1907, Ljubotin, Monte Negro – 1974, Belgrade, Serbia (SFR Yugoslavia)
Mediterranean 2, 1952
Oil on canvas, 112 х 146 cm
Acquisition: Donated by the artist
Reference: 00950
In the aftermath of the Skopje earthquake in October 1963, Petar Lubarda donated all 26 works from his exhibition in Niš, later exhibited in Skopje, which makes him one of the biggest donors to MSU Skopje. The museum has a total of 52 works in its collection, of which 40 paintings, two watercolors and ten drawings covering two and a half decades of the artist’s career (1942-1966).
In the interwar period he studied painting in Belgrade and Paris, and from 1932 until his death in 1974 he lived in Belgrade. In his painting oeuvre, the memorized features of the sharp configuration of the harsh rocky Montenegrin landscape are constantly visible. In the beginning, he painted in the style of realistic figuration, in which the emphasized drama of the light-dark chromaticism prevails. Since the beginning of the 1950s, Lubarda is among the first known Yugoslav painters to leave the ideology of socialist realism, moving away from reduced expressive coloristic figuration to associative abstraction.