The originator of art and modesty

He started painting depicting everyday scenes of ordinary people and the difficult life of the poor. He would always paint by feeling. This artist did not overly care about the rules of academic painting and did not even try to paint realistically - he painted what he felt.

Colors and figures, pictures and representations - all this was a reflection of Ivan's experience of the world around him. He didn't want to sublimate all that world into one frame!

He showed his paintings to the world for the first time in 1931 at the 3rd Exhibition of the Association of Artists Zemlja in the Art Pavilion in Zagreb.

After the aforementioned exhibition, Ivan mostly paints on glass with oil or tempera. The most famous works of this period are certainly "The Funeral of Stefan Halaček" (1934), "Ciganski svati" (1936); "In the Forest" (1938), "The Island" (1940), "The Dead Singer" (1954), "The Death of My Friend Virius", "The Lumberjack" and "The Deer Wedding" (1959).

The real turning point for the painter took place in 1935. Then he held a solo exhibition in Paris, thanks to which the good news about Ivan Generalić began to spread throughout Europe. In Bratislava in 1969, he was called the only living naive painter!

In the period after 1970, the painter begins to combine symbolic and existentialist content and connects different motifs - from folklore painting on glass through Breugel's unparalleled realism to surrealism.

Although considered the originator of Croatian naïve art, Ivan Generalić stands as an example of modesty and modesty - until his death he remained in his birthplace where he ran a peasant painting school. He lived peacefully, and well.