Dejan Rančić, a Forgotten Painter of Flowers and Landscapes

Abstract

Ivan Rancic was born in the Kraljevo village, in eastern Serbia to a family of farmers on 19th, February, 1906. Very little data about him has been preserved, therefore, this paper is an attempt to make a reconstruction of his life and work. He attended primary school in his birth place, lower secondary school he finished in Knjazevac and Military Academy in Belgrade. After completing the National Academy in 1934, he was sent to Zagreb where he got his first post. He lived there with his wife and his son until the capitulation of the country in 1941. A few months after the collapse of the country, he was arrested and sent to Ljubljana and three months later to a concentration camp in Austria. He spent about fifteen months in that camp in during which time he intensively studied painting. He fled from the camp to Switzerland and stayed there until his death in 1987. According to some letters he sent to his wife in Nis, some of his paintings he created during his time in the camp, ne took to Switzerland where he eventually sold them. He did the toughest jobs there in order to survive and painted extensively. After World War II he graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Lausanne. Later on he had two exhibitions at the New Gallery of Modern Art.

Ivan Rancic came a long way from an unknown beginner to a respected prominent artist. He left behind about 350 works, many of which he sold during his life, mainly landscapes and still life in oil, watercolor and pastel. He was neither concerned about styles and trends nor did he believe in the old and the new. If he came to a certain specific manner of painting, it is because at one point it was imposed on him as the only proper way of expression. The analysis of Rancic’s paintings leads to the conclusion that his creation had gone through four phases. The first one ( started in the concentration camp in Austria) during which he painted still lifes without full sketches, previous studies, and the use of linear perspective.This phase is characterized by the use of dark colors. This phase is followed by the one in which he painted flowers and vases with flowers. A considerable number of paintings from this period has been preserved, many of which were done in oil on canvas, while most of which were painted in oil on plywood or cardboard. A number of these paintings was painted in watercolor on paper. In the colorist sense, this stage was very different from the previous one. The next was the stage in which he painted landscapes. Some of his landscapes, mostly the ones which were painted using the combination of watercolor and pastel have a transparent atmosphere, bright and flickering light. The fourth stage was, in fact, a synthesis of all previous stages of development in which Rancic attempted to alleviate some of his artistic shortcomings. Almost all of his paintings were signed but none were dated , so t will be very difficult to determine the time of their creation.

Ivan Rancic is a rare example of an artist who came a long way from realism through impressionism to expressionism. Rancic, as a man, wanted and succeeded to remain completely anonymous to us. As an artist, he could not prevent a number of Swiss art lovers from recognizing a talented artist in him. His painting represents the last page of a yet unwritten history of Serbian painting of the twentieth century. He died in a nursing home in Korbirijer on 26, January, 1987. The urn with his ashes is being kept in that place.