Pavle Paja Jovanović
VR Exhibition

Pavle Paja Jovanović gained fame and popularity as a painter of people and customs in the Balkans very early, even in the thirties. Thanks to his undoubted gift and great work, as well as the awakened interest of Europe in the Orient in the XIX century, he quickly gained many admirers around the world. The work of Paja Jovanović is enormous in every respect. Generations in the past were brought up on his well-known genre scenes from the life of the Balkan peoples and historical compositions. They resonated most strongly with the people and aroused national feelings in the years preceding the Balkan Wars and the First World War. In that respect, Paja Jovanović was a man of the time in which he lived and created. Aware that at that time he belonged to a modest number of internationally recognized Serbian painters, he accepted the role of an artist who, on an equal footing with artists of other nationalities in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, justified the ethnic and cultural identity of Serbs.