Ilija Bosilj Bašičević

1895-1972 · Šid, Serbia

A Serbian farmer who took up painting at sixty-two and filled his canvases with two-headed beings, Old Testament visions and the occasional astronaut.

The life

Bašičević was born in 1895 in Šid, then part of Austria-Hungary, had about four years of schooling, and spent his life farming. He began painting in 1957, at sixty-two, encouraged by Yugoslavia’s naive art movement and by his son Dimitrije, an art critic, who at first disapproved of what his father produced. Exhibiting under the name Bosilj, he showed in Belgrade, Zagreb, Amsterdam and Paris, and in 1970 founded his own museum, the Ilijanum in Šid, with a donation of his works. He died there in 1972.

The work

Oil on canvas and gouache on cardboard, flat as a Byzantine icon and coloured like village embroidery, painted not from observation but from his own visions and dreams. Old Testament subjects dominate, joined by birds, apocalyptic scenes, astronauts and his signature two-headed figures, emblems of human duplicity. His work is held by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, the Zander Collection and his own Museum Ilijanum.

Why we love them

The village thought him odd and the critics called him naive, and he answered the lot with a museum of his own. Case closed.

Go deeper

• Ilija Bosilj Bašičević at the Outsider Art Fair
• Ilija Bosilj Bašičević on Wikipedia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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