Gjura Stojana (also known as George Curtin Stanson, George Stojana, and George Stanley) (1885-1974) was an American modernist painter and sculptor primarily identified with the Los Angeles-based modernist groups of the early 20th century.
Early life and move to the United States
Gjura Stojana was born in 1885. Sources differ about his early life. According to the Laguna Art Museum, he was of Romani heritage, The Municipal Employee called him Serbian, and Lewis Mumford described his background as a mix of Latin and Slav. Historian Edan Hughes gives his birthplace as France, while Mumford says he was born in Africa. He moved to the United States in 1901 or 1903 and changed his name to George Curtin Stanson. In 1908-09 he attended the San Francisco Art Institute and took a job writing about art for the San Francisco Chronicle. When he was young, he traveled around Europe and Asia, which would greatly influence his work.
Early career in Los Angeles and Hawaii
In 1917, he moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. He formed a relationship with Elizabeth Rudolph, a teacher, with whom he lived at 3501 Dahlia Avenue in Los Angeles and had a child. Stojana primarily produced abstract art, a style that does not try to faithfully depict reality. Abstraction was not yet popular in Los Angeles at the time, and according to friend and peer Conrad Buff, his work was not commercially successful at first so his family lived primarily on his wife's wages. Buff, who first knew Stojana as George Stanley and described him as "quite a character", praised his early work and regarded him as "the first abstractionist in Los Angeles". He helped Stojana secure an exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum (which later split into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or LACMA, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County), but when the show had to be pushed back by two weeks, Stojana said he would refuse to participate. Buff pled with Stojana to accept the delay for fear his "temperamental" reaction would cause the museum to think all modern painters were difficult. Stojana agreed, and then left to spend six months in Hawaii without his family.
In Hawaii, he produced many works, including "Abundance", a large-scale painting which Arthur Millier described as "an expression of earthly richness painted in strong colors and massive Baroque design ... [representing] a large body of work done by Stojana in the islands".
Return to Los Angeles
Stojana returned to Los Angeles in 1920, set up a home studio at 5653 La Miranda Avenue, and became involved with the local modernist art communities. According to Laguna Art Museum curator Susan M. Anderson, Stojana was "omnipresent" among Los Angeles modernists, describing him as a "colorful and bohemian" and "a bridge" between the various regional modernist groups. He was affiliated with the Modern Art Workers, which was founded in 1925 to exhibit work of artists that did not fit in with the most popular art trends at the time. The group also included Barbara Morgan, Buff, Mabel Alvarez, Morgan Russell, Edouard Vysekal, Henrietta Shore, Luvena Vysekal, and R. M. Schindler. The organization held exhibitions at several Los Angeles locations, and Stojana served as president at some point in the 1920s. He was also close with photographers Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, Tina Modotti, and Johan Hagemeyer. He was known on and off as George Stanson during this time, but changed his name back to Gjura Stojana, his birth name, in 1929.
He was part of a movement which combined architecture and arts. Eleanor Lemaire, who was in charge of renovating the Bullocks Wilshire department store in downtown Los Angeles, hired him to paint a mural in the Sportswear Shop. He created "Spirit of Sports" there in 1928, an Art Deco and Bauhaus-influenced fresco which incorporated plastic reliefs and wood strips. Margaret Leslie Davis, author of a book about the store, described it as "an expression of action, speed and movement", praising it for its beauty. While working on the piece, Stojana slept in the store.