The Šantel Family of Artists: Three Women Painters in Maribor
The Šantel Family of Artists: Three Women Painters in Maribor
First exhibition: Avgusta Šantel Jr.
UGM Kabinet, Strossmayerjeva ulica 6
19 April–18 May 2025
opening: Saturday, 19 April 2025, 11:00
curators: Breda Kolar Sluga and Igor Longyka
The Šantel family of artists, which spans an arc between the Slovenian Littoral and Styria, is firmly anchored in Slovenian art and music history, but the years that the three painters spent in Maribor have not yet been researched in detail. In order to improve knowledge of their artistic work, the Maribor Art Gallery has asked the public for help and, following a very positive response, has decided to prepare an exhibition in two parts.
The first part is dedicated to Avgusta Šantel Jr. (Gorica, 1876–Ljubljana, 1968), a painter, musician and teacher who, after teaching in numerous towns in Slovenia and Istria, moved to Maribor in 1920 and took up a position as a teacher at a secondary school for girls. In recent years, her work has been presented in smaller overview exhibitions in the towns where she worked. This research exhibition at the UGM Kabinet, however, focuses on her time in Maribor, where she devoted herself to printmaking alongside her many years of work as a painter. The works on display focus on her depictions of flowers and landscapes. After a hundred years, the exhibition will also include some works that were created during the artist’s lifetime in Maribor and have already been exhibited. In addition to the works from the collection of the Maribor Art Gallery, the exhibition will primarily show previously unexhibited works by the artist from private collectors who have kindly accepted our invitation.
A plunge into the life and work of the educated and artistically talented Slovenian Šantel family offers us an insight into the everyday life of a bourgeois milieu in the established rhythm of Austro-Hungarian society in the last decades of the monarchy. Their arrival in Maribor reveals the local particularity of the period after the waning influence of German culture, when life was enriched by compatriots who had immigrated from the Slovenian coastal region. Among them was Avgusta Šantel Jr. who was committed and spirited in her pursuit of excellence. With her pedagogical eros, her knowledge of languages, her passionate musical activity, her intensive artistic work and her organisational commitment to the Grohar Art Society and the Music Society Glasbena matica Maribor, she is a symbol of the independence that women could achieve in her time through the status of an unmarried teacher.
In her long life, Avgusta Šantel Jr. had only two solo exhibitions in her old age, but these presented her work exclusively in watercolours. Her extremely rich oeuvre of more than 1,000 works includes not only painting and graphic art, but also decorative art. With this research exhibition at the UGM, we would therefore like to contribute to the first comprehensive presentation and critical treatment of the painter and graphic artist Avgusta Šantel Jr.
The exhibition is part of a comprehensive study of art in Maribor between the two world wars, which was significantly influenced and shaped by the Slovenes who moved to Maribor from the Slovenian coastal region. It is also part of a larger series of events dedicated to the Šantel family in the coming spring months. A documentary film about the family has already been premiered by the national public television channel. The Music Society Glasbena matica Ljubljana will organise a concert with compositions for solo voice by Saša Šantel in the Knight’s Hall in Križanke, combined with the presentation of sheet music and a broadcast on the ARS programme of the national radio, as well as the exhibition Ex Librises by Saša Šantel in the University of Maribor Library.
