It was in Paris that Sava attended the academy of prominent art pedagogue and critic André Lhote, and af- ter that his works included a note of cubism, sprouting from the preceding art nouveau, symbolism and expres- sionism. Sava was also associated with post-Cubism, con- structivism, traditionalism, neoclassicism, Fauvism and poetic realism, only to ultimately and unavoidably settle on personal poetics. He personally referred to this poet- ic as the “how I know and can style”, in accordance with what dictated his mood, knowledge and motives. The beauty of his homeland enticed hundreds of paint- ings out of him, and most of them were created in the last decade of his life, when his famous “Šid ladies”, or “Lady bathers”, were also born. The painter himself said about them, “they really don’t exist in Šid, because in the stream (Šid’s) bathe only children and occasionally the odd girl hidden by a bush”. That’s because, like the great Renoir, Sava used a sin- gle model for a series of group compositions, who posed better for him in Šid than all Parisiennes, as he insisted. By multiplying her likeness, the artist sought to achieve a unity of style that he altered during his life, depending on influences and his personal preferences. That’s why his Luncheon on the Grass is linked with the work of Édouard Manet, while his Drunken Boat is all but a citation from The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Gericault. His leafy landscapes are empty in the sense of the human presence, yet they are filled with various forms of light. In his springtime scenes, the whiteness of the flowers is balanced with the shine of the still rising sun, while the winter sun surpasses the whiteness of the day, enriched with silvery tones. There are no people there – in their place are depicted the contours of houses, trees and the furrows of ploughed fields. He only really became aware of people later, when painting children from Šid and multiplying the figure of that local blonde, as well as the black-haired women he’d sketched in Paris to give her company among the “Šid Women”. These women, exhib- ited over an entire wall, prove breathtaking to visitors to this Šid gallery, which preserves 417 of his works, among them 350 oil-on-canvas paintings and 67 sketches of var- ious techniques. The observer is also rapturously silent when viewing the strength of The Pickers, carrying baskets filled with grapes and with a glorious vineyard in the background. Afi- cionados of Sava’s work and personality simply feel that he was struck by a great artistic charge immediately before his death, and wonder what else he would have achieved if he hadn’t departed too early. If he is remembered by young- er generations for his painting achievements, which were often revolutionary, his contemporaries knew that Sava was a pantheist, an intellectual, a gentleman, “who differed from his fellow painters in terms of the way he dressed, held himself and spoke”. It is a matter of the choice of the imaginative to visualise him sitting in a horse drawn car- riage, riding through landscapes and ripening orchards, wandering along dusty roads in search of inspiration. Or eternity, which is his rightful place.
Sava Šumanović Proleće u dolini Sv. Petke (1934), ulje na platnu, Galerija slika Sava Šumanović u Šidu Sava Šumanović, Spring in the Valley of St. Petka (1934), oil on canvas, Sava Šumanović Gallery, Šid
glow of summer, the whiteness of winter and, above all, the greenery of spring. However, 80 years after his death, the character of this man, one of the most highly educated Serbian artists, is still best described by the canvases on which he con- jured “flaming emotion”, as defined by famous art critic of the period Todor Manojlovic, emphasising the vision- ary nature of Šumanović’s painting, orientated towards beauty, that still remains overwhelming in the work of this painter from Šid. Born in Vinkovci in 1896, his fairly wealthy and edu- cated family returned to Šid in 1900, to today’s Memorial House, which was only bought by the Municipality much later. After completing high school in Zemun, Sava resist- ed his father’s wish for him to become a lawyer, as he’d already developed his artistic inclinations. He would lat- er rejoice in the colours of all seasons, but perhaps most of all in spring, when the sun’s rays would entice delicate buds to open in the surrounding gardens. “In carriages, he would tour the fields, orchards and vineyards of Šid and the surrounding area, and all of Srem, and he was attracted by the contrasting lighting of the morning, afternoon and evening, sketching everything with a pencil, writing down the details of colouring. He would then paint in his studio, becoming the creator of a new cosmos,” explains Jovana Lakić, director of the Sava Šumanović Gallery. And that new cosmos is woven from light and filled with order and harmony. That’s why art historian Milan Kašanin (1895-1981) said in the same context that “on none of our artists’ boards and canvases can one see so many white colours – white female bodies, white flowers, white houses, white streets under snow”. In spring, the petals of blossoming plum trees on the Srem plain are also white, fluttering gently towards Fruška Gora, the only mountain in the whole of Vojvodina. In order to develop such a strong love for his home- land, Sava had to travel and compare, so he says: “That Šid area is the most picturesque and most beautiful to me among all those I’ve seen so far”. He also thought Šid was given its lovely appearance by dust, because the town ap- pears “powdered” and tame, “like the areas around Paris...”
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