Slavan Vidović is remembered in Split as a respected physician and surgeon. He spent the majority of his career at the City Hospital, which, by a twist of fate, became the home of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2009. The idea that “the Museum could relocate from Lovret to the old building on the city walls near the Park, once the hospital had vacated it,” was first proposed in the early 1930s by his father, Emanuel Vidović. Thus, the history of this unique building, with its medical and later cultural functions, overlapped with Slavan’s lifelong interest in both art and medicine. Specifically, in his youth, he tried his hand at artistic creation and maintained a lifelong connection to the arts as a collector.

The son of a renowned painter, he was both talented and knowledgeable about modern art. He exhibited publicly only once, in 1919, at the Exhibition of Yugoslav Artists from Dalmatia in Split. At the major post-war art event, he showed six caricatures under the collective title From the Female World, which received favourable reviews in the Split newspapers Novo doba and Jadran. These publications remain the only record of what are, regrettably, now lost works.

Two albums, containing a total of eighty works on paper, provide compelling evidence of Slavan Vidović’s exceptional talent and his familiarity with modern art movements. The pieces were predominately rendered in mixed media, combining pencil, ink, watercolour, collage... The majority depict scenes from Prague, where he studied medicine from 1919 to 1926. They are part of the legacy of his daughter, Zjena Čulić PhD, and have never been exhibited before. The works range in size from 7.4 × 7.4 cm to, exceptionally, 23.5 × 22 cm, and were mounted on album pages, many of which are numbered and titled (in Croatian or Czech), with some also dated. The recorded dates cover the period from 1922 to 1924, and it is likely that the undated works were created around the same time during his studies.

Slavan Vidović’s work is marked by both thematic and stylistic variety. He drew and painted both exterior and interior scenes, portraits, occasional still lifes, and designs for posters, books, ex libris…, drawing on a range of artistic movements, from Fauvism, Cubism, and Dadaism to Expressionism and Neorealism.

In Prague, he showed little interest in the city’s historic architecture, focusing instead on contemporary urban life, depicting factory chimneys, streets lined with multi-storey buildings, busy intersections, suburbs, circuses, and carousels, often populated with human figures. Unbound by stylistic uniformity, he interpreted each subject according to his own personal vision. He employed a distinctive stylisation, incorporating elements of his own iconography. Forms were usually defined with bold ink contours before being coloured. Aside from his portraits, his figures are almost always typified and de-individualised. Many of his compositions display hallmarks of Expressionism, such as skewed and compressed spaces, multiple viewpoints, tilted objects, and unconventional proportions.

Striking in appearance and, in some cases, of remarkable quality, his works reveal his curiosity, creativity, and social intelligence. What he lacked was formal academic training and the opportunity to refine his talent through sustained artistic practice, an absence that, in his case, ultimately served the field of medicine.

Slavan Vidović was born on 1 December 1899 in Split, the eldest of nine children of the painter Emanuel Vidović and Amalia, née Baffo. He completed his secondary education in Split before graduating from the Faculty of Medicine at Charles University in Prague in 1926. Specialising in surgery, he spent the majority of his career at Split Hospital, with a hiatus during World War II when, from 1943, he worked on the islands of Vis and Hvar.

In 1919, he took part in the exhibition of Yugoslav Artists from Dalmatia in Split, presenting six caricatures under the collective title From the Female World, which received positive reviews. While studying medicine, he focused on drawing and painting scenes from everyday life in Prague, preserving these works in two albums which, until now, have not been publicly exhibited.

He maintained a lifelong connection to the arts as a collector. A discerning connoisseur with refined taste, he gradually assembled a valuable collection that, alongside his father’s paintings, included works by Miljenko Stančić, Ante Kaštelančić, Antun Motika, Ignjat Job, and others. Among these, Petar Smajić’s works are particularly noteworthy, as Vidović played a key role in promoting him as a sculptor. They first met in 1933, when Smajić was making gusle (bowed single-stringed musical instrument from the Balkans), and Vidović immediately recognised artistic potential in his work. Encouraged by Vidović, Smajić began carving a variety of wooden motifs, which Vidović purchased and later exhibited at Salon Galić in 1934. This marked Smajić’s first exhibition and proved a turning point, attracting the attention of other artists (particularly the Zemlja group) and the broader public.

Slavan Vidović died in Split on 8 December 1972.  

The exhibition has been made possible with the financial support of the City of Split and the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.