PETROVIĆ, Nadežda

Serbian painter, critic and exhibition organizer. She studied painting at an early age with her father, a drawing teacher, and became a teacher herself. In 1898 she went to Munich and studied first in the studio of F. Haas and in the school led by Anton Ažbe (1862-1905), then under Julius Exter (1863-1930), whose plein-air practice was discernible in her early works.

Between 1900 and 1910 she taught drawing at the women's school of arts in Belgrade, painted in an Impressionist style and wrote articles of art criticism. In 1905 she founded an artists' colony in Siceva. In 1910-12 she was in Paris, painted views of the city and became influenced by the Fauves. In 1914 she volunteered in the First World War and died of typhoid.

Her work is characteristic of the period between ImpressionismGLOSSARYA style of painting that became prominent in the last quarter of the 19th century as a reaction to the ossified doctrine of the Academy and the content-oriented atelier, historical, and genre painting. The name is derived from the 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet, and first was used by art critics as a mocking description for a group of artists excluded from the official Salon, but who had their own first group exhibition in 1874 at the salon of the Parisian photographer Nadar. Impressionism, as a new type of naturalism, negated classical pictorial methods; based on contemporary theories of physics, it indicated the natural object in a revolutionary fashion - entirely as a manifestation of colour. Their supreme principle was "plein-air" or open-air painting, through which the painters tried to capture a direct, spontaneous impression of what they saw. and ExpressionismGLOSSARYExpressionism is an artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person. The artist accomplishes this aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements. More specifically, Expressionism as a distinct style or movement refers who became active in the years before World War I and remained so throughout much of the interwar period. Although the term Expressionist can be applied to artworks from any era, it is generally applied to art of the twentieth century. It may be said to start with Vincent van Gogh and then form a major stream of modern art embracing, among many others, Edvard Munch, fauvism and Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, most of Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and the neo-expressionism of the 1980s.. As a conscious originator of Serbian modern art who had good knowledge of early and contemporary European art, she sought a visual vocabulary of her own that would reflect her native countryside. Most forceful in this respect are her Sumadija landscapes. Her works feature impetuous brushstrokes that bear comparison with Art informel, and expressionistic contrasts in colour (e.g. Tree in the Forest, 1902; Belgrade, National Museum). Her pictures often became two-dimensional surfaces, in which all sense of space was lost in large, intermingling sweeps of colour.