The catalogue raisonné
It is compiled by the estate, and registration in it is how a work is authenticated. This site plays no part in that and can offer no opinion worth having.
This archive cannot authenticate a painting.
It is an independent reference site with no access to the archive, no expertise in the hand, and no standing with anyone. Any opinion offered here would be worthless to a buyer, an insurer or an auction house — and stating one would be worse than useless, because it might be believed.
Authentication runs through the estate, and only through the estate.
What exists
The painter’s widow, the architect and psychologist Slavica Batos, and their son Aleksa Popović maintain the estate and are compiling the catalogue raisonné. By the estate’s own account the work is largely complete for the oils: approximately 3,700 oil paintings have been catalogued, while drawings, watercolours and graphics are still being collected and classified.
The first volume, covering 1954 to 1985, was published in 2024, alongside the Parisian Ascension exhibition at the ARTE Gallery in Belgrade marking what would have been his ninetieth birthday.
An earlier catalogue raisonné of the work to that date appeared inside Anne Tronche’s English-language monograph of 1981, published by Gordon Sacks and Alpine Fine Arts. It is a historical document rather than a current authority.
Counterfeits
The estate warns explicitly about counterfeits, and positions registration in the catalogue raisonné as the authentication mechanism. This matters more for Ljuba than for many painters of comparable standing: the work is stylistically distinctive, widely reproduced, and sits in a price range that makes forgery worth someone’s trouble without attracting the scrutiny a blue-chip name would.
If you are considering a purchase, the sequence is: ask the seller for the catalogue reference, then verify that reference with the estate. A work that cannot be placed in the catalogue is not thereby a fake — the drawings and works on paper are genuinely still being processed — but it is a work whose status is open, and it should be priced and insured as one.
What this site does instead
The catalogue here is a reading aid, not a register. Its records are compiled from published sources — the research literature, exhibition catalogues, museum pages and press — and its catalogue numbers, where they appear, are the numbering used by the source that supplied the reproduction. They are not estate references and should never be quoted as though they were.
Where the sources disagree, both readings are shown. Where a claim rests on secondary reporting rather than a primary record, it is marked as such rather than tidied into a fact.