Stevan Aleksić () (23 December 1876 – 2 November 1923) was a Serbian painter born in Austria-Hungary. His work belongs to the Munich School. He is especially known for his series of self-portraits, dating from 1895 to 1922, which at the same time illustrate the evolution of his style and technique as well as the changes in his physique and character, and is the largest such collection in Serbian painting. Biography Stevan Aleksić was born on 23 December 1876, in Arad, present-day Romania, to a family of artists. His father Dušan and grandfather Nikola were both painters. He finished his elementary school in Arad, where he received his first painting lessons from his father. In 1895 he moved to Munich, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in the class of Nicholas Gysis. When his father died, in 1900, he decided to quit his studies and move to Modoš (today's village of Jaša Tomić, in Vojvodina, northern Serbia). There he built a house with a studio and married the local teacher, Stefanija Lukić, in 1905. The rest of his life he spent living in Modoš and working as a painter. He died on November 2, 1923. Work Stevan Aleksić produced around 230 canvas paintings, decorated more than 20 churches with 100 icons and a number of wall frescoes, and made 60 sketches and drawings. Since his early career, Aleksić dealt in decorating churches; he was especially skilled at making monumental compositions with religious or historical context and decorated a number of sacral objects around Vojvodina. At the same time, in the first decade of the 20th century, he worked as a portraitist. One of Aleksić's most notable works is the "Merry People of Banat". He exhibited it at the 4th Yugoslav Art Exhibition in Belgrade in 1912, but received a lot of negative criticism, especially by the communist politician turned art critic Moša Pijade, who wrote that "Some fellow from Modoš, named Aleksić, produced an incredibly bad painting of the people of Banat". After this fiasco, Aleksić never again exhibited in Belgrade, and remained a marginal figure on the Belgrade art scene over the next half-century. Even after the failure of the "Merry People of Banat" Aleksić continued to explore and vary the motive. In 1922, a year before he died, he made his last version of the painting putting himself on the canvas and thus becoming one