⭐ 16: Hayracks with Flowering Buckwheat by Miroslav Kugler

Sunlit Late Summer 

The landscape painting of hayracks and a field full of white buckwheat flowers in the foreground was painted in the late summer of 1972. The oil painting is the work of Miroslav Kugler (1914–2005) and is on view as part of the exhibition The Four Elements: 2 – FIRE. Art teacher Miroslav Kugler devoted himself to painting the entire time he was teaching at the Brežice Grammar School. His focus was not on urban vedute, but rather on the landscape of the Posavje region in different seasons. During the summer months in particular, he often ventured into nature, where he spent a lot of his time painting. 
   

For heritage enthusiasts:

Academy-trained painter Miroslav Kugler (1914, Ljubljana – 2005, Brežice) spent most of his creative years in the town of Brežice. At the Brežice grammar school, he succeeded Franjo Stiplovšek (1898–1963), a teacher, painter and museologist, as a teacher of drawing and descriptive geometry. He was born on 4 February 1914 in Ljubljana and started devoting himself to drawing at quite an early age, while he was a secondary school student. He enrolled at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts in 1940. After his graduation in 1946, he first worked in Zagreb and then took a job at the Brežice Grammar School. After his retirement, he lived and worked in Brežice to a ripe old age and died on 17 April 2005.
Like most other academy-trained painters who stayed in the Posavje region and took up teaching to make a living, Miroslav Kugler continued his creative work, devoting himself to portraiture and especially landscape painting. The depot collection of the Posavje Museum Brežice houses over eighty works of art painted by him, including a small number of oil paintings, prints and watercolours that depict landscapes, vedute and still lifes. A large number of his works are portraits, including the painter's self-portrait painted in 1953.
 

SELF-PORTRAIT, 1953, Miroslav Kugler (1914–2005), a pencil sketch, height 30.7 cm, width 22.7 cm, Inv. No.: KZ 1/971.	PAINTER MIROSLAV KUGLER sketching by the river Krka in Velike Malence in the spring of 1998. Photo by Oži Lorber.

The time he spent studying, albeit with some deviations in the 1960s, marked Kugler as a painter who strived for naturalism in his paintings and a lyrical interpreter of the landscape in his native region of Posavje. Much like for some members of the post-WWI generation of artists, the landscape was increasingly often a basis for subjective expression of emotion, for cosmic exploration of nature's spirit and also for the artist's own focus on the characteristic features of local physiognomy. At the same time, landscape also presented a challenge in terms of exploration of various artistic issues, in particular colour composition (M. Komelj, 1997).
 

SLINOVCE, 1975, Miroslav Kugler (1914–2005), oil, canvas, height 54 cm, width 73 cm, Inv. No.: KZ 1/210.

Kugler's landscapes kept at the Posavje Museum Brežice include the painting titled Slinovce, painted in 1975 and exhibited as part of the temporary exhibition Landscape from Museum Depots and the painting titled Hayracks with Buckwheat, painted in 1972 and exhibited as part of the exhibition The Four Elements: 2 – Fire. Kugler's depiction of buckwheat was highlighted as part of the European Cultural Heritage Days, which were dedicated to cuisine in 2021. Buckwheat is one of the oldest pseudocereals from the Polygonaceae family of flowering plants and has been used in Slovenian cuisine for centuries. In his famous work The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, Johann Weikhard von Valvasor states that buckwheat grows especially well in Carniola. In the past, buckwheat was used to make buckwheat groats (kasha) and to bake plain bread, which was black as earth. Slovenian chef Ivan Ivačič, who was born in the village of Zdole in the Posavje region, was famous for his extremely tasty buckwheat bread.

For more information see:

• Lorber Oži: Ogenj strasti duha. V: Štirje elementi: 2 – OGENJ / The four elements: 2 – FIRE, Černelič Krošelj Alenka (ur.), Brežice: Posavski muzej Brežice, 2018.
• Kugler Miroslav, Vrtačnik Lorber Jožica: Prof. Miroslav Kugler, akad. slikar – Slikarska razstava, razstavna zgibanka, Cerklje ob Krki: Galerija vojašnice, 1997.
• Komelj Milček: Poteze: slovensko slikarstvo XX. stoletja / Striche: slowenische Malerei im XX. Jahrhundert, Ljubljana: Nova revija, 1997.
• Milovanović Goran (ur.): Krajina iz muzejskih depojev, razstavni katalog, Kostanjevica na Krki: Galerija Božidar Jakac, 2009.
• Vajkard Valvasor Janez: Slava vojvodine Kranjske, VII. Poglavje. O raznoterih rastlinah na Kranjskem in sicer najprej o žitu, str. 346, Ljubljana, 2009-2013.
• Spletni vir: https://sl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajda, dostop 24. 9. 2021.

Prepared by: Oži Lorber
 
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