| Added by |
 Alain Martineau
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| General Description : | Serie: 413, Type: P, Stamps in serie: 3 LEO JUNEK (1899 - 1993) If we follow the continuity line of the modernist painting in Zagreb, we cannot bypass the name of Leo Junek. If we ideologically round up his painting, starting from the days at the Art Academy in the classes of Kovačević, Vanka and Babić, we may encounter difficulties in singling out a specific, most important period. In the painting of Leo Junek everything is important: from his magic realism to the lyrical abstraction. Immediately after he had completed his study at the Art Academy, Junek went to Paris. Works of art of unusual simplicity of visual elements have been produced there, and it is hard to connect them to the currently contemporary trends in Croatian art. By their content they belonged to the topical area of the group "The Earth" (Zemlja) and were the forerunners of the Croatian social painting, but they were more cheerful, lighter and liberated from the political pragmatism. What distanced him from the factory-like and other urban motives of the realism of the thirties is the colour. The artist has examined the Impressionists and Cézanne, the art of the Fauvists and Raoul Dufy whose art and sensitiveness has greatly influenced his painting. At that time Junek produced his best, lightest and most poetic works which will reach their peak in the painting "The Cube". There will be generated a cheerful painting, with intense chromatic values, an orientation that will lead Junek to the threshold of abstract composition in painting, where colorism and linearity are united. The wide areas of colour have completely conquered the canvasses and it is only Junek’s associative references to the starting point of his paintings, the nature and objects that occur as titles of his paintings. The painting "Maternité du Port-Royal" was painted in 1940 and is, undoubtedly, together with "The Sketcher" the best synthetic model of Junek’s painting. Wide flat masses of paint are separated from the contour, and that specific Dufy-like Fauvism has clearly overcome any attachment to the former Central European Neorealism. The originality and magic of the experience of an urban scene has become evident precisely in the combination of neorealism, colorism and a rather strange whiff of surrealism. |
| Face value | 2,50 Kuna |
| Catalog code (Michel) | HR 592 |
| Catalog code | Stamp Number HR 471 Yvert et Tellier HR 558 Stanley Gibbons HR 676 AFA number HR 668 Croatian post Inc. HR 415 |
| Series | Modern croatian painting |
| Stamp colour | multicolor |
| Stamp use | Commemorative stamp |
| Print run | 350,000 |
| Issue date | 01/12/2001 |
| Designer | Danijel Popović |
| Paper type | white 102g, gummed |
| Print technique | Multicoloured Offsetprint |
| Printed by | Zrinski - Čakovec |
| Perforation | 14, comb |
| Height | 35.50 mm |
| Width | 42.60 mm |
| Catalog prices | No catalog prices set yet |
