The Monument Scandal in the Museum Square in Ljubljana

Authors

  • Damir Globočnik

Keywords:

France Kralj, Čoro Škodlar, Božidar Borko, Stane Mikuž, Franc K. Kos, public monuments, “entartete Kunst” (degenerate art)

Abstract

France Kralj’s (1895–1960) statue of a peasant mother with a child and a cow (artificial stone, most likely from 1938), was commissioned by the City of Ljubljana and erected in Museum Square in May 1939. Following a critical article by the painter and writer Čoro Škodlar in the Jutro newspaper, the monument was vandalized. The police did not find the perpetrators. A debate followed between the supporters of France Kralj, the central figure among Slovene fine arts Expressionists, and the opponents of contemporary artistic trends, whose views resembled the official cultural policy of the Third Reich. The article also reveals that Slovene newspapers to some extent approved the Nazi attack on trends in contemporary fine arts in Germany.

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Published

2025-08-14

Issue

Vol. 26 No. 2 (2019)

Section

Prispevki

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Damir Globočnik

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