Natalija Cvetković
# Natalija Cvetković

Natalija Cvetković (4 June 1888 - 19 April 1928) was a Serbian war artist.

## Biography

Cvetković was born and raised in Smederevo, Kingdom of Serbia. Her family moved to Belgrade in 1900 to enable her to study art. She enrolled at the newly established Rista Vukanović Serbian Drawing and Painting School and spent five years learning art technique with Beta Vukanović and theory with Svetozar Zorić, and Branislav Petronijević. As a Fellow of the Ministry of Education, she continued her studies at Munich's Kunstgewerbeschule from 1905 to 1908 and then spent six months at the Académie Julian in Paris from the end of 1908 to mid-1909. Upon her return to Belgrade, she accepted the position of a drawing teacher at the School of Arts and Crafts (part of the Arts and Crafts movement), where she taught until the end of her life in 1928 when she died with influenza. She was one of the founders of the Association of Fine Artists in Belgrade in 1919 and a member of the Serbian Society of Artists, better known by its acronym "Lada". From 1920 to 1928 she was the society's secretary. With Nadežda Petrović and Zora Petrović, she participated in numerous exhibitions, artistic projects and art colonies in Belgrade.

During the Balkan Wars she volunteered as a nurse. Cvetković died of influenza in Belgrade, Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1928, aged 39.

### Painting

As a student of Beta Vukanović, Cvetković based her artistic beginnings on work in nature, such as French plenaries, where she worked on drawings and watercolors of landscapes in full daylight, which decisively determined her further artistic movement. During her stay in Munich, she perfected drawing and at the same time became interested in applied arts and arts and crafts. In painting, she changes by introducing a more intense color register, tailored to Munich impressionism, which remained characteristic of her later painting opus based on light and its contrasts. She was also influenced by viewing the French Impressionists at the Luxembourg Museum during her short stay in Paris. Her small impressionistic cycle of paintings, created on her return to Belgrade, is considered to be at the very top of Serbian modernism.

