Luncheon on the Grass

When he first presented his works to the Belgrade audience in 1928, Šumanović also exhibited Luncheon on the Grass. The entire exhibition was sold out and the Luncheon was bought by a certain merchant by the name of Đerasi, from whom Beljanski later purchased this canvas. Having painted this masterpiece a year earlier, Šumanović never even suspected that he would find his place in the group of interpreters of Manet’s famous painting (1863/64), among others Monet (1865), Picasso (1961) and the American sculptor Johnson (1994), whose work summarizes this technique of speaking through works of art in its title: Déjeuner Déjà Vu. From this perspective, Šumanović’s painting gains a double meaning. On the one hand, at the time it was painted, Luncheon on the Grass reflected the current Parisian retro-environment, received excellent reviews from the French and domestic critics from that period, and revealed Šumanović’s colouristic sensibility in its full splendour. Although it retained vestiges of cubist treatment which reflected the education received at Lhote’s (the painter’s self-portrait and the right profile of a clothed female figure, alternating warm and cold tones, the structure of the composition), Luncheon on the Grass with its pastel colours, thick material structure, use of contours, is the best illustration of the maturing of a new style which Šumanović was to continue and enrich with variations in his Šid period as well. On the other hand, new possibilities of interpreting this monumental piece appeared in the second half of the twentieth century, in the light of postmodernist reinterpretations of Manet’s Breakfast, which was supported by the already discovered “postmodern intuition” in Šumanović’s cycle of “Female Bathers from Šid.”