View from My Studio

Preferring painting in the studio to painting in nature, Gvozdenović nonetheless painted landscapes upon returning from Paris. The multitude of sketches and watercolours of Belgrade townscapes from the late 1930s when the painting View from My Studio was executed, speak of the author’s personal inclination towards diligent sketching, rather than painting directly outdoors. Preoccupied with cityscapes – roofs of buildings, dead-end walls, narrow alleyways, squares, parks, façades and yards – Gvozdenović created a personal and unique type of landscape. The painting View from My Studio is one of the main examples of this type. Spending most of his time in his studio and looking through his window from above, from an elevated point of view, Gvozdenović created a natural and unusual union and link between the inner and the outer, namely the studio and the landscape. “In the landscape,” Lazar Trifunović says, the artist “adds to and finally stabilizes the type of painting with an elevated point of view.” This way of observing imposed a stable form and structure of the painting, “because the elevated horizon in the landscape opened up a deep space and created the complex problem of its volume.” The construction and geometrization of the painting, achieved by “the arrangement of different levels and well thought-out tonal contrast” Gvozdenović softened through shimmering colours and conflicts of lightness values. At his retrospective exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in Belgrade in 1970, this painting and two more from the Pavle Beljanski collection, Vegetables and Woman by the Table, were exhibited as representative examples of thematic representations of the artist’s three main motifs between 1929 and 1938.