Franjo Mraz

He was born on April 4 in Hlebine, into the family of poor rural people. The artist’s father died during the First World War. After five classes of elementary school, the future artist worked in a well-to-do family and was engaged in agriculture. He enjoyed painting from childhood, using watercolor paints.

Under the guidance of Krsto Hegedusic, and then Peter Franjic, he began to paint regularly. He studied the technique of tempera and oil on glass and canvas. In the same year, he became close to Ivan Generalich, who also worked in a naive style and was under the tutelage of Krsto Hegedusic. Generalich became a close friend and colleague of the artist.

Took part in the Third Exhibition of the Earth Group in Zagreb as an invited guest. The debut of the young artist was a success. His original paintings in a naive style, like the works of Generalich, were noticed by his colleagues, critics and the public. The first success inspired Mraz to create new canvases in which social themes appeared under the influence of the members of the group “Earth”. In the same year, he started to closely collaborate with Peter Franjic. However, the jury of the Fourth exhibition rejected Mraz’s paintings, saying that they are “of a low art level”, which was rather controversial. He was about to stop collaborating with K. Hegedusic, who had already got young student Generalich. Mraz was fairly self-organized, independent, and he easily managed without a mentor.

Took part in organizing the First Exhibition of Peasant Artists in Zagreb. He helped open several exhibitions of Croatian peasants, artists and writers in Croatia and Serbia. The artist’s paintings of that period are characterized by soft tonal painting, freshness of colors and the immediacy of expression. Franjo Mraz reached the pinnacle of his career as an artist of naive style.

With the onset of World War II, he became an active participant in the National Liberation Movement. The artist created propaganda posters and newspaper illustrations of patriotic content, depicting war scenes and everyday life of partisans. Mraz’s painting became sharper, with a characteristic expressive line.

Spent the post-war years in Zagreb, worked in the Department of Art of the Ministry of Education and Culture. In 1950, he moved to Belgrade, where he got a job at the Military Museum. During that period, Mraz decided to become a professional artist and started to paint in a realistic manner. In his paintings, he mostly depicted scenes that were his memories of the war.

He gradually moved away from Realism, returning to the artistic traditions of the Hlebine school – the primitive style. Mraz depicted everyday rural life, idyllic landscapes, which, nevertheless, had some features of Realism. The brightest example of his work of that period is his painting “On the Pasture”, in which rural themes are combined with vivid expression.

In spite of the fact that the artist was not a shy person, he found an isolated environment in a fishing house on the outskirts of Orebić, living in an atmosphere of “adventure tourism” for ten years without electricity, trying to find, as he thought, lost roots, exhausting himself with unsubstantiated doubts. As the artist wrote in his autobiographical article, a crisis started and his work “could not stand up to serious criticism”. Dissatisfaction was due to the fact that it was impossible to return to a naive vision after working in a realistic manner.

The artist died on October 26 in Brežice (Slovenia) during the preparation for the opening of his personal exhibition in Switzerland.