The last day for submission of works to the contest THT@msu.hr Drawing

Antoine Watteau’s painting The Embarkation for Cythera from 1717.g. shows a happy group of people in fancy clothes that are descending to the coast in order to board a ship that is to sail to a desired island of fun and love. On it, Aphrodite’s temple awaits the newcomers like a cornerstone to their understanding of the enjoyment of the pleasures in life. The picture exudes a kind of elegiac mood as the characters get lost in the misty background of the image which symbolically (in the words of art the late historian R.Ivančević) shows the uncertain future of the high feudal society, which will in highest abundance have to come down from the stage of history, a thing that happened after the French civil Revolution in 1789. Two centuries later, in 1916 with his painting Crna Zastava (Black Flag) Ljubo Babić quoted Watteau since in his famous paining as well we see a group of people moving in the vagueness and uncertainty after the sunset of an era, ie. the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A century after Babić's painting Black Flag, namely in 2015, the drawing / collage The last day for submission of works to the contest T-HT@msu.hr is created. The drawing shows human figures moving through the mist towards the meandering building of MSU in Zagreb. Arthur C. Danto, interpreting the time in which he lives, uttered the following sentence: "This is a ‘period of play', a utopia of happiness that is in no way binding, but can actually lead us to absolute freedom." This paradigmatic sentence fairly accurately (just in another form!) describes the strategies of many of today's curators and their propensity for current topics in the world of high art. The aforementioned Babić’s flag is a display of the end of all such epistemological fixations of the postmodern man, and the work The last day delivery ... somehow becomes a "Groundhog Day” as in the eponymous film.

Drawing:Graphite on Paper

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:13.7 W x 9.8 H x 0.1 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.