The art of Branko Miljuš (Branko Milyush) since 1958
has mostly coincided with the current individual
stylistic determinants of the contemporary art. This
statement is not meant to direct us to any one-sided
interpretation of his work by means of decoding the
linguistical formulations on the general plane of
some theoretically defined pictorial phenomena, no
matter if they represent neo-surrealism, enformel,
the new figuration, pop-art, optical art or the new
geoometrism. Our approach has to be more complex.


Miljuš is a very well-educated artist who has
curiously followed all the changes in the art of his
time. He is, literally, in a permanent motion:
ranging from his travelings through the European and
American metropolises, his following the important
events there, to his visiting many attractive
countries in the Far East and absorbing the exotic
juices in that climate. "Equipped" in this way, he
varies one motif in his creative art. And this motif
is an "originally based artistic thought which
prevails over his whole artistic work or his artistic
procedure". In the case of Branko Miljuš it is
actually the FORGOTTEN CONTENTS OF THE SNAIL.
In all probability, at the beginning of his work, he
only had a premonition and later was aware of the
spiral, but never reached the end of this theme.
He had to find and determine the basic road-signs for
getting by in the labyrinth of his spiritual and
intellectual preoccupations. These landmarks had made
for him a definitive assemblage of symbols which,
during the preceding decades, were plastically
transformed, getting a pictorial lingual
actualization.
This fact means that we are not going to recognize
Miljuš beyond the context of the environment and time
in which he has formed himself, matured and evolved
as an artist until our day. But in order to reach
almost all the phenomenological layers of his work,
we are directed towards some wider, non-pictorial,
experiences. These experiences range from the
structure of his mythical mind, and over his exact
scientific knowledge (regardless of the fact that he
often intentionally deviates from it, giving
precedence to his own imagination) to his intimate
impulses and reactions to such an artistic vision.
During our conversations, with my endeavors to
notice all these factors and gauge their part in it,
he was rather scanty in giving his autobiographical
data and reserved in his own interpretation of his
work. Everything was reduced then to some basic
information on his origin and education, on his
aptitudes only through the essential ideas (music,
the sea, light), on his affinities in the realm of
the fine arts and on the names of some artists . . .
I think now that he was right in his attitude and
that every explication on his part would have
determined my "movements" beforehand. Mystery should
be the spiritual aura of the work, the driving
force of our imagination. Miljuš has early in his
life perceived that imagination and reality, mystique
and science are part of our entire existential
ambience in which they intertwine; and in this spirit
he has been creating his art. Predisposed in this
way, during his second stay in Paris, he came across
a book about mystique - the History of Magic in a
Thousand Pictures, published in 1961, which even
today, with its slightly worn-out covers, stands in
his atelier, to be always at hand. Miljuš was not
attracted by its definite iconography, but by its
various interpretations and concise descriptions of
many mystical contents. The book is compiled on the
basis of materials collected from all over the world.
It presents various pre-historical drawings, idols of
primitive tribes, mystical rituals, spiritualism,
sorcery, chiromancy, occultism; then a great variety
of pictorial symbols, signs of the zodiac signs of
alchemy; sacral monuments, mysterious drawings from
the ancient times (Orient, Mexico, and others);
scenes and symbols from the time of the pre-Columbian
civilizations of the Aztecs and Mayas, the from
Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Tibet; scenes from
the well-known myths (Gilgamesh, Zeus, Apollo, etc.);
scenes from the secret ceremony of initiation;
various masks and totems; scenes with fakirs and
yogis; data about some well-known theosophists;
drawings of various visions of the Cosmos. All this,
including C.G. Jung's interpretation of pisctorial
symbols, the illustrations of Bosch's and Dali's
"ambiences", Picasso's sculptures inspired by
totems;scenes by Max Ernst, Andre Masson, Odilon
Redon . . . At the end of the book there is science
bordering with fantasy: the photographs of the modern
electronics, robots and a presentation of their
delicate functions . .

The essential data about the artist:
His origin and devotion

Branko Miljuš was born in 1936, in Dragotinja,
Bosnia. After his Second-World-War refuge on the
Kozara Mountain, he came to Belgrade with his mother
and sister, in 1943. The Kozara horrors he has
experienced deeply and dramatically and has kept them
in his memory but the impression of that apocalyptic
suffering has not left any marks on his art, and thus
his themes and expressions remained free from taking
any signs of hopelessness, physical and psychological
destruction, even though this has very often happened
among our artists all the time since the end of the
war until our day.
After the sixth class of the high school, Miljuš
passed the examination and was accepted as a student
at the Academy of the Fine Arts, spent one year
attending the admission course, then graduated from
the Painting Department and finished the post-
graduate studies under Professor-painter Nedeljko
Gvozdenovic, and spent one more academic year of
specialization in the graphic arts under Profesor
Boško Karanovic.
It is indicative that among the artists of
Miljuš's generation, those of the same age or
education, some of them separated as the heralds of
"The New Symbols" - an artistic pictorial breath
group belonging in the art of the seventh decade.
Emphasizing a link, in the inspirational or
iconographical sense, between themselves and older
artists such as Stupica and Tabakovic, as well as
with some of those from the December Group, our
critic and painter Miodrag B. Protic has noticed in
the work of Branko Miljuš, Miodrag Nagorni and
Radomir Damnjanovic-Damnjan the problem of the
semantic aesthetics which, together with enformel,
means "a specific aspect of the magical art and the
new realism, but also a transition to the new
figuration and, paradoxically enough, to the new
tendencies". I emphasize this lucidly expressed
determinant in his synthetic review which speaks
about a common origin of some later divergent
movements in our art.
Ever since his childhood, Miljuš has been
friendly with Damnjan. But judging by their
individual works, one cannot speak of their spiritual
closeness. Even when a certain coincidence, in a
while, could have been recognized (only fragmentary)
in their system of signs, it was rather a consequence
of their use of a specific iconical repertory of the
more largely adopted modern pictorial communication
than of their edherence to the same pictorial
circles.
There is, however, an obvious early resemblance
between young Miljuš and Miodrag Nagorni and Radovan
Kragulj - his fellow-students from the same class.
Their first independent exhibition at the Belgrade
Graphic Collective, in 1959, showed their concord in
observing the artistic past, their interest in the
universal questions of man's destiny, his connection
with nature and their bent for a symbolic expression
in the form of fantastic visions. Miljuš wrote in the
Catalogue of the exhibition: ". . .How great is the
satisfaction to unveil in a stone, trunk and flower
some traces of unimagined beauty, traces of dreams
and reality, and to follow them carrying your life
experiences. Regardless of his youthful exaltation,
this statement contains the essential postulates of
his future art, no matter how they would be
pictorially formulated.
It is characteristic that all the three artists,
at their first appearance, explained their
predetermination for the graphic art by the advantage
of the graphic techniques for a free and direct
expression, which is a specific paradox in view of
the technique and technology of work in this medium.
The fact that after their study of painting they
specialized in the graphic arts (what remained
absolutely unusual because even all finished graphic
artists decide for the post-graduate studies of
painting) speaks that, at the very beginning, they
really felt the advantage of the graphic techniques
for expressing their intimate contents. And until our
day they have remained most popular and highly
recognized exactly thanks to their graphics. Their
affinity was certainly urged also by the passionate
work of their young professors, teachers at the
Graphic Department and by a great success of a number
of Belgrade graphic artists with the outstanding
Stojan Celic, Mladen Srbinovic and Boško Karanovic,
the first two of them were also affirmed as painters,
at the same time.
It was very often ascertained that the mentioned
exhibition has had an anthological significance, and
it is indispensable to emphasize this fact even now.
Although the movement of the New Fantasy attained its
real dimensions, the exhibition of works of Kragulj,
Nagorni and Miljuš, as well as the exhibition of
Bogdan Kršic, in the preceding year (1958), we can
consider to be the historical beginning of the
Movement in the graphic circle, which does not
exclude some other artists.

The conditions in our art in the late fifties:
New aspects of fantasy.

During the course of 1958-59, the Belgrade art
witnessed a new type of fantasy in the formation of
which equally participated a group of painters and a
group of young graphic artists. The roots of this
phenomenon could be sought for both in the deeper and
upper layers of the past; that is: in the mentality
of our people whose folk tradition is largely based
on fantasy, then also in the medieval and Renaissance
iconographical scheme; in the reflexions of the very
strong (literary, before all) movement of the pre-war
Belgrade surrealism; and in the philosophical
attitude and poetical symbolism of the first post-war
generation. In the same way as in the thematical
milieu of the medieval and Renaissance arts or
surrealistic symbolism there existed inspirations for
expressing the contemporary attitudes, and so in the
old techniques it was possible to find a material
basis for a new artistic syntax.
Fantasy, in a broader sense of the word, as a
leitmotif gets through all the retrospection of the
art in our environment, and it certainly is a most
frequent poetical finesse. During the passed decades,
many typological schemes which reflected the new
relationship between art and reality and manifested
the ideational and ideological attitudes of artists
towards the society and, generally, life, bore this
mark in their narrative, symbolic and plastic
language.
The great variety of visions in the whole creative
work of our artists who built their poetics through
their more expressive sur-real formulas, can be
traced according to the pictorial patterns and
poetical aims which are more clearly defined by the
following three trends: the narrative one, containing
a more expressive didactics; the symbolical one,
expressing dialectics of the locomotion of natural
phenomens; and the metaphysical one, deafing wiht
non-empirical contents. It is, of course, natural
that these basic aims casually permeate one another.
In the fifties, parallelly with various kinds of
abstraction, a very expansive art was the art of
fantasy whose representatives were gathered together
in the Mediala Group. Let us mention just few of
them: Dado Djuric und Uroš Toškovic had already in
the preceding year attained renown among a number of
their colleagues by their phantasmagorical drawings,
while Leonid Šejka became the theoretical interpreter
of the general intention of various individual
expressions of all members of the Group. In view of
their attractive appearance in the public and of the
fact that they were a counterpoint to the
contemporary "non-object" abstract art, many critics
devoted great attention to their art, interpreting
them sometimes rather arbitrarily and
terminologically inadequately. The leading art
critics had mostly an objective attitude. They
reduced the relaxed talkativeness of some of their
colleagues in describing this narrative art, to the
right measure.
The "proposed" term "lyrical sur-realism" was
marked by Djordje Kadijevic as a terminologicai trap,
and he suggested another descriptive name: the
visionary painting of a fantastic appearance. Lazar
Trifunovic called the Mediala Art a symbol of a
definite frame of mind, and pointed to the dominating
psychological factors in the act of creation; the
connection between the object and idea; and a wish to
organize irrational powers and make them the basis of
a sythesis of the profound consciousness and poetical
hights of life.
As early as in 1961 , reviewing the October Salon
of Art, where he noticed a strong presence of
surrealism and its similar school such as the
metaphysical and magical-realistical ones, Protic
expressed his scepticism that in this "circle one can
restore the original integral variant of the
figurative art and pointed to the need of a creative
transcending of the overtaken schematicaf historical
patterns.
In 1991, Dragoš Kalajic in his voluminous
elaboration of the notion of Weltanschaung (world
view) in which he speaks about many artists, ranging
from Milena Pavlovic Barilli to the youngest ones in
the scope of an illustration of the thesis  'The
Belgrade World View", has inspiredly explained this
century's constant spiritual need which "rests
between philosophy and poetry, and expresses
questions and answers through a mixture of the
conceptual language of philosophy and metaphorical-
pictorial tongue of poetry . . ." The cause for this
Kalajic finds in Belgrade itself as "a secret centre
of intersection or contacts between the borders of
the cultural-civilizational circles or cycles:
beginning from the Hellenic and CeVtic, over the
Roman and Byzantian to the Hungarian, Turkish, German
and Slavic ones . . ."
By this selection of quotations I wanted to point
out the permanent polemics on the occasion of
appraising the art of the fantastic trend in our
circumambience.
Although this turn may look like a digression in
my approach to the art of Branko Miljuš (Miljuš was
neither a member of the Mediala Group nor named as an
adherent to the "Belgrade World View"), I consider it
to be significant in my endeavour to explicate
Miljuš's artistic expression. I think that he would
not be sufficiently close to us without our knowning
the spiritual climate in which he ripend as an
intellectual and accomplished himself as an artist.
And he, himself, mentioned once in a conversation
that he had highly esteemed Tabakovic's cosmical
themes and his "metamorphoses", that he had found
interesting the ideas of the artists gathered
together around the Mediala (before all, of Dado
Djuric) and that he had felt a spiritual closeness to
Šejka. His "split" wiht them comes up in the realm of
interpretation because Miljuš uses a different
pictorial lexicon which directly corresponds to the
patterns of the contemporary pictorial syntax,
partially also derived from the experience of the
abstract trends. This will be rather more thoroughly
explained in the chronological review of his
evolution.
This Miljuš's spiritual closeness to Šejka we feel
as being in the homogeneous tendency toward placing
contents on the general plane, by which the
individual creative imagination calls for the help of
the mythical consciousness.
That Ivan Tabakovic is the spiritus agens of this
approach to art is proved by Šejka in his Treatise on
the Art of Painting. He reproduced in it the
"Tabakovic's,Circle", his drawing containing the
essential presentation of the simultaneity of events
in the human history, of various objects and ideas
and processes in nature and science. "Moving in the
space of nature and history, his consciousness
records the phenomena ranging from the static objects
to the sailboats, and from the sailboats to the
atomic machine" - noted Protic.
In the emanation of Tabakovic's spiritual
constitution and his vision of art Šejka found the
confirmation of his own theory of the integral
painting. This Šejka's theory was the ideational link
between many artistic expressions in the sixth and
seventh decades, .and even today one often stresses
its pragmatical significance. It "comprehends such an
integrity of a pictorial theme where all plafforms of
relationships - either logical, illogical or
indiferent - united in many combinations, mean an
integrity of all the named and unnamed objects and
forms . . . " A picture does not only contain an
illusion of a static object, but also an illusion of
the process of its formation. In this process the
discontinued realms and structures from other levels
of the matter are included in the whole.


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