2. Anton Ažbe (30 May 1862 – 5 or 6 August 1905) was
a Slovene realist painter and teacher of painting. Ažbe, crippled since
birth and orphaned at the age of 8, learned painting as an apprentice
to Janes Wolf and at the Academies in Vienna and Munich. At the age of
30 Ažbe founded his own school of painting in Munich that became a
popular attraction for Eastern European students. Ažbe trained the "big
four" Slovenian impressionists (Rihard Jakopic, Ivan Grohar, Matej
Sternen, Matija Jama) and a whole generation of Russian painters (Ivan
Bilibin, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Igor Grabar, Vasily Kandinsky,Dmitry
Kardovsky and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, to name a few). Ažbe's training
methods were adopted and reused by Russian artists both at home
(Grabar, Kardovsky) and in emigration (Bilibin, Dobuzhinsky).
3. Ažbe's own undisputed artistic legacy is limited to twenty-six graphic
works, including classroom studies, most of them at the National Gallery
of Slovenia. His long-planned masterpiece never materialized and, according
to Peter Selz, he "never came into his own as an artist". His enigmatic
personality blended together alcoholism, chain smoking, bitter loneliness,
minimalistic simple living in private, and eccentric behaviour in public.
A public scarecrow and a bohemian socialite, Ažbe protected his personal
secrets till the end, a mystery even to his students and fellow teachers.
The public transformed the circumstances of his untimely death
from cancer into an urban legend.
5. Loyal students Igor Grabar and Dmitry Kardovsky noted portraits by Ažbe for his "superb drawing”
marred by dry, if not dull, paint technique. Modern critics divide over Ažbe's significance as a
painter, not in the least because his surviving undisputed legacy is limited to twenty-six works. Eleven
of these are early paintings and classroom studies from his college years. Only four paintings, dated
from 1890 to 1903, can be considered mature art influenced by the Munich Sezession. The largest
and most complex of these, The Village Choir, has been irreversibly damaged by a botched
restoration. Photographs and memoirs testify to the existence of his other works, now lost or hidden
in private collections.
Lack of hard evidence prompted conflicts among historians and critics, further aggravated by the
politics of the former Yugoslavia and its successor states. Baranovsky and Khlebnikova noted that by
the end of the twentieth century, Ažbe the creator has become a myth, just like Ažbe the person
became a legend after his death.
Frantz Stele (1962) and Peg Weiss (1979) have extensively studied Ažbe's relationships with
the emerging avantgarde art and mature impressionism, and considered Ažbe to be a forerunner of
modernist art, a link between Cézanne and Kandinsky. Both studies, in partucular Weiss', were
rejected by Tomaz Brejc who reasoned that any parallels between Ažbe and Cézanne are moot
because Ažbe never mastered Cézanne's technique and there is no evidence that he ever attempted it.
8. In the picture I can see a room. In the
foreground there are people, and in the
background there is a wall. This room is a
little bit dark, but the sun rays enter
through the door. People are singing.
Women are wearing long, colorful dresses
and a man is playing piano. It is beautiful.
9. I think that this painting is beautiful.
„The Village Choir”
by
Anton Ažbe
illustrating rural life and allows us to learn the
old customs. I really like this painting.
