Unknown painter (1st of June 2012)

Painting is one of the reasons which makes us think of ourselves as being different from other animals. It is one of the reasons we call ourselves humans in some sense that surpasses the simplest darwinistic definition. Our ancestors had to have some models, some constructions of reality, in order to be able to make cave paintings which look powerful even today.

I always look at those horses, buffalos and deer with certain happiness. I imagine our ancestor, the smart guy, perhaps wounded in some previous hunt, who could, in his physical invalidity, only imagine the stories of his hunter friends. With time, he learned to represent some of his imaginations on the cave walls. It was a huge conceptual step forward. Construction of reality. But also the first historical note, a hunting diary. We were here, it said.

The need to paint follows us, at least some of us, from these ancient times. Quite some percentage of people we hold important and we are proud of as a specie, are painters. Da Vinci, Dürer, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Hokusai, Sargent, ... are the names that I immediately think of, and each one of you certainly thinks of some others. But, there is a much larger number of names we never heard of. These are the names of completely anonymous painters who painted, or at least started to paint, from the same ancient need as our smart ancestor. This post is dedicated to one of those anonymous painters.

The image above is a painting of the unknown painter. This is a portrait of my great grandmother, famous and terrible granny Šiber, the boss of the family. I "inherited" this portrait after my grandfather Šiber died, in winter of 1999. It would be more correct to say that I, to remember my grandfather, picked up from his drawers several yellow and deformed photographs, the portrait of Katarina Šiber, born Manz (the image above), and two framed photographs which I remembered from my childhood. One of those is the photograph of my grandfather's brother Josip which I used in the post >> Family, and the second one is shown below.

According to the look of >> my father (the baby on the little chair), this photograph was probably taken in year 1951. Other people on the photograph are grandfather Šiber with his famous pants (reithosen) and slick mustaches, grandmother Sofija, my uncle Stjepan and great grandmother Šiber. Comparing the portrait and this photograph, one can conclude that the portrait was made probably in the late 1940's, early 1950's. One can also see that the painter mostly got the salient features of the face of his model.

This post is thus, a sort of "exclusive" because Construction of Reality is the only place where the work of the unknown painter can be seen. And the painter is unknown for a very prosaic reason - he didn't sign the painting. The painter who does not sign, that is already unusual. Who was/is that guy?

Specially for this post, I disassembled the picture frame in order to see whether there is something in the inside which may help to answer this question. I was surprised to see that there is another portrait on the back of the portrait of Katarina Šiber. This, obviously unsuccessful and abandoned painting, is shown below.

Above this portrait, it is written Ešefojca Tasl, which is probably an unfinished name Ešefojca Taslidžić. Surname Taslidžić was pretty common in >> Gradačac (where my grandfather lived) and its surrounding. Ešefojca is not a proper first name. It means Ešef's wife (Ešefovica). Therefore, the abandoned work is probably a portrait of a wife of some Ešef Taslidžić (the other possibility is that Ešefojca is the painter that I look for, i.e. that the text is her unfinished signature, but, to me, that does not seem too probable). All this, however, does not help me to uncover the painter's identity.

Finally, the photograph above shows the back side of the frame before I disassembled it. The cardboard papers were used to track the work hours and the efficiency. The forms were printed in Cyrillic script. In handwriting, someone entered the dates and the work hours (from 07:00 to 16:00 ?), and there is also a name: Muharem Omeragić. Perhaps it could be the name of the painter. It is also possible that the cardboard paper used to frame the portrait has nothing to do with the unknown painter.

This is how this post ends. It was a story of an unskilled unknown painter on the web pages of the unskilled unknown painter.

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Last updated on 1st of June 2012.