Biography
Boris Kelemen, art historian and critic and theorist as well as museum officer was born in Podravska Slatina in 1930. He attended high school in Virovitica and took a BA (art history) in the Faculty of Philosophy of Zagreb University in 1955. He spent the whole of his career in the Zagreb City Galleries (today the MCA) as curator in the Benko Horvat Gallery and as manager of the Gallery of Primitive Art (later the Croatian Museum of Naďve Art) and its director.
He was awarded a PhD in 1966 on the basis of his dissertation on Oskar Herman.
He was engaged in the study of Croatian fine arts in the 19th and 20th century, Constructivism, Abstraction, computer arts, New Tendencies, but his most numerous articles are concerned with the Naive.
He published about 150 pieces in all the important dailies and journals in the former-Yugoslavia, wrote numerous entries for encyclopaedias, took part in a lot of conferences and symposia, and was the author of numerous exhibitions at home and abroad. He was author or co-author of several monographs, the most important of which was the Naive Painting of Yugoslavia, for which he won a prize from the 2nd Insita Triennial in Bratislava, in 1969. He won the Bronze Seal of the City of Mainz for inter-city collaboration and for the book Naive Painting of Yugoslavia in 1975.
He carried out a number of duties in international and domestic professional organisation. He died in Zagreb on May 30, 1983, in his 53rd year.
NB: data taken from material supplied by his wife, Mira Tartaglia Kelemen, to the Personnel Archives of the MDC on May 24, 2006.
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Selected bibliography
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