oil on cardboard, 47 x 63.5 cm, signed at the bottom left, in blue, ''O. Herman''

Research information

The work is catalogued and reproduced in the monograph "Oskar Herman", Boris Kelemen, Grgo Gamulin, Graphic Institute of Croatia, Zagreb, 1978., p. 126, cat. no. 331 under the title "Hills in Autumn".

Oskar Herman was a member of the Munich circle, that is, one of the four Croatian painters (along with Miroslav Kraljević, Josip Račić, and Vladimir Becić), educated in Munich at the beginning of the 20th century, who marked the beginning of modernism in Croatian painting. He was born in Zagreb in 1886. After his Munich education, he traveled and exhibited throughout Europe, mainly in Germany. During the Second World War, he was interned in the Italian refugee camp Ferramonti, then stayed in the allied artist colony in Cozanni, Italy, and after the war he worked in Zagreb until his death in 1974. Unlike his Munich colleagues, Hreman did not follow the examples of Spanish Baroque and their echoes at Manet or Courbet, nor the German Realists like Wilhelm Leibl, but found inspiration in the symbolist painter ("cult painter," as he himself said), Hans von Marées. The desire of Herman's painting was not to depict reality, but he saw the painting as a possible insight into deeper (one might say mystical, or archetypal) truths about the universe and the place of human perception in it. The painting 'Shores in Autumn' very exactly represents this Herman's poetics. The intense color and rich underpainting of this landscape create a dazzling impression on the painting. The motif is diffused into several colorfully lavish surfaces, painted with broad strokes. What Herman represents is no longer the shores, nor the intense colors that appear in nature in the fall. It's a pure aesthetic sensation, accessible to a sensitive consciousness. FG

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