Conveyor of a Byzantine Secret Message

Mihailović's paintings depicting the Nemanjić ruling family through different periods shine with a symphony of colours. He calls them all simply "Great Historical Tales".

Text by Jelica Roćenović

Unhappy that the 'soul' of art was being dissipated, and with a sense of rebelliousness and the loose tongue that he is known for, he would say: "All cities are alike: They are dormitories with big American advertisements! What's new in Paris? Two black horses tied outside a gallery. Horses are smarter than such gallery owners! This is why I would rather have an exhibition in Kragujevac, or, perhaps, in some village near Kragujevac." Unpredictable in his reactions, our famous painter is deemed an eccentric. Even to his friends at the Serbian Arts and Sciences Academy (SANU) – of which he is a member – Bata is not overly kind. Actually, Bata Mihailović paints in a way that serves to confirm the misunderstanding between the world and a great artist.

Ivo Andrić, too, was at a loss to explain what, exactly, makes such a creator wrest 'life and man's dream bit by bit' from nothingness, but to me it sounds plausible that by striving to create some 'higher order', each true artist disturbs the 'lower visible one'.

Bata Mihailović, I would say, is one of the uncommonly rare creators of this 'higher order' in Serbian culture. In the 50 years of his creative work, he has claimed for his people, bit by bit, their historical life and dream so as to point out the great drama being prepared in our days, under an apparently stoic mask of official reality.

Mihailović's beautiful paintings depicting the Nemanjić ruling family through different periods shine with a symphony of colours. He calls them all simply "Great Historical Tales". Bata Mihailović, it seems, had the feeling he could withstand the tragic feeling of contemporaneousness. Deep in its soul, the Serbian world of the Nemanjićs, in its epic and historical narrative, safeguarded the testament of the triumph of the spiritual over the material, of good over evil. This is why Bata believes that all the wisdom of this world can be reduced to the statement "Love thy neighbor as thyself", by which the ancient world lived. Today, Bata Mihailović's historically themed paintings are perhaps more disturbing than at the time of their creation.

Although he has lived and worked in Paris for decades, Bata finds it unworthily humiliating to adopt the stance, "Do let us – if possible – into your group... into your tomorrow, into your yesterday." In Belgrade, he has developed a perky attitude that he will never allow himself to be the little man protecting his spirit! This is why Bata finds Paris great, as it 'provides opportunities to those who come to it to exercise their right to silence."

In his artistic reminiscences of the great Serbian rulers, Mihailović most frequently chooses King Milutin. Milutin was a worthy son to Stefan Uroš I Nemanjić, who was Orthodox and built the Sopoćani Monastery, and Helen d' Anjou, who was Catholic and built the Gradac Monastery. Being such a distinguished figure, in his nation-building policies he could blend the high awareness of the need for unity in Europe, and about Serbdom, towards attaining the position of "East in the West and West in the East", as St. Sava perceived and preordained Serbia's role in Christian Europe. One should therefore not be surprised at Mihailović's fascination with this Serbian king who built more than forty churches and monasteries on Orthodox and Catholic ground.

Mihailović's King Milutin is sometimes sad, as he is shown on a 1988 painting with a bright face; sometimes immersed in thought, as in a painting he finished in 2000 and where his eyes are focused on the invisible Christ Pantocrator in a monastery church dome!

Bata Mihailović has created a world of art composed of pure poetry, a world which – just like the medieval Serbian epic (which also impressed Goethe), never ceases to move us and invite dreams of some higher, divine justice that will be instrumental in allowing Serbs to some day step out of the shade onto a sunny path. There is a most beautiful Mihailović painting that he named: "Forefather". Seeing a thin face emerging from bluish darkness, writer Dobrica Ćosić exclaimed, "This is my father!"

I, however, am more inclined to think that this old man with one dark eye and another blue one is also King Milutin of the Gračanica Monastery. For Bata Mihailović, only King Milutin can personify St. George killing the dragon, just as Milutin is indeed the historical archetype of our ideal ancestor.

Also worthy as an ancestor is Simonida – the young Byzantine princess – pale and formal, as she came to Milutin from Constantinople. A young girl in love with old King Milutin, who knelt before her in Skoplje; mysterious as love – all in the colours of purple and blood – this is how Bata Mihailović painted Simonida's portrait. The beauty of the 'Nemanjić paintings is a hidden beauty– an inner beauty, like all Christian Holy Sacraments into which the European kings of old were initiated. Even if he could not fully appreciate a palimpsest inscribed with a mediaeval manuscript, Bata Mihailović has approached it more than anyone else in the history of Serbian painting, sensing a deeper meaning in the shattered Byzantine mosaic.

Bata Mihailović's "Great Historical Tales" are therefore paintings of unchanging value, a call for a Christian renaissance of all Europeans, not only of his own nation.

In addition to historical figures of medieval Serbia, Mihailović has also painted 'historical portraits' of his friends. Sketching mere contours of the figure, he lays stress on character. Was he sharing the fears of Dejan Medaković when he painted his portrait in 1976 as expressed in the latter's verses: "If I assemble all the warriors of my tribe/ will I be able to bear/ the unuttered rebukes/ that we have shamelessly betrayed the flags/ they believed in/ to the end?" Bata's 'Medaković painting is a kind of a blue palette: ranging from a barely bluish colour to cobalt-blue and a dark face from which shine two blue eyes like two light-blue crystals.

He portrayed Matija Bećković as an absorbed, melancholic poet, and Dragoslav Mihailović as a man with a tragic fate.

Bata painted the painter Ljubinka Jovanović in the romantic light of their Paris studio: with a blue hat, in a laced white blouse, with thick eyelashes, as she was solemnly setting something (bread maybe!?) on the table. Božica Ćosić, too, shines with a sublime brilliance, like a nun. A number of major Serbian painters have depicted the Gračanica Monastery, but none have seen it like Bata Mihailović; a temple amid the brilliance of ripe wheat surrounding the monastery ("Golden Kosovo", 1978).

He transposed this unique beauty to canvas with no other human in sight except for a priest whose black headgear echoes in the heat of the summer day. In his paintings of Belgrade, too, Bata Mihailović has proved he is Byzantine through and through! That man's love, faith and hope are greater than man himself.

The "Great Historical Tales" of Bata Mihailović remind me of El Greco's "Boy Blowing on an Ember". He has respect for El Greco and, like El Greco from Kandia, he also developed his art as a message, and also like El Greco, he is under the influence of Byzantine tradition. But, as opposed to El Greco, I dare claim, Mihailović's "Great Historical Tales" carry a deeper conviction that "Love precedes all".

All paintings by Bata Mihailović are Memory.

A Language of the disappeared European Middle Ages Secret.

Also, Bata, paints in the same way that a Serbian peasant works the land. Naturally.

He does not lie and is not tricked by propaganda.

As a great artist, he knows that each new act begins with an old dream.

Hence Bata Mihailović's obsession with history, as the 'Nemanjić Stock' was painted to remind of the purpure and the time when glorifying Christ entailed living and breathing in Serbia and Europe.

This is why Bata Mihailović is a painter of the (Old) Continent.

Sometime after the bombing of Belgrade in 1999, this great contemporary painter and thinker uttered a thought that deserves to be remembered and put into practice: "Radiation is high in the country and much love is needed to cancel it."