Petar Lubarda's Legacy opens in Belgrade

BELGRADE - The Belgrade house where one of the greatest Serbian painters of the 20th century, Petar Lubarda (1907-1974), lived was opened on Tuesday as a museum dedicated to this artist, whose 1951 exhibition marked the end of socialist realism in the former Yugoslavia.

Visitors of the Legacy of Petar Lubarda, located in a renovated villa in Dedinje, an elite part of Belgrade, will have the opportunity to see some of his works that have not been available to the public for the past 30 years.

Sixteen of the 24 paintings kept at the Legacy will be on display on the ground and first floor of the building.

Besides the paintings, visitors will also be able to see some of the furniture Lubarda and his wife possessed, private photographs and the painter's easel.

Belgrade Mayor Sinisa Mali said at the opening ceremony that 2014 marked the 40th anniversary of the death of the famous artist, and he invited the people of Belgrade and their guests to visit the Legacy.

Art historian and critic Jerko Denegri said that Lubarda had reached the pinnacle of his art as far back as the 1930s, and that he gained a particularly prominent role with his 1951 Belgrade exhibition, considered a turning point.
"Lubarda's art will represent a turning point, both in the important features of the language of his paintings and in reducing the visual image to the boundary of a visual signal," Denegri stated.

Lubarda enrolled in the Belgrade Art School in 1925, but he lived in Paris from 1926 to 1932, where he studied at Academie des Beaux-Arts for a short while. He returned Belgrade until 1938, when he moved to Paris again, until 1940.

Between the two world wars, Lubarda had exhibitions in Paris, Rome, Belgrade and...