Pompeian Company at Table

In the increasingly visceral work of Marij Pregelj, one of Slovenia’s preeminent postwar modernists, the motif of the table or people seated at a table, as in this Pompeian red “banquet” with a dead bird signaling hunger or both concrete and symbolic impoverishment, is a recurring one. It first appears in a few paintings he made immediately after WWII, depicting scenes of life in labor or prisoner…