Together with his brother France Kralj and the painter Veno Pilon, Tone Kralj is among the most notable protagonists of Slovenian art between the two world wars. Immediately after World War I, his art was influenced by expressionism, with which he had become acquainted in Vienna and while studying in Prague. Some of these works are displayed in Room 1.
Peasant Wedding was painted slightly after this period, and although it still retains some expressionist elements, such as caricatured faces, it is associated primarily with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) trend in painting. In Slovenia, this trend is often characterized by a shift toward plastically shaped and distinctly objectified figures and objects. Kralj conceived the monumental figures in the painting as basic geometric shapes, which makes them appear stiff and clumsy, almost sculptural.
Unlike the stiffness of the figures, the composition of the painting is extremely dynamic. It leads the gaze circularly from the masked figures entering the room down toward the couple dancing in the lower left part of the painting, then to the group seated at the table on the right (including the barely recognizable bride and groom) and back up to the children clustered on and around the tiled stove in the corner. Kralj painted a typical custom from his home of Zagorica – the mačkare masks worn at Shrovetide. This Carnival custom involves people wearing painted larfa masks and tall, pointed kastur hats “crashing” a wedding, dancing, and inviting wedding guests to dance.
The peasant wedding motif is very popular in Slovenian art, appearing already in works by Ferdo Vesel, Ivan Grohar, and Maksim Gaspari. Tone Kralj painted his work at the turn of the 1920s to 1930s, a time when the search for national identity through art was again gaining momentum. He used this same motif on several occasions, for the first time in another oil painting in 1926 – the work is now included in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade – and then again in the extensive series of prints Soil (1932–1934).
