From the Archives

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 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.

In 1907 Ivan Cankar stood as a candidate of the Social-Democratic Party at the elections to the Austrian parliament (called the Imperial Council). In the middle of the election campaign he wrote the short story Hlapec Jernej in njegova pravica (first translated into English as Yerney’s Justice and subsequently as The Bailiff Yerney and His Rights), in which he professed the idea of socialism, which is also the most revolutionary idea in the history of Slovene literature. Smrekar’s design for the cover showed Jernej as an old man sunk in his thoughts, with a bundle on his back into which he has packed forty years of work on the estate. Although there is nothing revolutionary to be seen in the image of Jernej, he personifies the working masses of the world and their difficult path in the struggle for social justice. The book has been translated into eighteen languages and is considered a classic work of world proletarian literature.

In 1908 Smrekar designed the covers for Zgodbe iz doline šentflorjanske (Tales from St Florian Valley) and Pohujšanje v dolini šentflorjanski (Scandal in St Florian Valley), both of which built further on Cankar’s criticism of bourgeois morality.

In 1909 Smrekar illustrated the cover of Za križem (Behind the Cross). In it, Cankar describes the suffering of the Viennese proletariat, who at a time of high unemployment as a consequence of the great economic crisis of 1907 in 1908, were struggling to earn enough to survive. People were living in want, turning to drink and dying of tuberculosis.