Rudolf Sablić (24 January 1916 - 29 March 2012; Vinkovci, Croatia)
Rudolf Sablic was born in Vinkovci in 1916 and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1939 and completed a special painting course at V. Beciæ. He first exhibited at the illegal exhibit of the partisan artist in Split in 1943, in the sculptor's studio of Marina Studina.

At first he painted stark nature and landscapes in post impressionist style (around the Dubrovnik area, 1951), then found his own expression, and since 1952 he has liked lyrical abstraction. In the cycle of Istrian motives (1953), he displayed a sensual sense of matter for the image and chromaticity, which remained in his later feature ( Modri ??kristali, 1979). Papers (collages, frotaže) are subtle compositions inspired by musical forms; the drawings emphasized the dynamism of movement in the space, and in the latter works a figurative drawing in the chromatic illumination of surfaces. He was involved in illustration and equipment of books, theatrical and film scenography ( Samac, 1958).

He worked as a theatrical scenographer for the Zagreb Drama Theater and HNK, and in Belgrade and Dubrovnik. He also worked as an animated film setter and was involved in illustrating and graphing equipment of books. He was also interested in music, and for hours he spent hours playing violin and trumpet. He has worked in Milan and in recent years in Zagreb.

Extract from RUDOLF SABLIĆ
Text authors: Darko Schneider, Marina Baričević, Maja Juras
ISBN: 978 953 182 082 0

" Rudolf Sablic is one of the few, even more important, witnesses of the Croatian art scene from the middle of the last century to the present day. An artist, who certainly belongs to an indispensable place in the history of Croatian art. "

"The artist's action comes down to pure aesthetic productivity. What he reveals and expresses in his drawings and pictures is a miraculous beauty of sifting the colored surfaces, the variability of matter, and the intertwining of the graphic structure, which is legally alternating with the random. All of this leads us to the conclusion that Rudolf Sablic has consistently developed his paintings in the direction of long-time involvement in the lyrical abstraction movement, but with one of his variants: re-reflecting the values ​​of 'beauty of the image'. "


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DISCUSSION WITH RUDOLFO SABLIĆEM
Maja Juras
This conversation was conducted on several occasions in the spring of 2007 in the cozy and warm-filled atmosphere of the home of Mary and Rudolf Sablic.
Rudolf Sablić is the actual contemporary Croatian painting and as such is one of the few, even more important, witnesses of the Croatian art scene from the middle of the last century to the present day.
An artist, who certainly belongs to an indispensable place in the history of Croatian art.
That is why I rejoiced with Rudy's suggestion that I write a text about him as a painter and a man for his monograph. However, I was struck by the fact that even after about thirty years of acquaintance, after many seen images, after reading almost everything written about the painter and his paintings, I still do not know much about it. I only knew that our family and working friendship in a special way, somewhat fateful, marked my professional life and I felt, intuitively, that we just have to do something else together - to round up the story. And I'm thinking of the idea: to talk to Rudi. For who can better and more authentically apologize for their lives, describe people and encounters, proclaim all memories of childhood, youth, of Rudolf Sablić himself, who experienced and lived them. There is no better way, no better interlocutor.

With a 91-year-old, still extremely youthful spirit, she kept the freshness of the voice and the warmth of the wide boy's smile. He is also distinguished by strong intellectual interest and intense vitality in these high years. Remember each and every detail of the past and with enviable precision remember the names of people and places he met and where he was in his long life. He speaks moody, acts pale, not confused. With his thoughts and way of life, he represents a man who can and wants more to say.
There is something in this beloved man who, despite not always a lazy life, suggests that he has lived and lived alive in his own choice of life.
This is the privilege of rare. Or happy. Or perhaps those who were brave enough, in spite of everything and everything, to live in reality their "parallel world", the world of their truth.

The biography records that you were born in Vinkovci in 1916. Tell something about your family, childhood, youth.
"I do not feel that my childhood was different from others. His father was an evangelical priest and a professor of Latin and English. He was a lecturer, a conductor of all the singing societies in Vinkovci. He was very professional, but he did not understand the only thing he was educated. The mother was a housekeeper, very strict in her upbringing. Later, I began to realize that my mother respected all German pedagogues and wanted to carry out absolute authority over their children. There was no "no", nor was there "I will". Luckily I was born with an attitude "on one ear inside, on the other side". I felt Batine, and words seemed to have not existed. I was afraid of a bat, and I freed myself. I had my parallel world.

Please explain what it meant to have a parallel world? Can there be foundations of your commitment to art in the existence of this parallel world?
- There was a world of fantasy. He was and may have remained stronger than the truth, so I often skimmed on duties and duties. And without feeling guilty. It was predestined to look for the world pleasant and enjoyable, not the unpleasantness and the worry.

I would say that your childhood was marked by a period of rigid education, but still with a sense of concealment in the security of the family. But already on the break-up of childhood in youth, in this extremely sensitive period, your life is beginning to be accentuated to change and complicate?
"My dad got sick when I was in the sixth grade of high school. He could not earn more. Then I began to help the family by thanking Slavko Kopač, who had not even had much time, to start making commercials for the cinema. It was not like today. First we drew the advertisement, then photographed it and was only ready to put it. So besides some other jobs I helped the family financially. There is little time left for learning. I practiced violin at least four hours a day (I was preparing a concert for the final exam at the middle music school), I was drawing at least two hours a day, and then at school, so I learned little or nothing. There was a graduation, where one inspector, the opposite of the political views of my father, crashed for a year, ignoring my family situation, which he knew well.
I was very shy because I was perceived from the environment as a versatile, interested, hard-working young man. But I did not have the choice, I had to survive that year until the next maturity. I've been crashed all year. I matured next year and shortly my father died. I left Vinkovci and went to Zagreb. The beginning was hard, I lived as I could. I enrolled the Academy in the fall. There were about thirty of us on the exam, and we only received three.

When did you start to feel your talent for painting? When did you feel you wanted "that"?
- I did when I knew for myself. A bitch, a bunch of bricks, a piece of plaster (no stone in Vinkovci) and horses. Only horses. Big, smaller, even smaller. And I felt like a chauffeur. Actually, the only life dilemma was then whether I wanted to be a coachman or a painter, even though I did not know either. I did not have the right thing to do about it. At that time my mother copied Crncic, from the hobby, with some knowledge she had picked up in school. And that seemed to me a miracle - that scent of color, cloth, oil, palette. There was something magical about it. I did not know whether it was good or not, but I just wanted it.

Do not you think these difficult occasions in your early teen's life helped you make a decision? Or was there someone who influenced you in that regard? Or was it just a sort of predestination?
- I think there was no one or something specific or unique, but all this was supported by Professor Pajalic in Vinkovci. It was a liar painter. He always talked to himself that he was a little Leonardo, and he was drawing the way he was drawing for the first year of the Academy, very naturalistic. He was Slavko Kopač, Branko Ružić and me with me in the landscape. And there we played the painter. With thirteen years of feeling the importance of the painter there was something special. In short, he produced himself before us and I believed he was a great painter (I did not know anyone else). But I also have to say that my first grade, which I got from drawing in gymnasium, was a unit, because Professor Pajalic wanted what we see to be accurate and perfectly accurate to the paper. It was a very important contour to him, and I have denied the contour from the beginning even though I did not even know what the contour was. I was interested in something completely different then unknown to me. Later, I called it a bill.



What is the bill? How do you get to your invoices?
"I was ten or eleven, and I saw some illustrations, a photo in a magazine. As I do today, I remember looking like a sailboat and a blue sky without any stains. I wanted to copy it. Until then, I never did anything like that. It all came out "flaky" and dirty. Then I put it on still wet paper, carefully raised it and found a miracle. "Invoice". There was something going on in me, and that was my first moment of painting cognition.
Does this word of the invoice correspond to what I think? But, in a simpler way, I can hardly tolerate color, like paint, windows, cars, etc. Color vibration in a different shape makes me look alive or acceptable. Out of every parable with others (which I do not even feel a different color sense), because the pictures are different, and other people are different.
When I came to the Academy, we only respected what Račić, Kraljević and Becić did. They were models. There were no invoices in their pictures. Everything had to look like it was made with the "bush", which I hardly accepted then, and I can not imagine it today. I do not think I'm an exception, when I say that I was at first trying to imitate nature, the way it was taught and how it should "work". The greatest praise was "looks right".
I was, like many others, a victim of such and such foolishness. Pedagogy of nonsense and inconsistency has destroyed generations and generations, creating unselfish people, wonders of everything and everyone.
Then suddenly I heard of someone, I do not remember who, I would almost say, "Forget all you learned!" Becić was the brightest in that. He left us freedom, which other classics did not have then. Maybe we were free, but the weather was a bit shabby. We were looking for. Who found it? What did he find? But life got juice.
Despite the Academy and the time in which I lived, the bill began to come back.

Which means "were we free"? Then? And in relation to the generation of artists today?
- I hardly understand today's generation. There are young colleagues among them, who are talented and honest people. I'm very happy to talk to them. However, in conversations and in the preface to the catalog of their exhibitions, it is claimed that they are part of a generation of relinquish artists, which I do not understand. This would mean that they completely erased the emotion from the visual arts. What else is left then? Perhaps it should be called a different name today, not art. In fact, wherever this leads, I do not know. Because if a visual blink does not trigger any emotion, then I do not know what it is. Here I am thinking about new developments in art. It must be admitted that the enformel has given many new ones, but all this was overwhelming. But in all of this, I liked the use of other materials and other invoices. And I thought that does not have to lose the aesthetics of the work. That "beautiful" picture can be made with rough elements. That was the beginning of my touch with the enformer.
So is music. Emotion can not be thrown away. Emotions are vibrations of our lives. For me, art begins and ends with emotion. Emotivity is not tears. What I consider emotional is not the category of private life.

And what is talent?
- I think these people are wrong. They say, "You are talented". I suppose I have the talent, because if I do not have it, I would not picture it. But talent can have someone not to paint and have talent to paint. What does this mean to me? There is a third element, and that is a fantasy. You can not escape from your own fantasy. When you're "full of" your own fantasy, you have to get rid of it, you have to register it somewhere. But the talent itself does not mean anything, nothing. You have to get the fantasy out of the initiative for a particular act.
Are all of us born different or same, but different? I will say: same, but under different circumstances, from conception to all that makes life and what "takes" or "gives" this life throughout our existence. That's why selection comes. Or it is predetermined by genes. We do not know that. But there is some filtration that gradually separates us from brothers, friends, and from what we think we know, and is in fact the continuity of existence. It seems to be more and more devoted to that and to love it as part of ourselves. As a part, even the most important. As the goal of a creation without "worrying".
I think that is what is called talent, and in some it seems very early.

If there are important settings such as talent, fantasy, emotion, which means extracting an initiative for a particular act? What is it like to stand in front of a blank canvas and start making it?
- Empty canvas ?! My late dear friend Mezdic, desperate for months in a single pay-as-you-go format, and did not have the courage to for any reason and for any reason quit the void. We got through, but without success. I am - and I do not speak in the name of my like - I realize that in this white cloth I do not look at the void as much as my many unrealized ideas that are losing time because they have not found their white cloth. But when an idea began to develop, it then created itself for itself, and the concept of a white cloth disappeared.

When do you know you're done with some work? Is it a feeling of excitement, calmness, fulfillment, liberation, or ...?
- How to Start - And How To - How To Finish. I think that the image always started, and completed, but in the whole process of creating a picture, it always floats in front of the eyes of the phrase well-remembered: "Forget all you know and do not bother." Every picture should start scratch. Each image imposes new questions in itself. Solutions are often unforeseen. Experiential. And the end of the job is when you seem to have solved the "rebus".

How much importance do you attach to the names of your paintings? Does the image suggest a name or a picture name? Or would it be better not to imitate images and so let the game of association take place in complete freedom?
- The title of the image is just a necessity, and not the idea of ​​the image. Every birth has its own developmental trends and can not predict the end of the process. Appointing a picture is sometimes absurd, as if you can justify the meaning of a picture and picture message. My pictures carry the name just as a sign of recognition.

A great number of years of life are behind you. In your life there were many interesting events, many interesting meetings. People and meetings you remember?
- There are some that I remember very much. One meeting with Gabrijel Stupica. He wore a small picture under his hand, on which was painted a house in Ilica, and was on the snow roof, which had been identified with the sky. There was no big difference between them. But it was clear that it was snow and what the sky was. I was so impressed. Unforgettable, magnificent, when you realize that a painter can seem somewhat impossible.
I was happy to remember many meetings with Mezdic. He wanted to talk about valeries, vibrations, relationships. He told me his studio story with his stories. But then I started to avoid people. At that time, she had a terrible surface. Socrealism, which pushed everything into the abyss. And anyone who had any responsibility could not accept it.
I was happy to remember meeting and seeing Tina Ujević, Branko Gavella, Drago Ivanišević, Vladimir Bužančić, Mladen Škiljan, Mirom Dupelj, Vladimir Žedrinsky, Radoslav Putar, Mladen Raukar, Josip Torbarin, Vladimir Malkeković, Kostom Spaić etc. etc. Sadly , past time. None of them live anymore.
The man I spent a lot of time in society before and after the war was Tin Ujevic. He enjoyed listening. He always said what he wanted, but he spoke with a soul. We spent the night and the night at the Split train station, because there was the only restaurant there, which worked at night, and did not talk at all.