Among many painters who lived (or still live) in Kovačica, Jan Knjazovic has an honorable place. He appeared on this art scene in 1951, together with Martin Jonaš. Both of them – in their own way, secured originality and singularity of their work by reducing the elements of folklore to the elements of color. But Jan Knjazovic’s premature death prevented him to express his full creative energy.

He named his only daughter Ana, and she was the one and only person that he loved more than painting. Therefore he loved spending time with her, giving her paper and colorful pencils. There is something primeval, something more important than anything else in us – a legacy that no one is aware of, but still it is genetically passed on to the younger generations and occupy them. And that is why the little blond girl with angel eyes was always sitting next to her father, painting. She was drawn by some distant magical dreams made under the skilled brush strokes of her father. She was in love with that world luring her from the paintings, and her favorite smells were paints and turpentine.

Knjazovic choose those typical themes of his surrounding and climate, in which he was born, and where he lived. He painted his fellow peasants in the field in each season, he painted them on the market, on wedding or while dancing; he painted their troubles, sadness, joy… And still, many things distinguished him from the other painters in Kovačica. The strength and recognition of his artistic expression is in the specific presentation of those themes. He used colors, light and shapes lightly, easily and without excessive details he created unusual, but compiling composition. By his recognizable coloring (dark purple, dark blue with orange accents, pink and yellow), stylization and shapes (houses, animals, flowers, people), with a frequent dose of a light humor Jan Knjazovic has built an authentic artistry within Kovačica art circle. Ana grew up and the roads were leading her higher and further. Painting was not her only concern now, although she often returned to it, each time better and safer.

After her father’s death and some personal breakdowns, as already mature person with the certain view of the world, she took the paintbrush in her hand, and while returning into the childhood and warm memories of the great painter, a wonderful father and a great man, she was afraid. And she wondered: Can I succeed? Will I not embarrass my father? And suddenly her responsibility doubled: What will my fathers’ audience and critics say? What would my father say if he could see it? But all that got answered very soon. Her paintings found their way to the audience and established the communication right away. It was heard: Already seen, but still not the same thing. Sensibility and poetry of heart which goes into the brush makes Ana’s paintings a bit more lyrical, with darker tones and vivid colors of the figures she is achieving greater strength and volume, it is more dynamic. The figures are less static. The public was at first reserved, slowly getting used to her paintings, and then accepted it unconditionally. Ana was finally happy. She felt her father’s dear look somewhere near here, his warm blue eyes were smiling, and she could almost feel his breath. And she knew it. She succeeded!

So many times she observed that simplified form, emphasizing or highlighting something. And she perceived it with understanding; it was impressed in her mind. In the childhood man remembers things and do not forget. Today, she often finds herself unconsciously reaching for the same colors her father used. Ana lives by these reminiscences, and she knows that as long as she paints, her father will live. She feels it as an incarnation of a great man, who was her father and gave her the first painting lessons straight from his heart.

When I saw her paintings for the first time, I said: Welcome, Ana! She looked at me bashfully and said: Are you serious? Many people say that I’m just like my father. I laughed: I guess you look like him? That’s alright. Many of them are like Bosch, Brueghel,Večenaj, Generalić and so on, and I am not sure that they are even related.

History teaches us that each artistic projection impose by its meaning and the material existence. And the meaning depends on heterogeneous factors.

Koviljka Smiljković

One of such artists is Nataša Knjazovic. A close relationship between herself and her paintings is evident. And this statement has a double meaning because of the fact that she lives intertwined with her creative work but also because she comes from the family of painters, from the sunny and rich pictorial vineyard of Knjazovic family. In order to form an authentic iconography of the work of Nataša Knjazovic, it was important to have this background of innocent and playful world view, and it is carved into her heart by heritage from her grandfather Jan and her mother Ana Knjazovic, the two naive painters with suggestive visual universes and almost religious devotion. Awareness and subtility with which Nataša is reinterpreting the elements of their visual poetic on her paintings are another proof that a good gene has magically tripled while going on and growing through all the three hearts of Knjazovic family.

In Nataša’s work, we can clearly recognize a woman’s touch and woman’s soul: a delightful (Dream), refined (My World), wickedly playful (Harlequinade) and sometimes painfully intense (Balkanika) inner world, whose heroine is the artist herself: different on each canvas, but still recognizable. Nataša’s self-portraits are often on the verge of reference to her character, actually showing endless possibilities of her being, a vibrating entity always searching and reshaping itself with insatiable curiosity, like in some magical theater, where she is trying the new masks over and over again.

As a heroine of the western pictorial tradition portrayed by male painters, woman is usually being reduced to a carnal aspect or to strictly defined woman’s role in a man’s world, while through relatively new tradition of a female self-portrait (this subject is being specifically talked about in public since Frida Kahlo, but in the light of women’s social emancipation the history of art has also noticed some of earlier female artists like Sofonisba Anguissola or Hildegard von Bingen) we are getting all those complex nuances of female character, sensibility and world view. From this point of view, Nataša Knjazovic belongs to one rich conglomerate of the contemporary female artists with self-researching vision.

Formally, Nataša’s canvas manifest the artistic inheritance of the Knjazovic family: its form stylization, space dimensionality, expressionistic and symbolic use of color, but at the same time showing greater tendency towards the representative, followed by more diverse palette, sometimes close to naturalistic one and built on bright color hues, clear and raw, or more frequently from the pastel gamma, which this painter always puts on as the new mask to play the new role and build an atmosphere of the specific painting. Formal aspects of her paintings serve to fulfill the meaningful art layer, leading from metaphor to narration.

Besides the figure of the main heroine, Nataša’s imaginarium includes multiple spaces, room – canvas on canvas – window-sky, mutually intertwined and creating the stage, on which the pursuit of love or daydreaming about love is taking place; as well as various mystical symbols like apple, ladder, birds or flower (often it is a sunflower covering the fields around Kovačica, and also the paintings of Ján and Ana Knjazovic); symbols taken from the Orthodox iconography, the myths, and – in more recent works – a contemporary visual culture, such as the character of Charlie Chaplin as her companion, and why not, as her alter-ego in a theatrical, life and artistic adventure…

In these times, when people do not distinguish themselves anymore from the rough masks behind which are they hiding from the others and from themselves, we have to appreciate such artists as Nataša Knjazovic, who – with steady enthusiasm and some kind of divine humor – through countless characters expose their own and universal human essence: the vulnerability, childlike playfulness, introspection into one’s own soul universe and endless search for love… Thank you, Nataša…

Ana Đorđević

In attempt to define, or at least find the point from which Ana and later Nataša started to act in the world of naive art, we have to look at the naive art in general; we have to look at the moment when Jan, together with the other artists, at first created universal and later his original visual language.

Naive art is „naive” by its definition, but also sincere, innocent, simple and natural in its expression. Those mainly self-taught artists didn’t have to look for the inspiration; they lived their art in the fields, landscapes, in nature. On their paintings they combined an archetypal memory of Slovakia, from where they all came long time ago to Banat and found the abundance of motives scattered in the fields, where the peasants worked tirelessly and lively, thus creating completely special iconography enriched with fantastic coloring. Although belonging to the group of naive artists, each painter from Kovačica had its own style, and Jan Knjazovic undoubtedly defined his art with its heart signature – that art was more than optimistic due to his gentle nature, almost unreal for a male artist. The rhythm of figures indicated beating of the heart, and the ultramarine – that warm blue color in the background – complementary kept the rest of the motives in the foreground warm.

Jan Knjazovic left a great legacy to his family, he introduced the love for art to their hearts, but at the same time he left one difficult task, and that was to keep and continue the tradition, not by copying, but upgrading it. That upgrade can be seen and even felt on the paintings of Ana and Nataša through that two and three hearts, which bring to their paintings such powerful emotion, so we can be sure that Jan’s heart is full.

In what way is Ana following or how much is she decomposing her father’s art? When you observe Ana’s fantastically magical paintings, you can feel that she belongs to Kovačica and its naive art thematically – with nature and village, motives of animals, people, trees, small houses of Banat… But thanks to her uninhibited imagination, these themes and motives on her paintings take on a different appearance. The motives become phantasms, the human figures are not Brueghel-style slow and heavy – on the contrary, these people could get everywhere, while almost weightless, hovering or climbing up the corn cob. And the horses are so free that, although without the wings, it appears that they can fly. The cockfight is not physical, but formal and colorful. Ana’s compositions are solid; she shapes and subordinates all the things on the painting according to the central motive. This was the first thing that she learned from his father, and then she put that ultramarine color – Jan’s trademark – on her paintings background, and with its nuances she realizes plans and illusion of perspective.

The participants of Ana’s artistic dream are distributed carefully, like in friezes, sometimes horizontally, sometimes vertically. The coloring of figures on Ana’s paintings is even brighter and stronger than her father’s, in order to deepen the intensity of participants’ relationship in this magic game, against the monochrome background. This background is actually a memory of Jan, it is unsensual world, which we can approach only through emotions, it is the stage on which Ana placed the actors of her large magical drama. That warm blueness of sleeping nights brings Ana’s dream about the world to reality – not the world in the way it really is, but how it should be. Protected, cheerful, wildly free, unspoiled and full of emotion. Perhaps Jan Knjazovic brought the sensitivity and emotion to the naive painting, but it is more than certain that Ana developed it to the point, where emotions overcome any relation with the reality. That’s why Anna’s poetry is out of this world, for her it is just a starting point, while the ending point is deep in the soul of the beholder. This style of painting can hardly remain within the borders of naive art definition as such. Because Ana’s art has so much of a fairytale feel, that it reminds Chagall. From the real life in the village, Ana stepped into the realm of the surreal world of the myth of village. The work of Ana Knjazovic is a specific form of fantastic, or magical, and yet by heart „naive” realism.

The work of Nataša Kňazovic Mijailović takes us to the last stage of developed poetics of the Kňazovic family. If Ana stepped into the magical realm, Nataša has brought his magical world of symbols and allegories to the absolutely appropriate form. She feels the noble tradition of pictorial poetics of her family, but she also makes a brave step towards the new motives and the new, unexpected relationship within the world of famous background. Namely, Nataša combines heritage and family memories with her own sense of inner world and its relationship with the surroundings and society.

The dominant figure of her artistic world is an image of a young, beautiful woman; sometimes naked, sometimes dressed as a ballerina, and other times as a princess. This female character is not realistic enough so we could think that it is a self-portrait of an artist, and it is not either a marionette from some theatrical play, whose strings are pulled by someone else. This central female figure is just Nataša’s inner life – woven from the finest and purest feelings – that pulls the strings and creates artistic expression of this artist. Whether it is shaped like naked Venus, or Juno surrounded by the peacocks, the inner self of Nataša Knjazovic – although in enigmatic relation with the other motives – more than clearly feels and reacts to the outside world.

Thus her art becomes some kind of the diary entries of her soul, but at the same time it is engaged in the society relations. Nataša’s painting is filled with symbols and riddles, it is a product of her inner life and hidden imagination – it is metaphysical.  But unlike Giorgio de Chirico or heroine of Serbian metaphysical painting Milena Pavlović Barili, her world of fantasy and illusions doesn’t stand on deserted squares of antique or Renaissance, but in the landscape of her native Kovačica, in Banat sunflower fields, and always under the bright sky. A fact that she belongs to the new era she confirms by the critical approach to the modern momentum by mocking the artificial presentation of internet appearances, or when she paints harlequins and Chaplin on the stage, she emphasizes the importance of differences between what is true and what is false, the essence and the illusion, difference between inner life that makes us rebels versus the outside world, in which we are forced to live.

Nataša is painting a flower from her waistcoat, decorated with an old Slovakian embroidery, and on the painting a woman is watering that flower, and through that kind of work the legacy of the Knjazovic family grows and flourishes to a portrait of her grandfather Jan, with whom the artist connects not only through the bloodline, but also through the everlasting sunflowers and ultramarine color – a family protecting color. Nataša is shaping the mild forms of all her characters, the female bodies and oval faces are particularly softly modeled. The coloring is completely in thematic function, so the pastel colors are coloring seemingly familiar landscapes into some kind of surreal, imaginary landscapes covered in haze.

The last two generations of Knjazovic family, two big artists, two women are proving that in the heritage of naive art there is no room for separating male and female themes. Although it was very difficult for women in the history of art to obtain the equality of rights, these two female painters are showing us that the equality in this case is completely unnecessary, because the advantage of a female painting actually gets a full meaning in the work of Ana and Nataša Knjazovic. With highly expressed sensibility for the world around us and at the same time open senses for the inner world these two artists are providing the new mark and a special developing way to the naive art of Kovačica.

Jelena Anđelković, art historian

As it happens, only in Serbia is Kovačica not affirmed enough; a little town sleeping for a few months in a white dream, and then churned up by the yellow and green vangoghian wheat fields. In the art world, however, everyone knows about this picturesque Slovak and Serb settlement, where almost every house is a small painting studio or workshop for manufacturing national musical instruments, chairs, tripods, corn husk dolls, hand painted pumpkins, enchanting embroidery and many other artisanal handicrafts. For Slovakia, Kovačica is a kind of miracle, because Slovaks do not have, and never had oases like this; an artistic and ethnographic phenomenon, that found a fertile soil in Serbia, a sparkling rain of heavenly gifts, which came down on Kovačica, all warm and starry as a sign of prosperity of nature and spirit.

In this ethnos within ethnos and cosmos within cosmos, where peasant women with rosy cheeks still wear five petticoats under their skirts and cover their heads with colorful kerchiefs with starched laces or enormous woolen scarves, people still ride bicycles with baskets out of which goosenecks’ heads stick out, in this God’s garden house the Knjazovic art family is probably the most prominent and the most renowned one.

Jan Knjazovic (1925-1985) was the founder of the family art tree and an artist with extraordinary talent, heartfelt emotions and gentleness that won the hearts of his fellow citizens and art critics. He painted solely by heart, and because of that Jan Knjazovic signed his paintings with one heart and a letter „K“, while his daughter Ana added another heart to her paintings, and his granddaughter Nataša (also a painter) the third one, so the heart of this wonderful artist kept beating and continued that stream of colors, singing wedding parties, dances, musicians, swings, lively markets and cheerful young peasants, intoxicated with the Dionysian joy of life. I am avoiding sad motives, because I am an optimist by nature, said Jan. Together with Martin Jonaš and widely known Zuzana Chalupova, Jan Knjazovic become a symbol of the Kovačica naive art – unique and world renowned school of traditional folk art.

However, Jan’s kingdom is not like the other naive artists’ kingdoms of the sun, but rather the kingdom of the moon, where nights and days are given a cobalt-blue color with addition of surrealistic shapes of characters in motion. Jan Knjazovic could not know (nor he was interested) about the fact that he unknowingly introduced modernism into his paintings (The Blue Nights cycle) and thus infringed some of the holy artistic canons. Knjazovic has found his own shape of the house and tree, man and animal – regardless of their actual appearance he would coat them in blue, red or purple color by his own idea. By adding the light he emphasized power of the color, focused attention to certain shapes and dematerialized the space. Earth and the sky merged into a unique space, where people and animals float. (Marica Vračević, curator of Museum of Naive and Marginal Art, Jagodina)

But Ana Knjazovic (1950), my favorite Ana went even further in that somnambulistic game, erasing the border between heaven and earth. Unlike the humble Jan, Ana’s got a burning passion, and her paintings, with its bright and clear colors, are always erotically marked and deeply connected with the atavistic and chthonic human urges. Complete artwork of Ana is an ode to love – pure, pristine, Edenlike. In her magical blue night, the lips of young peasants are lustfully seeking women in love; their bodies are intertwined with the croups of the fairy horses, prancing furiously in a sparkling of the horseshoes and embers. Pigeons are pecking the pigeon hens; large roosters with eagle-like wings are bringing „good news” instead of Archangel Gabriel, while carrying a compact little village with small houses, bell house and a cross on their tails. A tree grows from the giant corn cob of warm orange and yellow colors – it is often a swing for lovers or a balk on which the magnificent bay horses and white, gray, dappled, roan and chestnut stallions are dancing – the horses that can be found only in fairy tales. Ana’s characters are born from the eggs, in the miraculous resurrection of the Old and New Testament, while the running horses with long, wavy manes are carrying large, ostrich-like eggshells.

Horses are sacred animals for Ana, like totems; marvelous and playful, overjoyed while pulling with their tails a crescent moon and a sleeping girl with her knees spread, the pigeon and the whole little village as well. On one miniature painting, even the granny mounts an angry red mare and flies high above the white chimneys like some apparition or a ghost. The horses are coming out of the river after the flood; the horses perform their love dance on the rooftops of the village cob houses and huts; winged horses are breaking loose with the neigh and flying up to the sky; beautiful unicorns appearing from some archetypical dream; the horses are carrying the crescent shaped world, big as a half of watermelon instead of the elephants, which carried the earth’s plates, long time ago.

Naive artists create in the pre-prayer gardens, by that part of the human being which does not know holiness, but there is a precognition and yearning for it. They create in such way that the vivified love on their paintings is a great passion of a human being which loves all those human and divine characteristics that can’t be found anywhere else. Because for a human-naive painter God is not born yet. It is inside of him. He just needs to dig into that well of stars. With paints. (Sanja Domazet, Shadows)

A day on Ana’s paintings is a small yellow sun, just a slightly bigger than the pea, while the night is a slice of the moon and the background is always the same – ultramarine, and that’s the only setting Ana knows about, while the light comes from within, from her characters shaded by a thin white lines. Ana’s landscape – if you can call it a landscape – are few houses tucked together tightly, tiny as a box of matches; village has just one tree with the few branches and several fuzzy berries, similar to the Beckett’s tree-symbol, the only living thing in his famous existentialist drama about waiting. There is no grass, no flowers, no children and no large flakes of snow, like on the others characteristic naive paintings. There are no scenes of work on fields, tillers, harvesters, millers or washerwomen. Her paintings are the fireworks of senses and one big love feast (where lovers invite only horses, roosters, pigeons and dogs), the nature survival and the extending of species with animal roars and instincts.

A drawing is supple and reduced to its essence, the form is solid, full and rough, the anatomy is simplified and the movement is rigid; color harmony is conditioned by intimate mood and revived by a subtle toned overpainting; the light does not depend on the light source, but it is rather determined by some inner strength and logic; the space on the painting is most frequently resolved by the law of golden ratio, while the composition is always balanced. A dream is always ahead of the reality, an imagination masters the reality. (Nikola Kusovac)

Ana’s colors are ultramarine with ebony glow, intensive and aromatic color of cyclamens, oriental orchids and lilies; mystical dark purple, then pomegranate red, amber yellow, color of the liquid gold, honey orange and jade green. Ana jealously preserves her iconography; there are no „strange” allegories and parables in her expression, it just varies infinitely. You will recognize her paintings in each room and in the crowded gallery, because they are totally authentic, which is something difficult for the naive painter to achieve; and given that her surrealist and expressionist style overcomes mentioned spheres, we can say that she is a unique artist from our country.

While Ana is eruptive and too passionate for a woman, Nataša Knjazovic (1977) is a gentle, sensual, pastel. Natasha’s nudes are almost chaste compared to Ana’s constantly veiled peasant women with spread knees, elbows and lips. Nataša Knjazovic comes out of naive and enters her own surreal space of dream visions. Her world is a world of beautiful lonely ladies, who collect butterflies and play cello; a world of unreal princesses, who let down their hair from the top of the lonesome tower for the most daring suitors. In that world there are lovers riding flying bicycles over the sunflower fields, or driving Russian troika through the snowy wastelands of Vojvodina. Behind Nataša’s mirror you can also found cheerfully-sad Harlequins, circus acrobats and clowns, rabbits out of the hats and a carousel for the Crystal Palace lady.

Her sound of love is subtle; it requires a lot of effort and a ladder to reach the loved one, to reach the sun, like the ladder of Lazarus reaching the endless sky. Nataša’s paintings are filled with the naive childish loves, toys, dolls, hop scotches, music boxes, lollipops, cherries in bloom. In her paintings there is a chronoscope of cyclic changes of the light and darkness, seasons, but there isn’t any aging process. Her fairy like ladies almost never leave the fairytale childhood and girlhood age, they always look like virgins. I guess no other painter has so much nudity with so much harmless innocence in it. Nataša is also a modern painter, but her futurism is more like the Renaissance drawings of the airplanes, balloons and submarines. She is hopelessly in love with the old laces, veils and tulles, hand held fans and peacock feathers.

Among all the painters from Knjazovic family, Nataša is actually the closest to Chagall, because of carnival atmosphere, the masks and marionettes, the vista of the twins and look-alikes and nearly identical colors. Her most frequent motives are ladders, by which her characters are reaching for the sun (as the pagan deity, but also God), then the chess boards, the chess squares on the floors of the palaces and chambers like a black-and-white dichotomy of the world, of good and evil. From her perspective, the houses are often turned inside out, the rooms are upside down and the earth globe hangs above the head of an amazed young man, who is trying to reach the apple, which is nailed to the globe, to the earth. There are also swings, ballet shoes, flocks of sheep like cotton bolls and a barely visible water wells under the young honeymooners with small white wings growing under their armpits, flying high above the fields, trees and meadows. And, of course, butterflies – ethereal, airy symbols of passing beauty, fleeting like a game and eternal as desire. They add lightness to her canvas, color of the air and scent of powder. A variety of biblical motives like churches and crosses are disguised in surrealism; umbrellas are used instead of parachutes for that first and crucial fall of man, unique compositions of the sun and the moon that shine together like today and tomorrow, present and eternity – eschatology. There are seeds of dissent, apples and poppies and heavenly nudity of a man and nature. Music on Nataša’s paintings is also inevitable: her girls are playing violin, flute and cello on a trapeze. The most immaterial and subtle of all arts gives that special tune to these canvases.

Nataša Knjazovic, a “third heart” in the family, takes the elements of her mother’s and grandfather’s visual poetics, and these elements are perfectly shaped thanks to relatively long family practice. (Slobodan Stevanovski)

Nataša Knjazović Mijailović was baptized in the Orthodox Church, and with all the blessing she is also an icon painter. We can correctly assume that her icons are also made with the vivid colors of resurrection and that the characters of the saints have dear, big eyes and bright expression. The most frequent character is the Saint Paraskeva – patroness of women, a wonderful helper and a consoler of the Serbian people. Naive art has many similarities with the icon painting in clear colors, bright characters, reduced dynamics of movement, the original approach and the purity of heart and mind – and the Orthodox religion is based on these values.

To own the paintings of some naive artist from Kovačica is – like their gallerist Pavel Babka says – a matter of good taste and a prestige. I agree with him. To own some canvas from the Knjazovic atelier is a privilege.

Slavica Jovanović

]]> http://www.knjazovic.eu/en/?feed=rss2&p=503 0 http://www.knjazovic.eu/en/?p=507 http://www.knjazovic.eu/en/?p=507#comments Sat, 18 Oct 2014 13:20:19 +0000 admin http://www.knjazovic.eu/en/?p=507 The exhibition "Three hearts- you can see well only with the heart " at the Days of Serbian Culture in Prague "]]>