Kristian Krekovic (1901 - 1985), was an outstanding Croatian artist, born in the village of Koprivna near Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then a part of Austria-Hungary, to a family originally from the region of Lika (modern-day Croatia). He died in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
He studied in Vienna and Paris, and already in 1928 was a member of the French Society of Visual Arts. The same year he was awarded the gold medal in Bordeaux (Exhibition of international art). Krekovic portrayed many ministers, statesmen, and outstanding persons like:
- Mahatma Gandhi (1931)
- the English Queen (in 1938, upon her request; the portrait is kept in the Buckingham palace in London,
- the royal family of Spain (King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia)
- the royal family of Sweden (King Gustav V upon his invitation to Stockholm in 1948, when he was at the age of 90)
- Queen Marie of Romania
Krekovic's extensive opus of 143 large format works, devoted to Croatian history, including 63 portraits of Croatian Dukes and Kings (from Porga in 620 till Stjepan Tomasevic in 1463), was unfortunately not preserved. Between 1928 and 1966 he visited Peru many times, so that his work became deeply imprinted by the life and art of Incas. From 1955 he lived in Peru, and became a Peruvian citizen. He had great success with exhibitions of Presente y pasado del fabuloso Peru (Present and past of the fabulous Peru) in:
- New York (Law Memorial Library Columbia University; Ambassador Hotel, 1956)
- Washington D.C. (National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, 126,000 visitors in July and August 1955, that is, more than 2,000 people daily!)
- Siracuse (The Syracuse Museum of fine Arts, 1956)
- Boston
- Philadelphia (University Museum, 1955)
- Madrid (Circulo de Bellas Artes, 1957)
- Lima (exhibition opened by the president of Peru, Manuel A. Odria, 1954)
- Vienna (Neue Hofburg, visited also by Dr. Schaerf, president of Austria, 1957)
- Barcelona (Galeria Grife & Escoda, 1957)
- Palma de Mallorca (Casa de Cultura, 1961)
In the course of Krekovic's first exhibition in the USA (held in New York) he was described as "Yugoslav painter". Krekovic's did not permit such misrepresentation, and warned the organizers that he would not allow the exhibition to go on if he were not described as Croatian-Peruvian painter. He succeeded, despite the protests from the embassy of ex-Yugoslavia.
It is not surprising that he is often desicribed as Croatian born Peruvian artist, or as Poeta de la pintura. Krekovic signed himself as pintor croata or pintor "croata-peruano". His grand exhibition of ethnographic paintings held in 1954 in Lima, was opened by the president of the state.
In 1966 the famous Peruvian city of Cuzco (or Cusco), the old capital of the Inca Empire and "the archaeological capital of South America", conceded him honorary citizenship and the Gold medal of the city.
In 1965 he settled in Palma de Mallorca, where in 1977 he built the Museum of Palma de Mallorca with his works of art, now known as Museu Krekovic (Colleccion Pintor Krekovic). The Krekovic Museum was officially opened in 1981 by the Spanish Queen Sophia. In the guestbook she wrote:
...magnifico museo y magnifico pintor.
Mahatma Gandhi, who was a personal friend of Kristian Krekovic, wrote the following:
El sentimient de Kristian Krekovic hacia el mundo es unico. Impregna todo su arte e impregna con extraordinario creatividad y constructivo caracter.
Krekovic used Croatian Glagolitic script in daily correspondence with his friend Marko Dosen (president of Croatian Parliament during the WWII period), as was the custom also in his family during his childhood.
Krekovic's wife was Sina, a French woman who mastered the Croatian language perfectly, using many Croatian expressions and words already fallen into disuse during the Yugoslav period. Born in Paris in 1910, daughter of an outstanding surgeon, she spoke also Quechua, Catalonian, Spanish, Italian, German (studied piano at the Vienna Conservatory), French, Russian, and English.
Krekovic dreamed about free Croatia, and to start again working on his Croatian cycle, but he died too early. It is worth mentioning that in 2002 Javier Bizarro Bentitz won the prestigious "Premio de Poesia Antonio Machado" with his poem Los fantasmas del Parque Kristian Krekovic, among 154 other works.
His works of art have been bought in 1950's by three prestigious American institutions for their collections: Philadelphia Museum, Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, and Museum of the American Indians in New York.
External links
Other pages about Peruvian artists
-Angie Bonino -Armando Andrade Tudela -Carlos Enrique Polanco -Cesar Calvo de Araujo -Eduardo Tokeshi -Fernando de Szyszlo -Hugo Orellana Bonilla -Kristian Krekovic -List of Peruvian artists -Pablo Marcos
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Kristian_Krekovic
