In May 1951, a historic exhibition by Petar Lubarda was held at the ULUS Gallery on Knez Mihailova Street. The May Day celebrations, which brought people together in a festive atmosphere, also marked the birth of a new era in Yugoslav painting. The exhibition attracted a large audience, and media, critics, and essayists wrote extensively about it. It was visited by both art enthusiasts and curious passersby who paused in front of the gallery windows. Lubarda presented something new and different, shaking the public with bold and powerful strokes. Reflecting on the exhibition, Lazar Trifunović compared the event to a “comet with a tail” striking the center of Belgrade. Through this exhibition, Lubarda introduced a new artistic language, inspiring others to seek their own. No one remained indifferent to Lubarda’s art.
This was followed by his participation in the São Paulo Biennial in 1953, where his new inspiration was recognized with the jury’s purchase award. Afterward, he completed monumental public commissions, such as the mural Battle of Kosovo (1953) in the building of the Federal Executive Council of the People’s Republic of Serbia, as well as Journey to Space (1962) and The Great Relay of Human Reason (1965). His art gained a privileged place at the first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, where his painting Prometheans of the New Age adorned the stage behind the speakers in the Federal Assembly Hall. This resulted in a three-month trip to India and exhibitions in New Delhi and Bombay. Lubarda’s prominence in the Yugoslav art scene was confirmed by numerous domestic and international awards and large public engagements. His art of the 1950s sparked a “new creative renaissance” (Trifunović 1990: 162), and he was given the role of a cultural attaché for Yugoslav art, whose work served to affirm the country’s new democratic aspirations.
Dragoš Kalajić’s article “Petar Lubarda – State Painter,” published soon after the artist’s death, uses this unflattering term with the intention of positively describing Lubarda’s role, although the author acknowledges that it “implies a form of insult.” By equating Lubarda’s artistic transformations with the state’s, Kalajić notes that “the horizontal complexity and vertical depth, synchronicity and diachronicity of Petar Lubarda’s work from that period (the 1950s) provide a far deeper or higher and broader insight into the content of the new Yugoslavia than a mere political chronicle could offer.”
Lubarda’s Art and Visual Chronicle
Interpreting Lubarda’s art as a chronicle aligns with the artist’s personal belief that “the task of art is to reflect reality” and that art “should be social in character… to actively participate in the community’s efforts and construction” (Anonymous 1951). Lubarda’s painting was woven from what was personal and familiar to him: the Montenegrin landscape, literature, folk poetry, drawing inspiration from old masters exhibited in galleries and museums, which he claimed were his “only school.” His art communicates through recognizable content: misfortune is depicted as a raven, conflict and the madness of war through compositions from national history like The Battle of Kosovo, while divine inspiration is embodied by the image of a national bard, the guslar. The artist once remarked, “The national tradition transformed in my consciousness haunts me both in dreams and reality” (Anonymous 1971:8). Lubarda’s appropriation and transformation of content inherited from the past made him one of the most prominent post-war modernists and one of the greatest interpreters of national pathos and epic.
Paintings such as The Battle of Vučji Do, Srđa Zlopogleđa, The Battle of Kosovo, The Raven, The Guslar, and The Mourner were recognized by contemporary critics as a revolutionary step in Serbian painting and are today considered his most significant achievements. Lubarda himself stated that in this post-war period, he spoke in his true voice. The power of this visual language was highlighted by Momčilo Stefanović’s comment that Lubarda “sang of The Battle of Vučji Do with the license of a guslar” (1988: 136), while Miodrag Protić compared viewing The Battle of Kosovo to reading an ancient tragedy (1955: 141).
The folk tradition also served as the foundation for Petar Lubarda’s lesser-known painting Emperor Trajan’s Goat Ears, created near the end of the artist’s life in 1972. This painting is now housed in the Petar Lubarda Legacy, in the home where the artist lived and worked from 1957 until his death in 1974. The story, familiar in local tradition, was taken from a folk tale recorded by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić in 1829 at the quarantine station in Zemun, where he heard it from Gruja Mehandžić of Sentomaš. It was published in Vienna in 1853 as part of the anthology Serbian Folk Tales. The tale tells of Emperor Trajan, who had goat ears, a humiliating secret he kept by executing his barbers. One barber was wise and discreet enough to save his life but decided to relieve the burden of silence by digging a hole, confiding the emperor’s secret, and burying it. Over time, a tree grew in that spot. One day, a shepherd passed by with his flock. He decided to rest under the tree and made a flute from one of its branches to amuse himself. When he blew into the instrument, it produced the sound: “Emperor Trajan has goat ears.”
Lubarda’s painting captures the moment when the flute reveals the truth about the emperor’s ears. In the lower right corner of the painting is Lubarda’s autograph, illustrating the following verses:
“Ask a poet, he’ll tell you the truth,
Poets always speak honestly,
And the poet came, writing an ode:
‘Emperor Trajan, your courtiers deceive you.
They’re powerful with you, nothing without you,
They fear the collapse of your rule,
So listen, emperor, hear the truth at last,
On your head are goat ears.’
The poet perished, followed by many,
The emperor, in fury, silences the truth with death,
But the shepherd sings, and the flute plays:
‘Emperor Trajan has goat ears,
Emperor Trajan has goat ears.'”
The author of the verses is Vera Lubarda, the artist’s wife, who personally wrote them in a notebook, noting that they were composed during a visit to Đerdap in July 1972. The painting was a gift from the artist to his wife for their twenty-sixth wedding anniversary. It also serves as a reflection of a specific historical and social moment, capturing the circumstances in which the country found itself in the years following the constitutional changes in Yugoslavia, which led to increased national tensions.
Lubarda gave his emperor the name Trajan, instead of Trojan—the name born out of folk tradition and adopted in literature in that form. The change of name was not a mistake on Lubarda’s part but an allusion to the Đerdap area, which had been a focal point of public interest in Yugoslavia during those years. This region, which had not seen major construction or economic ventures since the reign of Emperor Trajan, became the site of the largest and most ambitious project in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) starting in 1964—the construction of the Đerdap 1 hydroelectric power plant.
The preliminary works for the construction of the hydroelectric plant included terrain surveys, which led to the discovery of the previously unknown and original culture of Lepenski Vir in 1965, marking the first controversy that challenged the realization of the project. The first generators were put into operation in 1970 after six years of effort and the inevitable difficulties that accompany projects of such scale. These projects also came with sacrifices, in this case, the flooding of villages, archaeological sites, and monuments, including the site of Lepenski Vir itself. Over 8,000 residents on the Yugoslav side and 14,000 on the Romanian side were relocated. The hydroelectric system was officially inaugurated on May 16, 1972, the same year Lubarda created Emperor Trajan’s Goat Ears.
The symbolism of Trajan’s portrait is evident: he is unmistakably a representation of authority, crowned with a laurel wreath. The meaning of the figure of the shepherd playing the flute is revealed through the mutual interpretation of the image and the poetic text within the painting. The identity of the flute player is hinted at in the opening verse of the illustrated poem: “Ask the poet, something will tell him, poets always speak the truth.” Lubarda himself believed that “The task of art is to reflect reality, not to be servile, not to please anyone, to be creative, to lead like a symbol on a flag” (Anonim 1951), and he identified painting with poetry, asserting that he did not paint but wrote. The shepherd in the painting is, in fact, the artist himself, the herald of truth; his symbol, through which he proclaims to the regime the truth about the unsustainability of power. Lubarda did not live to see the fulfillment of the prophecy in his painting, passing away in 1974.
Lubarda remained loyal to the artistic language he introduced in May 1951 until his death, enriching it and expanding its boundaries. He remained true to his artistic theory, developed in the early 1950s, which was based on the belief that art is the sublimation of experienced reality. In 1951, Stanislav Vinaver wrote, “I don’t want to wait a hundred years,” giving Lubarda’s painting the highest praise and recognizing him as a great painter. Lubarda’s work did not merely document but actively shaped a historical and artistic period, of which it remains an eloquent witness to this day.
It has been 69 years since the exhibition in Knez Mihailova where Lubarda presented his vision of painting, and his art continues to write new chapters in the history of our painting with its content.
SOURCES
Anonim (D. A.) “Jedan trenutak sa…” NIN no. 10 (13.05.1951)
Anonim (D. S.) “1001 noć na platnu,” Večernje novosti 3, November 1971: 8.
Dragoš Kalajić, “Petar Lubarda – državni slikar,” Delo vol. 20, year 20, no. 4 (1974): 422-428.
Lazar Trifunović, Studije, ogledi, kritike vol. 3, ed. Dragan Bulatović, Belgrade, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990.
Momčilo Stefanović, “Izložba Lubarde, Milosavljevića i Aralice,” in: Studije, ogledi, kritike, ed. Radmila Matić Panić and Ješa Denegri, Belgrade, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988: 135-139.
Miodrag B. Protić, Savremenici, likovne kritike i eseji, Belgrade, Nolit, 1955.
Ješa Denegri, Srpska umetnost 1950-2000. Pedesete, Belgrade, Orion Art, 2013, 117-129.