Smrekar worked with the Slovenian Mountaineering Association on several occasions. In 1936, he drew satirical scenes for postcards on which he presented individual mountaineering types. Here he made fun of the competitive alpinists, who chase records and forget to enjoy nature.

Smrekar was often critical of Capital. He most often depicted him as a fat man, in this drawing gorging on the overwhelming wealth. Threatening him from his back is a horrible centipede with human legs and arms; it holds a sickle in one hand and a hammer in another, two symbols of the Bolshevik revolution.

Smrekar presented his view on broader socio-political changes in the cycle Mirror of the World, created during the years of the extraordinary economic crisis that began on the American stock market, the Nazi overtake of Germany and the rise of fascism around the world.

At the time of increasingly dangerous social and political extremes, people were looking for culprits of general problems and a way to solve them. The primacy of simple, raw, and effective physical force over the brain is evident from this drawing, in which the muscular men mock the scholar with books.

Smrekar presented his view on broader socio-political changes in the cycle Mirror of the World, created during the years of the extraordinary economic crisis that began on the American stock market, the Nazi overtake of Germany and the rise of fascism around the world.

After the First World War, classical order, harmony and proportions in art were changing radically. Smrekar presents contemporary innovators, including a Bauhaus architect, a Picasso-style sculptor, a garrulous poet recording his words, a child (jazz) saxophonist, a small painter smearing with paint, and a composer sitting on books on counterpoint and chromaticity. In the front to the right and in the back to the left are two critics who are keenly observing what is happening.

Smrekar presented his view on broader socio-political changes in the cycle Mirror of the World, created during the years of the extraordinary economic crisis that began on the American stock market, the Nazi overtake of Germany and the rise of fascism around the world.

Smrekar wanted to study medicine but because of his lack of money, and with hopes of a scholarship from the Knafelj Foundation, he decided that same year to study law in Innsbruck, in the Austrian state of Tyrol, where he remained for the winter and summer semesters of the 1901/1902 academic year. Several illustrated postcards sent by Smrekar to Anton Mrak and others during his time in Innsbruck have survived. The postcards are written in pure Ljubljana dialect.
In a postcard to Anton Mrak, Smrekar wrote that Innsbruck was the “Arschloch der Welt” (“Rectum of the world”) and that a Carniolan could not be happy there, particularly if alone. He also mentioned a scholarship worth 140 crowns that he had received after six months, and wrote that he would now be able to continue his studies in Vienna.

It was common for young artists from Slovenia to set off for Munich at the time of the Oktoberfest, when all the streets in the city were festively illuminated in the evenings and full of people in costume. Gaspari’s memoirs recount an incident when he and Smrekar were more or less starving and sorrowfully awaiting the October festivities in a freezing cold room on Kreittmayrstraße. At the very least they wanted to go out for a walk and look at the town, but with no money they were wondering how they could improvise a makeshift costume. They decided to draw on each other’s faces – Smrekar drew a classical Leda and the Swan on Gaspari’s face, while Gaspari drew a design in which something is peeping into a rose-red heart (unfortunately this part of the entry is illegible). The two friends walked into the town centre “among the joyous brigades of merrymakers”, who called them over with a cry of “Here’s a couple of likely lads!” and treated them to a lavish dinner and copious drink – whatever they wanted. And so on at least one occasion they were “famous and sated” in Munich.

Torn between international artistic styles with their characteristic iconography and the national themes they had vowed to cultivate, the members of the Vesna group created a synthesis of the two. More than with fin-de-siècle decadence or symbolist spirituality, they associated the decorativeness of Art Nouveau to narrative storytelling and folk tradition, with elements taken from the everyday life of peasants, local folk tales, customs and traditions, folk songs and rustic crafts.

The adaptation of Art Nouveau elements is clearly visible, for example, in the case of one of its most popular iconographic motifs, the kiss, which was addressed by some of the most prominent representatives of the era such as Gustav Klimt and Edvard Munch. We would look in vain for profound personal emotion or symbolic messages in the paintings of the Vesna group. They placed their lovers in a domestic environment and dressed them in traditional Slovene costume, in order to bring a genuine Slovene scene closer to us – something familiar to us, something beautiful and good.

Animals were also popular subjects, just as in literature. The attractive forms of swans, herons, snakes, peacocks suited the compositional rhythms of the period. Peacocks with ornate tails served to decorate initial letters, swans and herons with spread wings appear on covers or on river banks, snakes coil around women’s bodies, and so on. Smrekar also drew exotic animals such as monkeys, lions and elephants as studies.

Trees played an important role in compositions of Smrekar and other members of the Vesna Club. These included birches, poplars, oaks and, above all, willows, usually standing alone and pollarded, as well as old hornbeams and single forked trees alone in the landscape. Willows – and old hornbeams – are sometimes given anthropomorphic forms and change into demonic faces such as created by man, his fear and visionary imagination. Within Slovene art this process was intensified to the most gruesome level by the painter France Mihelič (1907–1998), a teacher at the Academy in Ljubljana after the Second World War.

The Art Nouveau period also devoted particular attention to the appearance of the book as a total work of art – in other words to its covers, binding and all artistic elements including the decoration of the front cover and title page and the decoration of individual pages with vignettes, chapter headings, initial letters and illustrations closely linked to the text. Never before had so many bibliophile editions been published as in this period. The form of the book was also a reflection of the age, and the transition from conventional decorations to original illustrations was a gradual one. An extremely important position in the development of Slovene culture was held by the merchant and publisher Lavoslav Schwentner (1865–1952), who moved from Brežice to Ljubljana in 1898. He was dubbed the “court publisher of Slovene modernism” by virtue of his contribution to the establishment of the movement and accepted for publication a great number of thematically and ideologically controversial texts that were also commercially risky and which – owing to these considerations and the censorship exercised by the editorial and management boards of the existing publishing houses – would otherwise never have seen the light of day. Schwentner devoted particular attention to the physical appearance of books. While publishers in nineteenth-century Slovenia relied on imported clichés and illustrations, Schwentner replaced the dead decoration with original creations.

Cankar liked Smrekar’s Gospa Judit, which showed “powerful genius”, and its geometrical-expressionist stylisation prompted him to choose it from among the eight designs submitted. The draft is one of Smrekar’s earliest surviving works. It emanates the ideals of the Vienna Secession and links directly to the circle around Gustav Klimt. In a drawing that reflects sensitivity and precise draughtsmanship, he has placed in a stylised landscape the fashionable silhouette of a lady strolling past a fountain in a park, to which she has retreated from a grey Viennese suburb.

Several other of Smrekar’s drafts for this book cover have survived, revealing that he initially flirted with the late-nineteenth-century idea of femmes fatales such as Klimt’s The Witch or Eve from Franz von Stuck’s painting The Sin.

Smrekar wrote several memories of Cankar, for the most part after his death in 1918, and mentions that he used to see him in Ljubljana even before they got to know each other. On an illustrated postcard from 1903 featuring a portrait of Cankar, Smrekar wrote to the addressee that he had dashed it off quickly, relying on memory, and that he had failed to capture him very well, adding that his most expressive feature were his eyes and that he would study him better in Vienna.

In 1905, before Smrekar had completed any of his caricatures of Cankar, the literary magazine Ljubljanski zvon published a short story by Cankar about a man with a long nose, in which he described, or rather caricatured, Smrekar:

“Soon afterwards the door opened and a guest came in who looked around the room with a timid, sullen expression and took a seat in the corner by the other window. He wore a long coat that almost reached his heels and had an old-fashioned round hat on his head, which he did not take off when he came in but instead pulled it even lower over his brow; around his neck he wore a loud carelessly knotted tie like those worn by artists in shelters for the homeless in big cities. Protruding from beneath the hat was a nose the like of which I had never seen; it was strangely long, somewhat red, and soft – giving the impression that it would have waggled if the man had turned his head suddenly . . .”

A long, drooping nose became a trademark of Smrekar’s self-caricatures. He usually drew it with a drop hanging from its end, which gave him a pitiful character.

One of Smrekar’s first self-portraits is Žane, perhaps the most fashionable image in his entire oeuvre. It reflects his cynicism and his ability to adopt and adapt contemporary themes. He depicted himself in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters, a fashionable hat with a feather on his head, a red scarf round his neck and a Virginia cigar in his mouth, as he strikes a defiant pose and makes a vulgar gesture with his fists. It is undoubtedly an image with a certain significance, although its intention was not to magnify the artist’s personal virtues in the manner of bourgeois realist portraits. Quite the opposite, the artist’s pose reflects a pugnacious attitude towards society.