Cities: A Certain View

The exhibition “Cities: A Certain View. From the Collection of the Graphics by Foreign Authors of the National Museum of Serbia” will be opened in the Gallery of the National Museum Kraljevo, as part of the Žica Spiritual Assembly “Transfiguration 2024”, on Friday, August 16th, 2024, starting at 8 p.m. The exhibition will be opened by Bojana Borić Brešković, MA, director of the National Museum of Serbia.
The thematic backbone of the exhibition by Dragana Kovačić, PhD, museum advisor and curator of the Collection of Drawings and Graphics of Foreign Authors of the National Museum of Serbia, is represented by the depiction of the city as a key place where it began and where modern culture and art developed dramatically and rapidly, first at the transition from the 18th to the 19th and then from the 19th to the 20th century.

The motif of the city in the field of fine arts from the 17th century was mostly represented in printed graphics, whether it was individual prints or graphic maps with topographic representations of different places. In accordance with the cognitive standards of the modern age, accuracy and truthfulness are emphasized in the graphic representations of cities. Thus, city views that were printed in the form of series and maps according to publisher’s orders and in the first decades of the nineteenth century were made in the same way as thematic maps of various scientific disciplines such as botany, zoology or anatomy. Charles Broke’s prints, “View of the Kremlin” and “Petrov Castle”, Friedrich Weber’s “View of Freiburg” or Josef Weixelgertner’s “View of Belgrade from the Sava Side” belong to this type of work.

A century later, at the end of the 19th century, the way artists see the city changes fundamentally, thanks to the great influence of impressionism and post-impressionism. On the other hand, the way of observing the city becomes conditioned by the often-accelerated changes in the appearance of the cities themselves and the way people lived in them. In addition to the depiction of individual cities, a frequent theme is the city as a phenomenon, without specific identification, with a sense of alienation in urban areas.

The authors of the exhibited works moved expressively through unoccupied spaces, using the artistic style and language that previous generations have tested and adopted. These are the authors of the so-called middle current in artistic trends. That is why their representation of the city is “certain”, and there are no turning points in the story. In it, two ways of understanding the city separated by a century are confronted, and their works show how the image of the city has changed, without major breaks and drama.

The exhibition “Cities: A Certain View. From the Collection of the Graphics by Foreign Authors of the National Museum of Serbia” includes 48 works and 36 artists and will be open in the Gallery of the National Museum Kraljevo until October 4th, 2024.