„The Village Choir”

By Anton Ažbe

Anton Ažbe (30 May 1862 – 5 or 6 August 1905) was

a Slovene realist painter and teacher of painting. Ažbe, crippled since birth and orphaned at the age of 8, learned

painting as an apprentice to Janes Wolf and at the Academies

in Vienna and Munich. At the age of 30 Ažbe founded his own school of painting in Munich that became a

popular attraction for Eastern European students. Ažbe trained the

"big four" Slovenian impressionists (Rihard

Jakopic, Ivan Grohar, Matej Sternen, Matija Jama) and a whole

generation of Russian painters (Ivan Bilibin, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Igor Grabar, Vasily Kandinsky,Dmitry

Kardovsky and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, to name a few). Ažbe's training

methods were adopted and reused by Russian artists both at home (Grabar, Kardovsky) and in emigration (Bilibin,

Dobuzhinsky).

Ažbe's own undisputed artistic legacy is limited to twenty-six graphic works, including classroom studies, most of

them at the National Gallery of Slovenia. His long-

planned masterpiece never materialized and, according to Peter Selz, he "never came into his own as an artist". His enigmatic personality blended together alcoholism, chain

smoking, bitter loneliness, minimalistic simple living in private, and eccentric behaviour in public.

A public scarecrow and a bohemian socialite, Ažbe protected

his personal secrets till the end, a mystery even to his students and

fellow teachers. The public transformed the circumstances of his

untimely death from cancer into an urban legend.

Ažbe as a

creator.

Loyal students Igor Grabar and Dmitry Kardovsky noted portraits by Ažbe for his "superb drawing”

marred by dry, if not dull, paint technique. Modern critics divide over Ažbe's significance as a painter, not in the least because his surviving undisputed legacy is limited to twenty-six works. Eleven of these are early paintings and classroom studies

from his college years. Only four paintings, dated from 1890 to 1903, can be considered mature

art influenced by the Munich Sezession. The largest and most complex of these, The Village Choir, has

been irreversibly damaged by a botched restoration. Photographs and memoirs testify to the existence of his other works, now lost or hidden in

private collections.Lack of hard evidence prompted conflicts among historians and critics, further aggravated by the

politics of the former Yugoslavia and its successor states. Baranovsky and Khlebnikova noted that by the end of the twentieth century, Ažbe the creator

has become a myth, just like Ažbe the person became a legend after his death.

Frantz Stele (1962) and Peg Weiss (1979) have extensively studied Ažbe's relationships with the

emerging avantgarde art and mature impressionism, and considered Ažbe to be a

forerunner of modernist art, a link between Cézanne and Kandinsky. Both studies, in

partucular Weiss', were rejected by Tomaz Brejc who reasoned that any parallels between Ažbe and

Cézanne are moot because Ažbe never mastered Cézanne's technique and there is no evidence that

he ever attempted it.

„The Village Choir”

In the picture I can see a room. In the

foreground there are people, and in the

background there is a wall. This room is a

little bit dark, but the sun rays enter through

the door. People are singing. Women are

wearing long, colorful dresses and a man is

playing piano. It is beautiful.

I think that this painting is beautiful.

„The Village Choir” by

Anton Ažbe illustrating rural life and allows us to learn the old customs. I really like this

painting.

More Paintings by

Anton Ažbe

„Little Dalmatian Girl”

„Study act”

„Harem”

Thank you for your attention!