About the Artist

Though war formed him, it re-formed him into a personality who chiseled the brutal into refinement, like he chiseled a rough hewn tip onto his thick wooden graphite pencil to create his drawings. 

He relished his art and was charged every day to do it as if intoxicated by his ability to wake up and begin drawing, preparing paper with whatever showed up in front of him, coffee grounds, dirt, hairs.  Meticulous, an unusual descriptor for his quick eye and hand, he attacked the paper with new eyes often revising images until the paper eroded under his pen or pencil. He dealt with the underbelly, grim imagery, ‘sooty’, yet he is never depressed. Toskovic in the ultimate sense celebrates life, the authentic and the bloody; the Montenegrin ‘elemental character’.

To know his drawings means to observe bitterness, illusion, sorrow, in which he hides mercy and compassion. He’s an innovator with ingenuity, vision, wit, and tenderness. Behind his horror lies gnosis, knowledge of spiritual matters. When fixed on a single face, a single image, his drawing defies the conventional.

Within his images there is a dialogue, a collision of cultures, ancient and modern, Slavic and Western European. To give voice to the uncanny, to the nightmares of war, to the mystical, religious, spiritual swinging of the censor he intones  ‘Gospodi Pomiluj…’ ‘Have mercy, Lord’ and creates phantasmagorical images that overlap meanings in every inked line. Toskovic makes demands on the viewer as a participant. 

Dado Djuric, Montenegrin painter, engraver, draftsman, and sculptor whose career in France spanned decades and was a close friend of Tošković since their youth, declared that ‘Tošković was the finest draftsman’ of all the Yugoslav artists.

Ljuba Popovic, also a friend, said that Tošković’s images were an ‘amalgam of beauty of his workmanship and the monstrosity of the world.’ Like what has been said of Rothko, he paints ‘violence, what is tragic and timeless’.

As our own Bill Busta says, ‘Tošković was not tentative! He’s very sure of what he’s doing and there’s not an extra stroke, nothing extraneous, which puts Tosho in the realm of what the higher levels of art can be.’

Uroš Tošković was born September 19,1932 in Pelev Brijeg, a village in Montenegro, then Yugoslavia.

His drawing talent was recognized early and supported by his father, his mother having passed away when he was two years old. He went to a high school of Art in Herceg Novi. Then with his close friend, Dado Djuric, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in the class of noted Professor Marko Čelebonović from which he graduated in 1956, after contentious behaviour got him expelled and then reinstated. 

He is one of the founders of a group which grew into Mediala, meaning delicious and monstrous, a struggle of opposites toward a Renaissance of new personal artistic expression, that stood for individualism, modernism, experimentation, symbolism. Late in 1956, he went to Paris on a scholarship from the French government, where he studied at the 'École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts' under Maurice Brianchon. He lived in Paris for 20 years before returning to Belgrade and Montenegro in 1976-77. 

The time of his youth coincided with WWII. As a boy he played in the mountains amidst the detritus and horror of WWII. He repeatedly mentioned that his respected eldest brothers were killed fighting as Partisans for Tito there. He was close to another brother, Branko. And, he has a half-brother, Ljuba Tošković, who is still living in Podgorica with his wife, children and many grandchildren. 

Tošković married an Italian woman in Paris. His first child, Ana, born in 1962, died in a motorcycle accident in 1976. He adored Ana. When she was four and visiting the opening of his exhibit at the Maison des Beaux Arts with her nanny, he urged friends to greet her with warmth and praise. Her death may have one reason for his departure from Paris at that time.

He married for a second time in Belgrade in the 1980’s and had two more children, Marija and Petar. 

He divorced and had been living in Bar and Podgorica since 1996.

In 1987 he received the 13th July Award, the highest civil award issued by the Government of Montenegro. He was granted an apartment by the government in Podgorica where passed away alone March 3, 2019.

His mission was to be free to create.  

About the Collection

Ljuba Popovic, French painter of Serbian origins, also a close friend, realized that Tošković left his works in portfolios in empty rooms all over the world. He noted that having ‘the works of Tošković gathered together would surpass...prominent individuals of the present history, when we are dealing with those creators who overstepped the boundaries of normalcy.’

From: “Rebel with Sooty Face and Pure Soul”, the first monograph Tošković, Radionica Duse, Workshop of the Soul, Beograd, 2015.

The second large monograph, Tochkowitch, Uros Tošković, Bojan Krljic’s Collection, Grafica Kolective, Beograd, 2024, is a massive and gloriously comprehensive look at Toskovic’s work and life and adds to this ingathering of Tosho’s works.

The Toskovic/Russack Collection fills gaps and covers primarily the mid-1960’s from Paris and New York and even sketches from trips to Athens, Mykonos, the Atlantic Ocean, Belgrade and Dubrovnik. This collection is one more step towards compiling the works of Tošković to enhance our appreciation of the depth and quality of his drawing and painting.

These drawings, watercolours and sketch books from 1966 and 1967 are the corpus of the Toskovic/Russack Collection with the addition of other works acquired from him in the late 60’s and early 70’s.  The collection is comprised of 349 works on paper, stored in archival materials, numbered and described in the 'Toskovic/Russack Collection Inventory'. In addition, there are 11 sketch books, exhibit posters, poems, personal photos, letters and stories. And, translations into English of all the articles from the first Serbian monograph Toskovic published in 2015, given by the editor, Mosa Todorvic during a visit to Montenegro and Serbia in September, 2019. 

By the end of 2024 there will be translations of the articles from the recently published 445 page monograph Tochkowitch by Bojan Krljic. 

These articles by art historians, critics, and famous artist colleagues will enlighten the English reader about the breadth and depth of the artist Uroš Tošković. 

Famous artists were among his early collectors, as were the Musee d’Art Brut in Paris (housed in the museum of the city of Lausanne since 1976), the National Museum of Montenegro, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. And gallerists in Paris and the Balkans.

The Toskovic/Russack Collection does not fit into one category. The themes are universal and timeless: war, displacement, poverty, expressed through portraits, soldiers, animals, staffs/poles/crosses, religion/spirit, veiled faces, cartoon line drawings, phantasmagorical figures and scenes with grit and imagination and sensitivity.  This art is executed in watercolour, pastel, ink, graphite, crayon, pencil, red ink pen, in cheap notebooks or on heavy watercolour paper ‘prepared’ with his concoctions of coffee, hair, dirt etc.  His art hides contrasting aspects of his forceful spirit and personality.  

About the Collector

Uroš Tošković and Linda Russack met in the atelier of artist friends late in 1965. In the summer of 1966 they traveled to by train and ferry to Dubrovnik, Belgrade, Athens, Mykonos and Paros. Early in 1967 they took a freighter from Rotterdam to New York.  When Toskovic returned to Paris later that year, he took watercolours that he wanted to sell (see photos) and left large, medium and small ‘carnets’ (portfolios) and many sketch books with her. They visited in Paris in December, 1967, met in New York during his 1969 visit, and in Paris briefly again in early 70’s.  

As Ljuba Popovic mentioned, Tošković left work everywhere. That was one aspect of his disregard for convention or concession to the ‘art market’. In Paris he constantly looked for space in a ‘cave’ or apartment to leave his work. His output was extraordinary because he worked passionately and robustly every day inside or outside!  He carried a sketchbook on buses, walks in the neighborhood, in cafes or in others’ tiny apartments!