Slavko Kopač (August 21, 1913 – November 23, 1995) was a French painter, sculptor and poet.
Kopač graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1937. After graduation, as a young artist, he studied in Paris thanks to a scholarship from the French government. He continued his education in Florence where he studied philosophy and the history of Art from 1943 to 1948. In that period he started to liberate himself from acquired knowledge and rejected academicism, entering the circle of some of the prominent artists of the 20th century. In 1948, he has settled permanently in Paris, where together with Jean Dubuffet, André Breton and Michel Tapié he founded the Compagnie de l'Art Brut and was the leader and creator of the Art brut collection for 30 years. He worked closely with André Breton, who organized exhibitions for his work at his gallery À l'Étoile scellée. Michel Tapié included him in his book Un Art Autre, in which Kopač stands as one of the founders of Art informel together with Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Paul Jackson Pollock and many others.
He exhibited in Zagreb, Florence, Rome and Paris.
School and academy
Slavko Kopač was born on August 21, 1913, in Vinkovci, Austria-Hungary (now Croatia), where he graduated from elementary and high school. He received his first painting lessons from a high school drawing teacher, Vinko Pajalić.
In October 1933 Kopač became a student of the Royal Academy of Arts in Zagreb in the class of Vladimir Becić, where he completed his studies in 1937. At the academy, as a 20-year-old, he met Zoran Mušič and Mladen Veža with whom he would be friends for many years, both in Zagreb and later in Paris. During the academy days Kopač started dreaming of Paris, thanks to his professor Vladimir Becić who described Paris as "capital of light and painting".
In 1938, Kopač exhibited seventeen works at the Ullrich Salon, especially oils and watercolors, many of which were sold. The exhibition had a favorable reception, and was described as by "the youngest painters of the Zagreb School from the inexhaustible workshop of their role model and teacher Vladimir Becic". Kopač exhibited in his home town Vinkovci. Together with Mladen Veža, he was invited to exhibit in the new Meštrović Pavilion at the exhibition of modern Croatian art titled Half a Century of Croatian Art, prepared by the Croatian Society of Arts for its 60th anniversary. The exhibition brought together the best Croatian painters, sculptors and architects, among whom Kopač, though the youngest, was represented by three paintings. Thanks to these successes, Kopač was awarded a scholarship from the French government for study in Paris.
Nine months in Paris
At the end of 1939, Kopač went to Paris, where he was welcomed by Leo Junek, who had arrived in Paris in 1925. Kopač described his first stay to : "For me, Paris was a city of dreams. I used to say: if I could not do otherwise, I would walk to Paris; I was so attracted. When I finally arrived, it was November 30, 1939." As the war approached France, people were fleeing massively before the onslaught of Nazism and the German army, and Kopač and Junek spent days walking around the empty city.
During this first stay in Paris, the need to abandon academic knowledge and rules in his artistic expression was born:
I was very fortunate to find someone like Junek who showed me what was valuable. And I have my own views on painting. I reckon I wasn't even 15 when I got hold of a book which considerably determined me: that was a book about the great Austrian painter, Schiele. For me, he remains equally interesting and smart today, as he was at the time when I discovered him. But I never copied, not him or anyone else."
The planned one-year stay in Paris was shortened to nine months: in September he returned to his homeland, where he was sent to the grammar school in Mostar to become a drawing teacher.
Teaching
Kopač left Mostar and in 1941 to 1942 taught at the Second Classical Gymnasium in Zagreb. The works created during his stay in Paris and Mostar were exhibited at the First and Second Exhibitions of Croatian Artists, while the Zagreb-based paintings Jesuit Monastery and The Abandoned Station were listed in the Croatian selection for the 23rd Venice Biennale in 1942.