Sava Choumanovitch and the Secret under La Coupole
Marking the 180th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Serbia and France, the Gallery of Matica Srpska organized the exhibition Sava Choumanovitch and the Secret under La Coupole, author Tijana Palkovljević Bugarski, PhD, at the Cultural Center of Serbia in Paris. The exhibition introduced the French public with a part of Sava Šumanović’s oeuvre, which refers to the painting of one of the pillars in the famous Parisian restaurant “La Coupole” on Montparnasse in 1927.
In addition to the original draft made for the pillar, representing four female figures (now privately owned), the exhibition also features historical photographs of the restaurant “La Coupole” from the 1930’s, a replica of the pillar, and a selection of Sava Šumanović’s paintings from the collection of the Gallery of Matica Srpska. These paintings indicate the thematic and stylistic determinations of the painter and his development path from the phase of following current artistic trends during his stay in Paris 1920–1921, 1925–1928 and in 1929, to his characteristic poetics, accomplished upon his return to Šid in 1930. The compositional part of the exhibition is the film Four Caryatids by Igor Antić, an artist who lives and works in Paris. Antic based his video work on the presentation of the pillar in “La Coupole” restaurant, but also on the analysis of Šumanović’s entire work, which is kept and exhibited in Serbia.
The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual Serbian/French catalog Sava Choumanovitch and the Secret under La Coupole/Sava Choumanovitch et le Secret de la Coupole by the group of authors, available at the GMS Shop.
