COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

Hrvatski tjednik (in its sub-title it was defined as a newspaper for cultural and social issues) was a periodical published by Matica hrvatska (MH) in 1971 (from April 16 to December 3). It was launched at the peak of the Croatian Spring and soon became the primary media through which the MH and a circle of intellectuals gathered around it spread the ideas of this national reform movement. In advocating for Croatian cultural integration and equality within the Yugoslav federation, the paper openly criticised the socialist regime due to its economic-political, demographic and cultural failures. It was the most vocal media of the Croatian Spring that shared the destiny of the movement. After a precipitous ascent, the government extinguished it.

The first editor-in-chief was Igor Zidić (no. 1-13), who was succeeded by Vlado Gotovac (no. 14- 33), while the managing editor was Jozo Ivičević. The editors and authors of Hrvatski tjednik were prominent Croatian intellectuals (Stjepan Babić, Zvonimir Berković, Dubravko Horvatić, Tomislav Ladan, Srećko Lipovčan, Zvonimir Lisinski, Petar Selem, Tvrtko Šercar, Ivo Škrabalo, Hrvoje Šošić, Franjo Tuđman and others). The paper, which was published every Friday on 24 pages, had a circulation of 35,000, which increased over time. The last issue reached a number of 130,000 copies, which was an incredible number for that time.

The rapid spread of the newspaper provoked a reaction by the regime, which began to see it and its publisher as political opposition. Soon the regime declared them a focal point of counterrevolutionary politics and Croatian nationalism. The paper was censored in July (No. 16, July 30), and after issue number 33 of December 3, and the fall of Croatian political leadership at a meeting in Karađorđevo a day earlier, the regime shut down the paper and its publisher. The regime also launched various types of persecution against the most prominent members of Matica hrvatska and its newspaper, from harassment at work, dismissals, to court trials and prison sentences. In 1972, editor-in-Chief Vlado Gotovac was accused of conducting hostile activity against the state and was sentenced to four years of strict imprisonment with an additional three-year loss of civil rights. The editorial board had also prepared issue no. 34 , which was ready to print, but it was never released during communist rule. This unpublished issue with the editorial ("Maintaining Hope") written by Vlado Gotovac, was obtained by émigrés and came to the hands of Jakša Kušan, who published it in the newspaper Nova Hrvatska.

The photo made by Tomasz Sikorski in 1989 or 1990 shows the wall of the underground passage under Rozdroże square in Warsaw. The square, located in the center of the city, is a transport junction where Warsaw citizens everyday change a bus. The walls of the underground passage were an attractive space for the graffiti creators who put there their tags and stencil graffiti. That way, the spontaneous, informal graffiti gallery emerged there.
On the picture there are visible the stencil graffiti by Towarzystwo Malarzy Pokojowych (Association of Peaceful Painters), for example one with the Superman posture with the face of general Wojciech Jaruzelski, acronym PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party) on his chest – a token of the affirmative and in the same time waggish attitude toward the ones in power, placed in the same line with the pop culture heroes. Another stencil graffiti depicted general Jaruzelski with a mohawk, dressed as a punk in a leather jacket. There is also a graffiti with characteristic inscription ‘Solidarność’ (Solidarity) and Israel’s flag above it what one can interpret as an anti-Semitic connection of mass union movement with the Jewish influences.

Congratulations to President Vaclav Havel from Ivana and Pavel Tigrid, sent to him by fax on 5 October 1998, at 2:52pm. Pavel Tigrid and Václav Havel held a long-standing friendship that began in the spring of 1968 when Havel returned from the United States. They scheduled a short meeting in the transit area at Orly Airport in Paris, which then stretched into a whole week that Havel spent at the Tigrid House in Héricy near Paris. In this case, the encounter happened to be when pilots and air dispatchers went on strike at the airport. Tigrid even met Havel and his wife Olga briefly in 1969 when they visited him on his trip to France. After that, Václav Havel was deprived of his passport for a long time, about twenty years, leaving only telephone and written contact between Tigrid and Havel. And it was Havel, who invited Pavel Tigrid to Prague in December 1989 for his inauguration. Tigrid returned to his homeland after over forty years away to help build a democratic state.

Skirt, in Sorin Costina’s private collection, is a painting in oil on canvas. It is unsigned and undated, but is one of the well-known works of the artist Ion Grigorescu, at present the most well-known Romanian artist internationally. The painting is 32 cm in width and 58 cm in height. It was acquired on 20 April 1982 at an exhibition in Căminul Artei (Home of Art), the Union of Visual Artists gallery in Bucharest, at a price of 1,000 lei. At the time of its acquisition it was unframed. Its present frame was made from a rod of oak, at the suggestion of another contemporary artist of considerable fame in Romania, Paul Gherasim. It was brought to the collectors home by Ion Grigorescu himself, who stopped for a time in Brad in June 1982 on his way to a monastery in the region. Skirt may placed in the context of the artist’s visual experiments with the human body, a taboo theme in the communist period. It has been displayed in a number of thematic or solo exhibitions, including various Ion Grigorescu retrospectives, the most recent of which was hosted by the Museum of the Criş Land in Oradea in 2018.