A study of a series of self-portraits by the Croatian artist Nasta Rojc painted between 1912 and 1925 indicates a rounded work, with a planned and predetermined goal, in which complex meanings can be read within the codes of the lesbian subculture from the beginning of the century. Her usage of such a visual and symbolic language associates her directly with the circle of painters such as Romaine Brooks, Hanna Gluckstein and Jeanne Mammen, who played a central role in the visualisation and cultural articulation of the new type of the sexualized female subject in the period of early modernism. Nasta Rojc initiated her project of building the visual and cultural image of lesbian sexuality earlier than it happened in other, »more advanced« European milieus, and concluded it in the moment when it reached its climax in the metropolis of modernism, which challenges the traditional hypothesis on the peripheral position of the Croatian art at the time.
