The Larch / From the Carniolian Countryside


One of the most important accessions in the National Gallery of Slovenia in recent years has been The Larch,1904, by the Slovene painter Ivan Grohar. It was presented to the museum in 1990 as a gift from the Party for Democratic Reconstruction. While cleaning, the senior restorer Kemal Selmanović noted that the canvas had been cropped along four edges. Dr. Tomaž Brejc revived his hypothesis of 1982 that The Larch appeared as The Summer in the Imperial Jubilee Exhibition of 1910 together with The Spring, 1903, and The Autumn,arranged in a triptych. Grohar apparently perceived these paintings as a series of four seasons with The Snowshower,1905, standing for Winter.

Dr. Brejc assumed that Grohar had wanted to repeat the publically acclaimed composition of The Spring in his next ambitious canvas. His intuition was correct in more than one respect. However, the issue of the four-season-series needs a new interpretation. The problem evident from the start is the difference in size of the four canvases: 42,5 cm in height between The Spring and The Winter,and 41 cm in width between The Spring and The Summer (The Larch).I contest the identification of The Autumn. Instead of A Man with Pushcart,1910, I propose The Sower,1907.

Although all the paintings listed agree in proportions of the oblong rectangle, the measurements are too deviant to hold together as a series. I argue that, initially, Grohar might have had a four- season-series in mind but had never realized the plan. The 1910 triptych was a happy but accidental arrangement with a content different from the eternal rhythm of the seasons.

A few years ago one of the photographs in an exhibition on Rihard Jakopič, installed by Mestni muzej Ljubljana, attracted my attention. It was a photo from the First Yugoslav Exhibition in Belgrade, September 1904, which shows among other paintings also The Larch fresh from the easel. The painting no doubt appeared in the catalog under the title From the Carniolian Countryside.It is approximately the same height as the known painting, but almost one third wider. A close examination of the composition proves that the original painting had been cropped some time before 1910.

We can trace the first appearance of the present title The Larch back to the fall of the 1906 exhibition in Sofia. I suspect that earlier appearances can be identified with the titles Aus meiner Heimat (Vienna, 1905) and From my native Country (Sic!), (London, Spring 1906). The editing of the painting was undertaken some time after 1906 and before the spring of 1910, when the painting was photographed in its cropped version in the Jakopič Pavillion. Editing profoundly affected the style of the painting although the character of the surface remained unchanged. It could be located between The Sower, 1907, still fashioned in an impressionist manner, and the monumental, expressive Wheatbundles, 1909. It was at the end of the decade that Grohar's compositions became decisively symmetric, tectonic, his brushwork broad, long-gestured and paint mixed on the pallet again.

The Larch was originally almost identical in size to The Spring. National Gallery holds a photographic plate of a small painting with the brushwork identical to The Larch. A comparison with the 1904 photograph proves that the little barn and the fir above match exactly those in the original painting. Although the support is described as cardboard in the file, an enlargement to the actual size unmistakenly shows the weaving of the canvas in the crevices of the paint. The triviality of the composition and the match of the proportions prove that this is a fragment rather than a painting unto itself. I think that the canvas was mounted on a cardboard by someone who wanted to have another Grohar painting. These hypotheses were confirmed several months after the first publication of this article, when I hit upon the original fragment in a private collection.

The composition of The Larch followed the schema of The Spring: a cropped tree figuring as an internal frame and a repoussoir. It is reasonable to conclude that The Larch still fits within the four seasons plan, but had no follow up afterwards. The cropping produced a different painting. The naturalistic motivation of the landscape was mellowed to emphasize the heroic tree in the foreground (center) of the painting. The large signature incised into the bark makes The Larch a metaphoric self-portrait of a painter gazing at the Alpine landscape of his native place. Even such strong evidence of observation as the hues in the shadow of the branches in the upper part functions metaphorically as the shadow cast by the hat over the eyes. The painting frames the painter's field of vision.

The composition of The Spring and the first version of The Larch might strike us as a stereotype used by any amateur photographer today. Grohar's sources were magazines such as Jugendstil and Ver sacrum. It seems that particularly in the graphic design of the poetry pages one finds more than just a compositional pattern: the decorative frame is the tree and the landscape the poem/poetry. Yet, Grohar's composition is even more advanced. The view through the branches onto the landscape and the elevated, hovering viewpoint are two features which were disseminated all over Central Europe only during the second part of the first decade in this century. The cropping of The Larch enforced this pattern.

When The Larch appeared as the axis of The Spring and The Sower in 1910, it escaped the cosmological connotations. It was rather a personalized vision of life much along the line of Giovanni Segantini's conceptions of his triptychs. Nature, the life cycle in three parts, and The Creative Inspiration of Music, a large oblong composition with an interpolated frame, both of 1897 make the best comparison. Grohar showed the "live" seasons of the year, the blossoms of spring and the sowing of seeds with his self-image in the middle. On a personal level the series reads as an emphatic argument about the life-giving power of the artist. It manifests a tremendously urgent need to show once more how inevitable the hard work of planting the seeds is for beauty to blossom. We should keep in mind the fact that Grohar died of consumption only half a year later.

On a public level the triptych was a powerful incantation of the native country's beauty. It functioned as a panoramic view of Slovenia from the blossoming fields over the summer pastures and mountains, brightly lit by the midday sun to the autumn field receiving the seeds for the future harvest. At the time when the proposition for the national art by the so called Slovene impressionists had already achieved its full recognition, Grohar's accidental triptych looked like a panorama of the Fatherland from the Castle of Ljubljana.

Pictures illustrating this presentation...