Biography

Tuzla and Valjevo

Ljubomir Popović was born on 14 October 1934 in Tuzla, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and now Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Spasenija, a clergyman’s daughter, and Aleksa, a well-to-do merchant who owned land with an inn and a shop on the Tuzla–Zvornik road.

On the eve of the Second World War the family moved to Valjevo in western Serbia, escaping the wartime persecution of the Serb population in Bosnia. Several of his maternal relatives were killed. He grew up in Valjevo, excelling at drawing and writing, designing cinema posters and working as an assistant film projectionist — the beginning of a lifelong love of film that resurfaces decades later in canvases addressed to Kubrick and Clarke.

Belgrade

Unable to afford university outright, in 1953 he was sent to Belgrade as a cinema film-selector while training at the Academy of Applied Arts, which he entered in 1954. His increasingly personal, non-academic painting led to his expulsion at the start of his fourth year. Professor Ivan Tabaković recommended him to Marko Čelebonović at the Academy of Fine Arts, which admitted him straight into the fourth year; he graduated around 1959 and began a two-year Master’s Studio course under Milo Milunović, interrupted by military service in an artillery unit at Bileća.

Two events shaped what followed. The Urvater collection was shown in Belgrade in 1959 — his first sight of original Dalí, de Chirico, Magritte, Delvaux and Ernst. And he fell in with Mediala, the Belgrade group pursuing a synthesis of Renaissance technique and modern thought, with whom he first exhibited in 1960. His paintings of these years — Phantoms of the Attic (1958), The Pilgrims of Emmaus (1960–62) — are crowded with human figures in airless spaces, worked almost entirely in burnt umber.

Paris

In autumn 1963 he left Belgrade for Paris for good, carrying five rolled canvases: Danaë, Flowering, Isabelle, Istihon and Beauty Salon. A recommendation from Čelebonović to Ginette Signac, daughter of Paul Signac, brought him to the critic René de Solier, who became his first champion, and to the dealer Marcel Zerbib, who bought all five canvases and put him on a monthly retainer. He survived his first months as a house painter. His first Paris solo show came in May 1964 at the Galerie Edouard Smith.

In autumn 1970 he met Thessa Herold, beginning a collaboration that ran forty-six years, until his death — first at the Galerie de Seine, then through Artcurial, then at her own Marais gallery from 1993. The 1972 Galerie de Seine exhibition, twenty-three large paintings catalogued by André Pieyre de Mandiargues and Etiemble, is the moment his reputation consolidated.

Two countries

He married the architect Nataša Jančić in 1969; their daughters Adriana and Tiana were born in 1970 and 1978. He later partnered with the architect and psychologist Slavica Batos; their son Aleksa was born in 1989.

He kept strong ties to Yugoslavia throughout — a stone house on the island of Vrnik near Korčula from 1969, summers later on Jakljan, and from the war years onward at Xiropotami near Mount Athos in Greece. He co-founded the Modern Gallery Valjevo in 1985, which now holds a permanent collection of his paintings and drawings and a memorial studio. In 1991 he was elected an external member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Death and after

He died in Belgrade on the night of 11–12 August 2016, aged 81, after falling ill at his summer retreat near Mount Athos. In 2019 the SANU Gallery in Belgrade mounted a retrospective of forty-five mainly large-format paintings, curated by Nikola Kusovac and Slavica Batos; the Academy records 57,350 visitors, and the first printing of the Serbian catalogue sold out mid-run. His widow and son continue to compile the catalogue raisonné, the first volume of which appeared in 2024.