“Until I feel something stirring inside of me, I know I will not paint a good landscape, so I don’t sit down to paint,” these words belong to renowned Bulgarian painter Boris Denev. Works of his are on display until 26 May at the Loran gallery in Sofia. The exposition is entitled “Travelling with Boris Denev. Unexhibited landscapes”.

A few years ago, just before a major jubilee exhibition of works by Boris Denev, art critic Vessela Hristova-Radoeva was able to spend days admiring paintings by the artist, which his daughter Slavka Deneva had donated to the Union of Bulgarian Artists. And she realized why critics from the mid-20th century until the end of his life said there may be other painters better than him in different ways, but that as a landscape artist he is unrivalled. It is enough to take a look at his works to get a sense of the magic of nature coming to life in his canvases.

“Boris Denev was a man in love with nature,” Mrs. Radoeva says. “This is his creed and not just as an artist. When he was a very young man he took his first steps as a drawing teacher in a village near Veliko Turnovo and he wrote a report for a teachers’ conference. He says that as landscapes and nature are an inspiration, the artist, in painting them, can help ennoble man as nobody else can. He compares artists to philosophers who, by advancing their ideas help elevate the spirit. At that time he did not have a formal art education. Much later, displaying his paintings, very small, almost pocket-sized, at an exhibition organized by the Contemporary Art Society in 1908 in Sofia, he was noticed by experts and artists and was emboldened to mount his first independent exhibition the following year. With the money from that exhibition he went to study at the art academy in Munich. Unfortunately, his stay there was relatively brief, but as critics would later say, his studies in Munich cannot be said to have been crucial to his development as an artist. He did accumulate knowledge, though that was not the most important thing in his development as a painter.”

When the Balkan War broke out (1912-1913) he dropped out and volunteered as an orderly. He then spent ten years as a war artist with the army general staff. Alongside military themes, he painted hundreds of landscapes, portraits, biblical and historical compositions.

When a pro-Soviet regime was installed in Bulgaria, Boris Denev fell out of favour and was arrested. He spent ten months in the prison in Sofia and at a concentration camp in Doupnitsa. The reason – his feuilletons for the newspapers Slovo (Word) and Zora (Dawn). When he was released, he was forbidden from painting outdoors and, in 1945, was expelled from the Union of Bulgarian Artists for ten years.

Ultimately, in his own lifetime, Boris Denev mounted 25 one-man shows. Most of them were in the period before the 1920s up to the mid-1940s.

“Even as a war artist, he painted the horrors of war, the campaigns and he had to paint portraits of generals and of colonels. Perhaps it is precisely because of these portraits that at one point he said to himself: I cannot be a war painter any more, it is not in my nature. I want to paint ordinary people, I want to paint landscapes, I want to paint other things, not parades.”

As Vessela Radoeva says, to get a feel of what a given work will be like, Boris Denev invariably takes a sweeping, panoramic view. A panorama can be the size of a postcard, or it can be a meter, a meter and a half. “The sense of the monumental comes naturally to him. That is something that is given to but a few, with landscape painters it is even rarer,” says Mrs. Radoeva.

English version: Milena Daynova