Departure V
Artist
Emir Dragulj (Bosnian, 1939 – 2002)
Date
1981Medium
MezzotintDimensions
Image : 18 1/4 x 14 5/8 in. (46.36 x 37.15 cm)
Sheet : 31 1/2 x 20 1/2 in. (80.01 x 52.07 cm)
Mat : 36 x 24 in. (91.44 x 60.96 cm)Credit Line
Gift of Arthur and Kristine RossofObject Number
2019.90.19
Label
Emir Dragulj is regarded as one of the foremost Bosnian artists of the 20th century. At the time Dragulj created this print in 1981, Bosnia was part of Yugoslavia, a federated state in southeastern Europe with an ethnically and religiously mixed population of Orthodox Christian Serbs, Catholic Christian Croats, and Muslim Bosnians, Kosovars and Albanians. From 1945 to 1980, Yugoslavia was held together by the iron-fisted rule of President Josip Tito, but ethnic and religious tensions began to rise soon after Tito’s death in 1980 and the country ultimately split apart in 1992. This haunting image of a man in Muslim-style clothing looking over a stone wall into a darkened space beyond seems to foreshadow the ethnic cleansing and mass migrations that occurred in Bosnia during the civil wars that wracked many former Yugoslavian republics during the early 1990s.
