The Farmyard

1946
ink/paper
298 x 398 mm
signature: down in the right corner: F. Filipović / 1946

In the center of the composition a wooden shed with numerous details of peasant life: ladders, various aids. Behind the shed a wooden fence. On the left side of the composition behind the fence braided basket that disappears outside the edges of the paper. In front of it a wooden well.

Franjo Filipovic was born on October 2, 1930 in Hlebine, into an impecunious rural family. When he had completed four grades at elementary school he started to help his parents in the everyday jobs about the household and in the fields. He started painting and exhibiting in 1946, and from this date he was engaged parallel in art and in agriculture. He belongs to the second generation of the "pupils" of Generalic, whom the master had gathered around him after WW2. His personal style matured at the begining of the 1950's - he depicted everything with simple, flat forms, the color being light, soft and fluid, mainly without outlines and contures. He depicts the typical, everyday life of arhaic village of his youth, the people, customs and landscapes of his native Podravina. He always endevours to be perspicuous and clear but does not make use of the realistic method. Everything is stylised, and the figures in the paintingd are grotesque and caricatured, both people and animals. He also distorts the realistic relations of proportions. (quote: Vladimir Crnković, "The Art of the Hlebine School", Croatian Museum of Naive Art, Zagreb, 2006., page 102, translation to English: Graham McMaster)