The great exhibition of Petar Lubarda, displaying 178 paintings from all phases of the artist’s opus, was organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade and the National Museum of Montenegro.
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The last great retrospective of Petar Lubarda’s paintings was held in the Museum of Modern Art in Belgrade, in May 1967. After 40 years the exhibition conceived by art historian Petar Ćuković, until recently the director of the National Museum of Montenegro, was once again set up last year in the Blue Palace in Cetinje to mark the 100th anniversary of Lubarda’s birth. In Belgrade, this retrospective is being staged in the inspirational space of the Museum of Yugoslav History because the Museum of Contemporary Art is undergoing reconstruction through April 26th. |
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The majority of exhibits displayed belong to the National Museum of Montenegro and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade but other works are also on display from the National Museum in Belgrade, Gallery of Matica Srpska in Novi Sad, the Memorial Collection "Pavle Beljanski" and other public and private collections.
Eleven themed wholes of the exhibition lead the observer through the complete opus of Petar Lubarda and enables "reading" the development phases of the artist’s creativity. The first segments of the exhibition entitled "The Seas" and "Loneliness" include pre-war works – landscapes and still lifes in which feeling of angst and drama dominate, a distinctive epic tone characteristic for Lubarda that, according to Petar Ćuković "is before all connected with his being". Follow the wholes entitled: "The Opening", "Fruit", "Shriek", "The Knot", "The Wall", "Lightening", "The Camp", "Crime" and "Epilogue".
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While in the first phase of Lubarda’s pre-war period light is uniformly distributed on the surface of the painting, in the second phase it becomes more expressive, shading is deeper and the general impression is of emphasized drama. The focus of preoccupation is no longer a linear dimension, but a pictorial one, while in the third phase there appears pure colour.
The key to understanding the turning point in Lubarda’s painting called "The Knot" leads to a greater separation from concrete form and there appears a striving towards rhythmical arabesque.
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Especially noticeable is Lubarda’s "manifestation of power and master’s instinct" or, as Isidora Sekulić described it – the story of a falcon watching from high above. An important period for understanding Lubarda’s painting is also the whole called "Shriek" with well-known works dedicated to the Battle of Kosovo.
Visitors also have the opportunity to see drawings which Lubarda created as a war prisoner as well as works dedicated to the execution of Kragujevac’s pupils. The retrospective ends with an "Epilogue" dealing with Lubarda’s stay in India when, according to Ćuković, the painter lost the focus of his painting and turned towards a fascination with divinities and Zodiac signs.
Apart from the exhibition, the Department of Art Documentation of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, in cooperation with the Department of the National Library of Serbia, created the project "Read About Petar Lubarda" – featuring an electronic library, exhibition catalogues, professional periodicals, an henerotheque and photodocumentation about artists and art phenomena in the 20th century in the region of the former Yugoslavia that will be available on the site of the National Library of Serbia.
| Today, Lubarda is positioned according to three recognizable contexts. The pre-war context in which he is a young artist recognised as such by art critics. The post-war context, when during the 1950s and 1960s last century he becomes one of the key modern painters in Yugoslavia, according to some interpretations a "state artist" and certainly an artist whose presence in the ceremonial settings of the socialist government was far more than ordinary. The third context in which Lubarda is presented is the current period with a tendency to either canonize the artist either as the greatest modern Montenegrin artist or as the greatest modern Serbian artist or as the greatest artist of Socialist modernism – a tendency that should be resisted because Lubarda was above all an artist who in his time made an important break in relation to many conservative perceptions of art, whether activated by academism or nationalism, so these interpretations shouldn’t be left to such laconic canonization. Here we have an artist who at a turning point in history broke with both academic and provincial views of the world, too often typical for regional art. He should, above all, be seen as an artist who, as Dimitrije Bašičević wrote in 1954, rejected "the possibility of creating beauty in the old way" and "trodden paths of painting". (Branislava Anđelković Dimitrijević in the exhibition catalogue) | | 
