Milan Konjović

Milan Konjović (28 January 1898 – 20 October 1993) (Милан Коњовић) was a prominent Serbian painter whose works can be divided into six periods of artistic style. He studied in many countries abroad and lived in Paris from 1924 to 1932. His long life's work earned him many recognitions as well as a place in the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, SANU).

Milan Konjovic finished elementary and secondary school in Sombor between 1904 and 1916. In 1914 he had his first exhibition featuring some fifty works painted in nature. In 1919 he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, in the class of Vlaho Bukovac. Having left the Academy after the second semester, he continued his education on his own, in Prague where an avant-garde Czech painter Ian Zrzavi introduced him to the art of Leonardo da Vinci. He later brought his studies to Vienna and travelled to German museums in Munich, Berlin, and Dresden.

He arrived in Paris in May 1924 and stayed there until 1932. Afterwards he returned to his native Sombor.

His most significant and successful one-man exhibitions includes 1931's "Galerie Bing et Cie", 1932 "Galerie van Leer", and 1937 "Galerie Mouradian-Vallotton." He participated in several Paris Salon exhibitions, marked the beginning of his artistic "blue phase", which lasted from 1929 to 1933. In the later years, he devoted himself to painting his hometown Sombor, its landscape, people and milieu. In summertime he painted in the cities of Dalmatia, including Mlini, Cavtat, and Dubrovnik.

Konjovic's "red phase" lasted from 1934 till 1940. In 1941 Konjovic was in Osnabric as a prisoner of war. After his release, Konjovic began painting pastels most notably in the years 1943, 1944, and 1949. He then began producing oil works painted in so-called 'subdued colors' from 1945 to 1952, marking the "gray phase" of his work. 1953 is considered to be the turning point in Konjovic's painting style. He works began to be defined by more pure intensive colors and glow, leading to the period dubbed the "coloristic phase." New artistic orientation culminated and was to characterize the works of the "associative phase" (1960–1984). At that time Milan Konjovic engaged himself in the work of the artists' colonies of Vojvodina. In 1985 began the "Byzantine phase" with works treating various themes from Byzantine history.

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