Мюнхенски аспекти в живописта на Мърквичка
Munich Aspects in the Paintings of Mrkvička

Summary/Abstract: The study examines essential aspects of the influence of the Munich art school on the key figure of Bulgarian fine arts during the first decades following Bulgaria’s liberation of Ottoman rule (1878) – jan Václav Mrkvička (1856- 1938) – genre painter, portrait artist, illustrator, icon painter, author of eccle- siastic and secular monumental paintings and a pedagogue . These influences had not been so far subject to analysis in Bulgarian publications dedicated to the artist’s works, not even in the one and only Bulgarian monography (1955) on Mrkvička by Andrey Protich, who received German training . The importance of their establishment and examination, as this study shows, is of utmost importance since these influences had determined to a large extent the formation of aesthetic view points and artistic expression of the early post-liberation art of painting in Bulgaria . Due to the fact that the Bulgarian society at the time was hardly aware either of the characteristics or of the contribution of the Munich school, formed during the Grunderzeit period (1870 – beginning of the 1890s), which mainly signifies the art of the painters from the second half of the 19th century in Bavaria, the study gives its main characteristics . The accent is put on the comparative analysis of the works of two types of representatives of the school – those official and nonofficial, who had had the greatest influence on jan Mrkvička during his study at the Royal Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in the class of Prof. Otto Seitz most apparent in Mrkvička’s portraits, genre and histori- cal paintings . Highlited are those innovatory views and plastic components of composition in the historical paintings of Carl von Piloty adopted by Mrkvička either directly from observing Piloty’s works or through the pedagogical in- structions of his teacher, Otto Seitz. Established are also the influences picked up by the young Czech student from Franz von Lenbach, mainly in portrait paining, from Wilhelm Leibl in portrait and genre painting and from Franz von Defregger in genre painting . Through brief analysis of some of the works by these painters and Mrkvička the author seeked to identify some analogies . However noticeable the influence of some of the leading Munich artists of the time, Mrkvička did not copy them but strived to creatively reinvent them as he had been inventive enough to create оriginal works of art by himself. The influence of the Munich school, though apparent, is of general character and hardly imitative.

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