Art is not only a matter of beauty. It is also a matter of fellow feeling, of reflection, and of sensation.
Cross the threshold of the Gallery of Matica srpska in Novi Sad—the oldest cultural and scholarly institution in the country, founded in 1826, and rather grander than its modest name suggests—and you find yourself inside a permanent display that has thrown out the museum rulebook. It is called Revision of the Gallery of Matica Srpska Collection, and the gallery likes to write it as ReVision, so that the vision shows through the revising. The curators have declined to arrange the collection by period, by school, or by artist. They have arranged it by idea.
Each thematic room brings together masterpieces from wholly different centuries, and the effect is to make the evolution of Serbian art legible at a glance—rather more legible, in fact, than a chronological hang usually manages.
The most affecting of these spaces belongs to the module the gallery calls Taboo: Body and Mind, which moves through the body, the question of selfhood, feeling, and death. Feeling is explored by means of two works: the self-portrait of Novak Radonić (1826–1890), painted in 1857–58, and the eloquent Melancholy (1977) of the sculptor Sava Sandić (1915–2016), who lived to be a hundred and one. The room is grey, the lighting deliberately subdued, and the visitor is left to consider, at leisure and largely in silence, what it is that art does with what we feel.
The gallery puts three questions to the visitor and answers none of them. Which feeling would you use to describe Radonić’s self-portrait? And which for the sculpture Melancholy? How is one to depict the invisible—how to give shape to the intangible?
Two works, one room, and no answers supplied. It is a considerable act of confidence on a curator’s part to hang so little—and it works.
