NADEŽDA PETROVIĆ - PIONEER OF MODERN SERBIAN PAINTING

BIJELJINA, OCTOBER 11 /SRNA/ – Serbian painter Nadežda Petrović /1873–1915/ was born on October 12, 1873.

Nadežda Petrović was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade and a co-founder of the Circle of Serbian Sisters.

She studied painting in Munich and Paris and held her first solo exhibition in 1900.

Her works are characterized by a powerful, original style and an extraordinary richness of colours.

Around 200 of her works have been preserved, and some of her paintings are on a par with those of the leading European painters of her time.

Her artistic oeuvre ranges from plein-air painting to powerful realism infused with expressionism.

In Serbia during her lifetime, she was one of the artists most strongly associated with modern art and anticipated its further development.

She was born into a family in which two of her sisters became painters, another became a musician, and her youngest brother, Rastko, became a writer.

She died of typhus in 1915 at a hospital in Valjevo, where she had served as a nurse caring for wounded Serbian soldiers.

Art critics consider her a pioneer of modern Serbian painting, and her works including some of her most notable paintings, Resnik, Notre-Dame, Self-Portrait and Boulogne Forest, are regarded as among the finest achievements in Serbian visual art.