Suburb

Objective reality was always a good incentive for Kosta Hakman to express the inner world of feelings, to enrich the mundane and transform it into an artistic value; the wide emotional scale was most powerfully expressed in his townscapes. During his stay in Paris, the streets, the bridges on the Seine and parts of suburbs were Hakman’s favorite themes. Instead of depicting the hustle and bustle of bohemian Paris, the painter opted for the urban fragment, depicting it from a low viewing angle, with a house on the corner dominating the scene and the deep perspective of an almost deserted street. The root of this simple story can be found in the artist’s contemplative nature, but also in a similar orientation of Maurice Utrillo, whose sensitivity was similar to Hakman’s. There is a uniform tonality of ochre-brown and olive-gray nuances, a harmony of warm from which a pearly glow emerges, there are only a few single separate touches of pink and blue which breathe life into the painting painted with long, almost flowing
brushstrokes. When it was exhibited at his solo exhibition in the “Cvijeta Zuzorić” Art Pavilion in November 1929 the critics correctly noted that Hakman preferred to seek “squalor rather than glamour, painting blind alleys” in Paris, or as Todor Manojlović described him, “A landscape artist with a lively, warm, almost lyrical feeling for nature, for the fresh, shimmering greenery of the spring fields and trees, as well as for the architectural beauty of cities, streets, squares, suburbs.” In 1930, Ivan Meštrović included the painting in the representative selection of Yugoslav art for the London exhibition, and the fact that it was exhibited in the Town Museum in Sombor in 1945, confirms that it was already part of Pavle Beljanski’s collection.