Branko Miljuš 

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.

BRANKO MILJUS ARTIST He is a painter, graphic artist, mosaic artist and stained glass artist

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