UROS PREDIC
Directed by: Dragana VICANOVIC
Screenplay by: Dragana VICANOVIC
Camera by: -
Duration: 80 min.
ENGLISH VERSION AVAILABLE
“My biography could be written in just a few lines, since my days passed just like those of ordinary people, filled with strenuous work without any interesting adventures found in abundance in the biographies of artists, without any prominent role in our social life, and even without any noticeable influence on our art. Indeed, every worker makes his positive contribution to the general advancement, and I also made my contribution in which there was something new and original; but not so much that my appearance constituted a discernible stage on our country’s road to development. I did not take a completely new, undreamed-of direction, open new horizons, set the tone for a generation, create the taste of my times and write my personal note in the pages of our history”. These harsh words were written in the autobiography of 64-year-old academician Uroš Predić in 1921. He was a painter who the critics first proclaimed “the Nestor of Serbian art, the best of our iconographers, the first representative of academic realism and one of the most striking mainstays of Serbian fine arts in general”. And later, at the beginning of the 1920s, when modernism was flourishing, they cynically took issue with him, saying he was a “photographer”, an “old-fashioned painter” who did not understand the spirit and direction of “pure art”.
