Šid under Snow

An emotional approach to the act of painting, which came in 1925, opened up the expressionistic reserves of Šumanović’s talent, hidden beneath the cubist and neoclassicist studious compositions created during his previous stays in Paris and Zagreb. And while on canvases painted before the end of the 1920s his expressionistic tendencies were revealed more in his direct and forceful brushstrokes, and developed further during the Šid period in the thick material structure of lyrical landscapes, it appeared in a small number of paintings as a specific existential statement on behalf of the artist, thus approaching the essential meaning of expressionism. At the end of his Šid period in particular, working in complete isolation Šumanović would paint winter landscapes of Šid with the central motif of a road fading into the distance (The Ilok Road in Winter, 1942), and Šid under Snow from 1935 was one of the first such examples. In all these cases the depicted road was deserted, revealing the painful truth of the artist’s destiny: “And all that time, I was completely alone, with no company at all.” Although facing the street, the walls of the houses in the painting Šid under Snow have no windows, and the electricity poles carry no power-cables, whereby this seemingly rational and well organized scene becomes increasingly irrational and acquires a certain hidden tension, further enhanced by the long shadows on the road. Only the road in the middle of the composition suggests a possible way out and departure, so that Šumanović’s preoccupation with such fixed contents transformed the motif from a realistic state into that of a symbol, an expression of a hidden, inner struggle in the search of spiritual peace.