Eroticism on canvas

The Art Pavilion in Zagreb exhibits until 11 January 2009 some 120 works of Milivoj Uzelac. Uzelac is one of Croatia's foremost 20th century painters. Born in Mostar, he spent his early childhood in Banja Luka. After the death of his father, Milivoj and his family moved to Zagreb where he studied for a year at the Academy of Visual Arts. One of his professors was Oton Iveković, a man known for his paintings of dramatic events in Croatian history.
When the First World War broke out, Uzelac moved to Prague but returned to Zagreb after the war. In Zagreb he changed his style from expressionism to cubism and neoclassicism. Not unlike many other painters Uzalac left Croatia for France, where he lived from 1923 up to his death in 1977.
Milivoj Uzelac's works are imbued with eroticism. Nude women figure prominently in his work; they radiate sensuality and sexuality. His reputation as a womanizer and lover of the female nude grew after the discovery in 2001 of a cycle of erotic drawings in Prague. Some of these will now be presented to the Croatian public for the first time.

Croats in Dalmatia

It is conventional wisdom that Slavic tribes, and among them Croats, settled in Dalmatia in the 7th century. This thought is primarily based on the book De Administrando Imperio, written in the 10th century by Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. As Constantine wrote about things he thought that happened three centuries ago, some of his observations could be wrong.
Professor Neven Budak, for example, recently stated that there is no material evidence at all that Croats already lived in Dalmatia in the 7th or 8th century. He presented this "sensational discovery", as the paper Slobodna Dalmacija called it, at a conference organised by the University of Zadar.
De Administrando Imperio is known to contain a lot of errors, so Budak's disovery is not as sensational as Slobodna Dalmacija suggests. Much more surprising is the absence of further discussion in Croatia. I couldn't find the proceedings of the conference and read what Budak exactly said, but his findings should provoke some reactions in the small field of Croatian historians. Right?
Two painters put the arrival of the Croats on canvas. The first and most popular painting is by Oton Iveković. I can see why. Iveković portrayed the Croats as a well-dressed, civilised people, a kulturni narod as Croats like to say. Celestin Medović's painting, however, shows the Croats as a wild, barbaric and warlike tribe that fought its way to the Ardriatic Sea. We will probably never know how they looked like, but we might some day get an anwer to the question when they saw the sparkling Adriatic Sea for the first time.