The Wendish Research Exchange - Mirtschin, Maria: Jan Buck and Modernism. To the Sorbian Painter on His 90th Birthday

Lětopis Abstract 2012 2: Mirtschin, Maria: Jan Buck and Modernism. To the Sorbian Painter on His 90th Birthday

Jan Buck came into contact with classical modernism as a student in Poland shortly after the Second World War. Up to the first half of the 20th Century Sorbian art had been influenced by the artistic styles of 1900, as well as by folk and regional art. After a trip to Central Asia in 1973 Buck’s painting experienced an impressionist revival. As a result of engaging with the work of Cézanne he progressed from simple nature impressions to analysing the structure of a painting. Landscape and still life paintings soon became for him an intellectual experimental area, which led him to come close to Giorgio Morandi’s arrangements of surfaces. Buck found his way towards non-representational art via Kandisky’s expressive coloration, fauvist and cubist elements in the creation of figures and in the reduction to a geometric language of form based on the strict rules of colour, line and surface found in the works of Piet Mondrian. Linking with Cézanne’s realization that “art is a state of harmony which runs parallel to nature,” Buck has developed his very own modern language of form in the six decades of his artistic work, which he subjected to ever new tests. With Buck’s works Sorbian art connected with modern developments in art.