Vangjush Mio (1891-1957) is regarded as the finest Albanian landscape painter of the twentieth century. He was born in Korça and moved with his brother to Bucharest, Romania, in 1908, where, in 1915, he studied at the national school of fine arts. He finished his training there in 1919. In the same year, he opened his first personal exhibition, in Bucharest and the following year in Korçan, probably the first exhibition of figurative art ever held in Albania. From 1920 to 1924, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and travelled widely in Italy in the 1920s. Mio was a great admirer of 19th and early 20th century Italian realist art and of impressionism. Back in Korça, the most refined and cultured town in Albania at the time, he founded a fine arts society and exhibited his works on numerous occasions, becoming one of the best-known Albanian painters of the period. From 1934, he also taught art at the French-language secondary school there. Over 400 of his paintings are preserved, both in museums and galleries in Tirana and Korça, in particular his home in Korça which now houses the Vangjush Mio Museum. He is remembered in particular for his landscape paintings: poplars glowing in the autumn sunlight beside the waters of Lake Ohrid and floodlit plains of Korça covered in snow.
Robert Eslie
Leave a Reply