The academy-trained painter Vladimir Filakovac studied painting at the Academy in Budapest from 1911 to 1916. From 1916 to 1918, he was an army painter, while from 1920 to 1923 he stayed in Vienna. Filakovac later lived in Osijek and then in Belgrade, where he worked as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts from 1940 to 1941. He came to Zagreb in 1941, where he was a lecturer at the Academy from 1948 until retirement in 1962.

In the very beginning of his work, Filakovac created paintings in the tradition of the Munich Circle, using a dark color array for portraits, still life and landscape paintings. Afterwards, he introduced more lighter tones to his colors, giving birth to paintings with post-impressionist characteristics. After Filakovac's move to Belgrade in 1930, certain changes to his visual arts poetics brought about an intense colorist dimension in his works affirming Filakovac as a colorist. In Croatian visual arts circles he is held in high regard as an exceptional animal painter.