić writes, ” the people shown by Lipovac as enjoying sex are actually good parents or kind neighbors, regular churchgoers, who pay their bills on time, drive safely, commit no offenses, no matter how slight. They are normal, whatever that means. In fact, it is quite possible that some of them have a re-strained, untalkative, boring, buttoned-up character, maybe even not so lustful, rarely horny. Maybe that guy makes out with his wife only once a month, but Lipovac takes a look right at the delicate moment when sexual desire breaks through their middle-class armor.”

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Behind The Door

“The erotic works of Lipovac always display the duality of the Id and the Ego, urge and civilization, private and public, passion and restraint. It is perhaps most obvious in the series of intimate scenes behind a glass door. The door, its glass upper half showing a decent picture of a married couple, reveals their nudity from the waist down when opened, like a textbook of psychoanalysis. But Lipovac does not stick to that old teaching, since there is actually no serious drama between the two worlds. There is no Freudian frustration, no guilt in pleasure; the Id and the Ego are reconciled, the upper and lower part of the door live in harmony, and even if they happen to clash, it is more funny than morbid. Sex in those drawings, paintings, and sculptures is not beastly but natural and human. It is sex without spasms or horrors, without misery, crying wretches, mythological monsters, and whatever the painters of old employed for allegories. It is the ordinary, healthy, everyday sex of people from your neighborhood.” (Ante Tomić, “Vasko Lipovac. Erotika” (Introduction))

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Sources: Wikipedia.org; Vasko Lipovac. Erotika (catalogue), 2008.

The second will be added next Monday (11 December)….!!

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