Little girl in a pink dress

In the cold morning, we arrive at the corner of Masarikova and Marshal Tito. The corner of these two streets exists in almost all Vojvodina towns and villages with a Slovak majority - including in Kovačica, the seat of the municipality of the same name in the heart of Banat. On the building of the Gallery of Naive Art, in the blue and white painted "kućerdi na lakat" of the farmer, the board with the inscription "Masarikova Street" is in as many as five languages ​​and scripts - Serbian (Cyrillic and Latin), Slovak, Hungarian and Romanian. In front of the Gallery, Pavel Babka is waiting for us, he introduces us to the yard where his gallery "Babka" is located, which he founded in the middle of 1991 before the war and the collapse of the country, with the aim of affirming the young generation of Kovačić painters.

photo: Robert Choban

GRANDMA

Everything around us is so beautiful and colorful that one does not know where to turn first. Pavel shows us the painted hoklice - on one is the history of medieval Serbia, and on the other is the chronology of the migration of Slovaks from their homeland to the south. The walls are full of pictures. It is one of the most impressive Forging process Martin Jonas from 1957, created on the 50th anniversary of the event when the inhabitants of Kovačica rebelled against the Hungarianization and installation of a chaplain of Hungarian nationality in the Evangelical Church here. Because of that rebellion against Hungarianization, 97 believers led by Jan Čaplović were arrested and charged. At that time, they were represented by the famous Novi Sad lawyer of Slovak nationality, Miloš Krno. Four years later, they were acquitted.

Pavel says that many paintings have interesting stories, such as Zuzana Vereski's painting of three young women riding bicycles. It is about three sisters-in-law, married to three brothers; all three were different and the picture shows their characters through what they carry with them on the bikes. The author told Pavel that it was about the wives of the three Povolni brothers from Padina, who lived in the same household. All three were called Zuzana, and only by the intonation with which the older housemates called them did they know who they were addressing.

photo: Robert Choban

My attention is also drawn to the painted plates that are made here in Kovačica for the birth of children. On one it is written: "Želimir Cicka, July 14, 07." and next to the baby, a scale is shown with the baby on one side and the weight on which it says 1992 kg, and there is also a clock showing that it is 1.850:12.20. Thus, every newborn in Kovačica receives a certificate of the time of birth and birth weight as a gift. There is also a color caricature showing Pavel Babka in the company of Lenin, Marx and Engels, clearly alluding to the ideological aspirations of the gallery owner.

Pavel shows me a large panel on which are all the naive painters from Kovačica, from the oldest, one of the progenitors of the scene - Vladimir Boboš, to today's representatives. 1939 is considered to be the year of birth of naive creativity in Kovačica, when Martin Paluška and Jan Sokol started painting without any knowledge of academic construction of pictures. Some time later they were joined by Michal Bires, Vladimir Boboš, Martin Jonas and Jan Knjazovic. The subject matter of their paintings was quite atypical for Banat - they painted gondolas, romantic castles, African animals... Only in 1953, on the advice of Stojan Trumić, an academic painter from Pancevo, the progenitors of Naive began to present in their works what they see, breathe and feel.

NAIVE GALLERY

At the exit from Pavel's gallery, Ana Žolnaj Barca welcomes us and introduces us to the Gallery of Naive Art, of which she is the director. He tells us about how the work of a peasant painter without an academic education attracted the attention of art critics and the public, so on May 15, 1955, the first rural picture gallery in Yugoslavia was opened in the former House of Culture in Kovačica. In September 1989, a new Gallery of Naive Art was opened in a renovated farm that before the war was owned by one of the richest locals. During these almost seven decades of work, many painters have passed through the gallery, the most important of which are, of course, Zuzana Halupova and Martin Jonas, and currently the Gallery of Naive Art has 26 living members from Kovačica, Padina, Pancevo and Opovo.

Every year during "Kovačići October" an exhibition of the latest representative works of all its members is held. Those pictures are a gift to the gallery fund. The collection of paintings of the Naive Art Gallery is growing year by year, and currently has more than 800 paintings. To show everything, the setting changes every month.

JONAS AND HALUPOVA

Martin Jonas is one of the most prominent figures of world naive painting. He was a leading figure of Kovačica naive painting and one of the founders of the Gallery of Naive Art in Kovačica. He started painting at the age of 21, exhibited for the first time in Kovačica, exhibited at more than 450 solo and collective exhibitions, received high international awards and received the keys to several European cities.

The house of Martin Jonas is a kind of document about the life of this artist - the walls of the room where he painted are covered with photos, medals and diplomas. The shelves are full of professional literature, folders with voluminous correspondence, magazines and newspapers from around the world with reports on the artist - a precious archive of articles and photographs. There is also a collection of pictures, historical documents, books and old periodicals related to the history of the Slovak community in Vojvodina.

Of all the artists whose works are exhibited in the gallery, only she has the honor of having her bust displayed there. We are talking, of course, about her highness - Zuzana Halupova, the queen of naive painting.

Zuzana Halupova completed five grades of elementary school. In the 1964s, as a member of the Kovačice Women's Society, she embroidered scarves, shirts, tapestries and was reputed to be the best because she supplemented traditional motifs with her own ornaments. As soon as she sold her first tapestry for five thousand old dinars, she bought oil paints to paint on canvas. She painted her first oil painting in XNUMX. Threshing hemp. Her success was meteoric. At the first independent exhibition in Dubrovnik in 1968, enthusiastic foreigners bought all the paintings. Children are the main motive of Zuzana Halupova's artistic expression. She even painted adults as children, the difference was only in the mustache. They often say that Zuzana is the painter of a child's soul. In addition to children, frequent motifs are winter, the blacksmith's church, and biblical themes.

Anna tells how in 1986, Kurt Waldheim, the former Secretary General of the UN, then the President of Austria, ordered a painting from Zuzana Children of the world. By today's standards, that image is "politically incorrect" because black African children are depicted as extremely thin, with very thin legs. Zuzana saw them as such, because in those years she received videos of what looked like children from Biafra and Ethiopia.

photo: Robert Choban

The story about the motif of the little girl Katka in Zuzana Halupova's paintings is particularly moving. Namely, on each of her plates there is Katka, of different ages from a baby to a mature girl, and always in a pink dress or coat. It is Zuzana's unborn daughter, who exists and lives in her paintings.

Pavel says that Halupova was "a miracle, a woman with five grades of elementary school, in 1976 she helped UNICEF with about 1.000.000 dollars. About Zuzana's will to live and the way she fought, a manual could be written on how to achieve worldwide success without lobbying, marketing, teams of experts and the like. I was lucky enough to meet her and to work with her. When I did her first monograph in five world languages ​​in full color in 10.000 copies, she said: 'Paljko, you are the best man in the world, we haven't met before, we could go around the whole world three, four times!' And when I did the first monograph on Martin Jonas in five world languages ​​in 5.000 copies, she took a kitchen scale and put her monograph on one side and Jonas's on the other. And when she saw that Jonasha was 500 grams heavier than hers, she said: 'you are nobody and nothing'; it would mean 'you are nobody and nothing'. For two years I was ashamed to go out on the street!"

In addition to the above-mentioned founders of the blacksmith school and the famous Zuzana Halupova and Martin Jonas, the Gallery also has the works of Jan Strakušek, Katarina Kožokova, Alžbet Čižikov, Juraj Garaj, Michal Povolni, Jan Bachur, Katarina Karlečikova, as well as the younger Eva Husarikova, Pavel Hayek, Jan Glozik , Martina Markova, Zuzana Verecka, Pavel Cicka, Marija Vargova, Juraj Lavroša, Jozef Havijar, Ana Knjazovicova, Jana Shirka, Martina Papa, Ana Kotvačova, Marija Hlavata-Husarikova and others.

HOW IT IS TODAY

Finally, the director is proud to present to us the most impressive canvas created on the occasion of 220 years since the immigration of Slovaks to these areas. For more than two months, 19 naive local painters worked on a joint painting My unique Blacksmith, which has impressive dimensions and covers an entire wall of the Gallery. The canvas is dominated by the Evangelist church here, behind it are the High Tatras in Slovakia, from where today's inhabitants of Kovačica immigrated, in front is a wedding and the color of colorful Slovak costumes and customs.

Thanks to the creativity of the members of the Gallery of Naive Art, Kovačica was also visited by François Mitterrand, the Rolling Stones, Pele, Ursula Anders, Alain Delon, Franco Nero, Juan Carlos and various other politicians, diplomats, actors, artists... About 17.000 art admirers from all over the world come every year.

For now, Kovačica naive painting consists of 65 painters, of which 27 are no longer alive. When asked how many residents of Kovačica today live off of this world-famous brand, Ana and Pavel add up, look thoughtfully at the ceiling and answer: "Together with the fact that they do catering - no more than 30!" For the sake of comparison, as many as 750 households live from another brand characteristic of this municipality - women who prepare in "better houses" in Belgrade, about 15 full buses leave from Padina and Kovačica for Belgrade every morning.

"Being a painter, even of naive art, is nice," says Pavel Babka. "The rest of us people think that they are given something more than all of us, which is true. The need for man to express himself in this way will certainly always exist. They already see indications that there are new motifs apart from those recognizable by Kovacic, which is good, so I'm not afraid that motifs for painting will disappear. What gives specificity to our painting is perhaps this thought: 'When someone is born somewhere, anywhere in the world, and his mother tongue is a minority, that person looks for additional ways to be understood by the majority around him'. I think that the Slovak minority in Serbia partly found its way through naive painting!"

Pavel Babka expects that "putting our painting on the UNESCO list will certainly bring a much larger number of tourists from Japan to Kovačica, because the Japanese in the world mostly visit what is under the protection of UNESCO. We have held exhibitions in Japan for two years, so we can say this. This registration gives us a much greater chance that our offer will be accepted by large tour operators in Europe and beyond. But we must already know that world fame brings with it a lot of bad things, that's why we are preparing by adopting the Code of Ethics for painters. How to protect the copyright of these artists; how to divide what we Kovačići people consider to be real blacksmith art and what is kitsch, who can issue a certificate. There is a lot to do, create a bank of certificates, prepare. The biggest problem is that we don't have experts for our painting, art historians, ethnologists, sociologists, so we launched an initiative for art history students from Belgrade, Novi Sad, Pristina (based in Kosovska Mitrovica), Bratislava, Trench and Brno universities to come for a week in Kovačica and visit the galleries, use the electronic database, the library, talk to the painters..."

We also visited Eva Husarikova, one of the oldest Kovačica naive painters - she recently turned eighty. She welcomed us with freshly baked rolls, which we devoured right from the door. A picture of religious motifs and magical winter nights. On the canvases on the walls of her living room, which is also Eve's studio, we see Adam and Eve with a snake and an apple, as well as a beautiful scene of the birth of Christ in which all the actors are - baby Jesus, Joseph, Mary and the kings who come to worship the son of God – in Slovak folk costumes. And all the actors in the picture about Luther are in Slovak folk costumes, and instead of the cathedral in Wirtenberg, the picture shows the Slovak evangelical church in Kovačica.