Service Service

Tomislav Krizman (Orlovac near Karlovac, 1882 – Zagreb, 1955), painter, printmaker and designer. In the first years of the 20th century he returned from Vienna to Zagreb and endeavoured to bring up to date the taste of the middle classes in the sense of developing a feeling for refined design and at the same time to animate the local craft scene. Modelling his attempts on the Wiener Werkstätte, he designed use objects of glass, metal and ceramics, fashion accessories and jewellery. In 1910 he founded an art school of his own in his studio, and taught the fine crafts, leaving the actual production to well-known craft workshops and factories. An example of this kind of approach is the black-coffee set on show, decorated to his design, while the actual porcelain was produced in Bohemia to designs of artists from the workshops of Vienna. Apart from the geometrical treatment used in this service, Krizman also often used a motif of floral tendrils, a kind of interpretation of folk ornamentation. As well being concerned with the design of use objects, Krizman was one of the leading Croatian graphic designers of the Art Nouveau period: in addition to posters, he designed book and periodical covers and other printed materials.