Vladimir Kristl, Oil on canvas.

Description

Vladimir Kristl (Zagreb, January 24, 1923 – Munich, July 7, 2004) is a Croatian painter, draftsman, animator, screenwriter, film director, experimenter and art pedagogue. The biggest promoter of abstract painting in the 1950s and one of the greats of the Croatian avant-garde and animation.

Kristl studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and Belgrade from 1942 to 49. He joined the partisans, and was particularly involved in Agitprop Zavnoh, where he made posters, leaflets, and newspapers. After his return, he finished his education, and then in the 1950s he worked as an independent artist, illustrations for newspapers (Vjesnik, Kerempuh), advertisements, paintings, and published poetry. He is one of the founders of the avant-garde art group EXAT 51, and together with them he exhibits his strictly geometric abstract paintings in March 1953.

Vlado Kristl, above all, was an authentic non-conformist, a great free-thinker unwilling to be restrained - in many respects an anarchist. Because of his impetuous nature, he often got into conflicts, and since he was not inclined to compromises, he often got into difficulties and troubles because of them.

The cramped confines of post-war Yugoslavia were not enough for him, and in 1954 he set off into the world via France and Belgium, reaching Chile, where he stayed until 1958 (he allegedly held a solo exhibition there[2]).

He returned to the country in 1959 and began working intensively on cartoons. As early as 1952, Kristl worked on cartoons, for the Duga Film at that time, as a cartoonist and animator. For them, he prepared a recording book for the film Magical Sounds (but that film never came to fruition). After that, he started working with the new company Zagreb Film, and for them he made his first films Theft of Jewels (1959) and Šagranska koža (1950), which brought him first prizes at festivals in Belgrade and Vancouver.

His best film from that phase is the cartoon Don Quiota produced by Zagreb-film. In it, with the help of a contemporary cacophonous musical background and his extremely minimalistic geometric characters, Kristl turns all the existing cartoon conventions on their heads.[3] That film brought him the first prize at the Festival in Oberhausen.

Throughout that period, Kristl was also intensively engaged in painting, so he was one of the first to accept the new French fashion - informal painting, and in 1959 he exhibited 12 positives and negatives, two series of six white and black paintings each. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1959 together with his Zagreb friend Ivan Picelj at the accompanying exhibition Manifesti d'arte[4] Vlado Kristl also exhibited at New Tendencies exhibitions in the early 1960s. After his short film General and a serious man, made for Viba film, was banned from being shown due to political satire,[5] Kristl left Yugoslavia and moved to Munich in 1963. Along the way, he declared that he would never set foot in Zagreb again, despite numerous persuasions from acquaintances who visited him - he really never visited Zagreb again.[6]

Kristl also always wrote intensively, so in 1959 he published books of poems; Neznatna lirika and in 1961 Five White Stairs, he continued to write intensively in Germany, and published several books and essays.

In Germany, he made more than thirty experimental and feature films, of which he had the greatest impact; Madeleine, Madeleine (short feature from 1963), Der Brief (1966) and Sekundenfilme (1968).

From 1979, he taught for a short time at the University of Visual Arts (HFBK) in Hamburg and thereby influenced many authors of the German New Wave. He met the end of his life living relatively modestly on a small pension, however he remained as uncompromising and consistent with himself and his art as he was in his younger days.