The academy-trained painter Ljubo Babić attended the College of Art in Zagreb under professor Menci Klement Crnčić from 1908 to 1910. From 1910 to 1913, he attended the Academy in Munich under professors Angelo Jank and Franz von Stuck, where he graduated. Simultaneously, Babić attended art history classes at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and acquired knowledge of staging techniques at the Künstlertheater.

In 1913 and 1914, he continues his studies in Paris, returning to Zagreb in 1915. In his studio, Babić opened the Modern Painter’s School, while also becoming a professor at the College of Art in Zagreb in 1916 where he worked until retirement in 1961. In 1919, he prepared the first permanent exhibition of the Modern Gallery. Babić was one of the founders of the Group of Three (along with Becić and Miše). From 1928, he was a corresponding member of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences and became full member in 1950.

After Munich and Paris, Babić’s dramatic feel for the world and his new experience of painting could not be expressed anymore by using a decorative secessionist poetics. Light enters his artistic expression and is reflected in his through a completely personal form of expressionism.