The Dissonant Harmony of Incomplete Finality

in Srdan Kovačević’s Work

 “A created work of art is not a renewed life. It is more than that — the artist’s own life, time in its pure state. At the moment of living a happening is unclear and vague. It is in full blossom only in the spirit of shaping”.1 

Contemplating the work of Montenegrin sculptor Srdan Kovačević, perhaps it is best to start from the artist’s own statement, in which he says: “(…) In my work stone prevails. I was born on stone; I tripped on it, fell in love with it as a child and by working in it came to wood and other materials. The sculptor strips pieces away from a block of stone or a piece of wood and rejects them, until he finds what he looks for inside…”2 

Unlike other fine arts, where the process of adding is inherent to their realization, the specific quality of sculpture (in the classical sense) lies in stripping away, subtracting, rejecting, reducing. In the spirit of Neo-Platonism, Michelangelo held the opinion that “every block of stone a sculptor works on has a statue inside it, and the sculptor only hews away the walls that imprison it”.3 

If we draw a parallel between the present moment, the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, and the same decade a century ago, we can notice that, artistically speaking, the latter period was much more “turbulent”. The 21st century has brought nothing radically new in the discourse of art; on the contrary, the contemporary art scene appears quite relaxing and conciliatory, “but art — no matter how we wished to define and describe it — always was and still is there to reflect situations ensuing from society. Therefore, it is inevitable that contemporary art, too, will express and reflect the complex and contrasting sociological, political, economic, ethical and ideational situation of the society it lives in …” (Gillo Dorfles)4

Contemporary art, perhaps more than ever, not only expresses but actually lives the “complex situation of society”; thus, on this “common ground of intuitive understanding” and mutual recognition, all the givens and discourses seem natural.

Indeed, not even Rosalind Krauss (credited with the term “sculpture in the expanded field”), could anticipate to what extent and in what directions the field of sculpture would expand, and to what extent would its limits actually expand in all possible directions, from formal, technical and technological, through the media, to the signifier-signified and phenomenological determinants. Viewed in this cultural context, 21st century sculpture could be/is a “mobile sculpture” with the materialized vocalizing energy embodied in Lady Gaga’s physical expression. If Andy Warhol were alive, Lady Gaga would probably be one of his iconic pop-art muses.

So, if today’s living art knows no borders, especially in the media, if everything is allowed and possible, bipolar and heteropolar, if the story commenced in the early 20th century, and Duchamp and his contemporaries formalized the era of radical turns and treatment of a work of art, then the following statement appears unavoidable, that “the condensation of sense is a circular recursive activity; it occurs through gradual improvements — it almost never succeeds in the first attempt, and it requires reshaping. The new-innovation, is created in this way or no way, and certainly not as a new beginning. We can no doubt claim that whatever starts as a gun shot has already happened before — it is nothing new under the sun. The novelty is already behind us. The novelty as something authentic and original seems used up. What is of interest to us is born through accumulation…”(Holger van den Boom)

In his Medrano series, as early as 1915 Archipenko created a kind of synthesis between sculpture and painting which was, of course, preceded by suprematist and cubist art experiments. What draws our attention today and in a way expresses support for the world of Baudrillard’s simulations/simulacra is the shocking quality of diverse and scandalous reality shows and the fact that in such a real and reified world, classical sculpture, and classical art mediums in general, still exist appearing as respectable as before. True values still survive. In the times of pluralizing intermedia nomadism, it seems purposeful to speak about the lasting values of classical art expression. This, naturally, does not annul the present and entirely synchronic story of the contemporary, unconventional media and the search of contemporary art in totalitarianism and escapism of individual explorations and pursuits.

A look at the work of Srdan Kovačević from this perspective arouses a pleasant melancholy, almost nostalgia for “times past”, when life was “slower”, less loaded with collective stress of ephemeral consumer paradigms.         

Srdan Kovačević’s work belongs to the civilizational cultural path existing on the “opposing” developmental poles; if we reduce the story to the Montenegrin context, we can conclude that what we call Montenegrin art scene develops in the geographically reduced but creatively also diversified field of art. So, on this art scene, too, motions and shifts are only natural — from the traditional sculptural expression and medium to so-called non-material and expanded mediums. On it, Montenegrin modern art was gradually formed, with Montenegro becoming “a land of painters”, which quite clearly determined the position of sculptors and sculpture. Evolving further on, from modern to post-modern expression, generations of Montenegrin artists were formed, many of whom were former students of local art schools (School of Art, Herceg Novi; Pedagogical Academy, Nikšić), and are now university teachers (Faculty of Fine Arts — Cetinje, Faculty of Visual Arts — Podgorica). 

In 1955 Srdan Kovačević finished the secondary School of Art, Herceg Novi, and then in 1960 graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Belgrade. After graduation, he returned to Herceg Novi and worked from 1961 to 1968 as a teacher and headmaster of the renowned School of Art, which enhanced his responsibility and mission as an artist and educator.

Coexistence of traditional and modern expression is a possible and implied cause-and-effect phenomenon. We shall set aside the story of contemporary sculpture, which in Montenegro experienced formal “institutional inauguration” in the foundation of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Cetinje, with its Department of Sculpture, as well as significant steps forward in that direction thanks to the Cetinje Biennial in the 1990s. Also, it is disputable whether everything that is brought under the umbrella of contemporary sculpture today is immanent in the art practices ascribed to it.

The creative field of action of Srdan Kovačević is found within the traditional sculptural materials — stone, wood, metal. The artist clearly decided to give precedence to stone.

“— through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent!...” (William Carlos Williams).5

As a man from this region, carrying the Mediterranean in his genetic code and with it the entire complexity of cultural and civilizational heritage of spiritual crossroads of the old continent and part of the world, a man who grew up and matured on the slopes and shores of Lubarda’s “stone sea”, Kovačević is an artist who transposed the raw crudeness, hardness and coldness of stone into a pure lyrical experience in the softness and warmth of a sincere creative act.

Following the chronology of Kovačević’s creative oeuvre, we can notice that from the very beginning he was open to experimentation and creative exploration of diverse materials — stone, wood, metal, plaster. However, regardless of the material he expressed himself in, the pervasive essence of Kovačević’s sculptures lies in the sophisticated, haptic lyricism and dissonant, tender melodiousness. Dignified, silent imprisonment in timelessness.

The thematic “mainstream” of Kovačević’s creative oeuvre is human, most commonly female figure. Associative and animal forms, particularly birds, are also thematically present in his work, which he permanently and continually explores in diverse sculptural materials. Quite often we can compare the variations of the same theme in different materials/techniques — in stone and wood, for example: “Girl With a Mandolin” or “Mother and Child” in the same material but with different approaches, or the repetition of the motif in the same or different materials, e.g. “Undressing I” and “Undressing III” in wood and “Undressing II” in bronze. In these comparisons, if we abstract the content for a moment, whether it is narrative, symbolic or emblematic, particularly prominent are the textures of the materials with their primary qualities. When working in wood, the artist mostly uses olive and walnut, whereas in stone he opts for the white one from the area of Spuž or the widely known red stone from Kamenari. Of course, the monumentality of stone and bronze and the warmth of wood are inherent charms of the materials the artist explores in his artistic creation.

The specific quality of Kovačević’s sculptures is defined by deliberate “incompleteness”, or “understatement” of works. Especially in wood and stone these opposing structures/textures appear at once suggestive and unobtrusive. Treated almost in the relief-like manner, these works are characterized by absence of monumentality, and dignified elegance of a captured, materialized idea. Kovačević seems to teach us how to avoid the frontal, static impression, i.e. the central aspect of the work. In fact, we are witnesses to a series of successive aspects, each appearing to be “the right one” at the moment of viewing. Also, certain impersonality and control of emotions point to a dose of restraint and a kind of familiarity with ancient civilizations, which draws parallels with the works of modern sculptors, Modigliani and Matisse. By the way, Modigliani frequently placed figures like caryatids in paintings and sculptures alike, while Matisse in his playful, “wild” compositions often painted figures with music instruments as attributes. There are other things, too, that seem indicative in the works of these masters that I recognize while interpreting the work of Srdan Kovačević, and that I will note down not for comparison’s sake but rather as a value recognition of common art paradigms. The intrinsic connection between music and fine arts strongly expressed in the work and textual sentences of Matisse and silent, pervasive melancholy and spiritual verticality of Modigliani’s works, with the inviolable treatment of a rounded, stylized line defining the form — they are the links I recognize as common values articulated individually in the works of these artists.

The poetic works of Srdan Kovačević representing female figures with a mandolin or a child in their arms are characterized by subtle lyric linearism and suggested sense of volume. It is these melancholic deformities of form that are full of soft musicality highlighted by subtle linearism. Controlled to the limits so as not to give itself up to arabesque playfulness, in the function of stylizing and fixing the form, the line is an essential constitutive element of the artist’s act of execution. Reminiscences of “African primordiality” and the art of primitive peoples are obvious in the treatment of form, in the dignified, emblematic static quality, in the folklore narration and impersonal treatment of characters. Elongated, vertical forms of intimist character, frequently dominate the space with the classical caryatid posture; in fact, they unobtrusively create it and define it regardless of the size of the works themselves. This is a feature of the majority of Kovačević’s works in wood, where, just like in stone, the play of carved and uncarved surfaces and concave-convex arrangements is made rhythmical by fine contrast transitions. More often in profile than en face, with reduced extremities, with a implied mood and a suggestive attitude, the female figures, rarely compositions with more than one actor, create sublime sacral peace in space, giving the image of the woman-mother, bride, chanter, or nun an iconic meaning.

“Intimate cooperation between the artist and the material, as well as passion connecting the joy of a master with the enthusiasm of a visionary, lead them to the essence, to the form of an idea… Sculpture should harmonize its own spirit with the spirit of the material.” (Constantin Brancusi).6 Srdan Kovačević indisputably achieved this harmony in his work.

In my attempt to take a systematic view of Kovačević’s sculptures, whether it is through groups of portraits — heads, reliefs, acts, busts or birds, or through materials he worked in, any kind of grouping appears irrelevant, for, considering the totality of the artist’s expression, it seems that it is only a question of silent shifts caused by changes of the material rather than essential, semantic divergences within the discourse of art. So, despite the plastic syntax of Kovačević’s work, it essentially incorporates a profound human message of love. In the nurtured materialization of the artistic idea, the artist “thinks through the form”, in the way that he emphasizes the primary values of the material and, depending on them, makes digressions and certain departures from the initial idea; and yet, he always remains consistent to what touches the object from inside and guards its organic and meaningful core.

Life born in/from Kovačević’s sculptures is somehow premature; in fact, it is unable to completely come out of the hard womb of the matter. At the same time, it is mysterious and enclosed, immortalized in the communicative timelessness. It is a delicate artistic saga of the creation of something out of nothing in space, which is, so to speak, a “new kind of material”.

“First I had to create an illusion of limitless in the limited space. This is why I did not show entire figures. I give a fragment and make the viewer, through a clear rhythm, to experience the work not as a fragment but at once and in its entirety...”7

Also, the impressionists “despised the outer appearance of completeness” of a work of art. Great French sculptor, Auguste Rodin, deliberately left a part of stone unhewn in his works, thus stressing the very act of appearance, the “delivery” of the work under the chisel of the sculptor. Still, this “lack of completeness” in a work of art was practised by artists and discussed by critics much earlier, e.g. in the works of great Venetian painter Tintoretto. Since the 16th century to the present day, such treatment of works by artists has frequently met with lack of understanding by the general and professional community. In order to be “perfect”, a work of art had to be hewn and polished to the slightest detail. However, another great master paid little attention to these principles and the public opinion — Dutch Rembrandt van Rijn. Rembrandt maintained that a painting was completed once “the artist (had) fulfilled his intention”. So it is up to the artist to assess when his work is completed (in executive terms), and when it has attained its artistic goal. It is well-known what and how Duchamp “decided” and what hs attitude was towards his work in the first decades of the 20th century. I guess it is only natural for what characterizes the personal art of great masters to gradually become a rule and practice embraced by many artists coming after them. Anyway, a price certainly had to be paid for innovative and avant-garde moves, most often by lack of understanding and the ensuing consequences.

Srdan Kovačević did not attach too great importance to art trends. In his work, he was led by an intuitive, refined sense of composition and its relations, the material, drawing and the like. When sculpting in wood, he was led by the material imposing the final form. “Incompleteness” characterizing his work, too, was prompted by the material in which the work was born. A kind of verticality and linearism, a hint of form, more in a deep relief than in a three-dimensional relation, archetypically resemble primitive sculpture, characterized by planes and two-dimensionality. Intellectualistic sophistication at times gives way to childish decorativeness of a drawing, but this is only the superficial “reading” of the work. In fact, the artist shows extraordinary “intuitive organization”, manifested in a rather “frugal” language discourse. However, with the help of a winding, stylized line, the artist manages to create the necessary atmosphere of intimist character, without slipping into pure decoration and description. In the relations between the masses, typical of sculpture, the artist takes a drawing or graphic attitude. We are not bewildered by the powerful drama of the concave and convex relations, the holow and the empty, strong contrasts of light and shade. On the contrary, Srdan Kovačević builds his story of sculpture to the detriment of monumentality and to the benefit of poetic musicality and elegiac introspective “questioning”. The soft, winding line follows the natural form of the material and, guided by the author’s “laws of internal necessity”, almost emerges as a separate entity. Constructing ascetic bodies at times, in the positive-negative relation, like in the wood sculpture called “A Couple” with beautiful shading and transitions, highlighted by the texture of the material itself and its skilful processing,  the artist suggests a spiritual and formal verticality giving the entire sight a special, sublime “aureole”. In this context Kovačević creates a number of sculptures, such as: “Bride”, “Woman in a Cloak”, “After Bathing”, “The Negative”, “Wedding” etc.

The plastic syntactic lexis of Srdan Kovačević shows fine, unobtrusive steps towards ornamental and folklore graphemes in the works “Nun” in metal (iron), and “Family” in wood. While in the “Nun” the mere repetitive, conical-pyramidal form, and within it the discrete and simplified, geometricalized, rhythmic repetitions, give an impression of an archetypical and archaic dis-course, in the “Family” the primordial, linear zigzag motif contextualizes a folk story, where the motif follows the form of the material it emerges from. These works explicitly point to the wealth of Kovačević’s interlingual diversity and the masterly linear articulation with a drawing in different materials.

Particularly interesting details on Kovačević’s sculptures are faces, whether they are illusions, concave and convex forms and no more than that, or parts of a physical expression with stylized details, beautifully made hair and facial attributes — eyes, long nose, mouth. The lack of personality does not annul the sensitive aspect, with which these sculptures unobtrusively rule the available space.

In portrait busts, most of them being memorial busts of distinguished persons from the People’s Liberation War (the total of eighteen), Kovačević emerges as an excellent psychologist skilful at taking an introspective view of a personality. A particularly beautiful example, emphasized by a large number of art historians, is the portrait bust of the artist’s father — “My Father”, created in bronze. The bust, revealing “another” Kovačević, is characterized by a realistic approach and broad modelling. Reduction and stylization, characterizing most of his works as their recognizable traits, indicate that Srdan Kovačević is an artist who, without being exclusive in the creative polyphony, selected his dissonant unison, remaining consistent to it throughout his work.

Love and fondness for music are obvious in the general melodiousness of many of the artist’s works, but they are also accentuated by formal presence of music instruments in a large number of works — the mandolin, harp, lyre. They are usually works with names such as: “Girl with a Mandolin”, “Girl with a Harp”, or “Girl with a Lyre”, etc. What is obvious in all of these works with the relief treatment of form in wood, stone or metal, is an almost haptic, contrapuntal union of the instrument and the girl, for the sake of the pervasive, elusive sense of the silent, melodious serenity and a dignified, sublime peace presiding over the space.

Animal sculptures, too, mostly birds, reveal an intimist treatment with an anthropomorphic tendency manifested in the “look inside”. They are birds with an “attitude”, “posing” and suggesting a semantic plane by their hinted movements. Finely modelled, with the cohabitation of carved and uncarved masses, they represent a special, we could say, very intimate body of work.

Also, what confirms our assumption that Srdan Kovačević was a sculptor who spent the lifetime of artistic creation exploring various materials is the “Praying Mantis”, created in iron in 1999. Here we encounter a “new” and “different” Srdan Kovačević, always ready to experiment. The “Praying Mantis” is a work created by welding ready-made iron objects or their pieces and creating a new whole, an associative form explicitly suggested by the name itself.

Another work, in a certain way, seems atypical of Kovačević’s artistic vocabulary and his treatment of form. Bronze sculpture “On the Balcony” points to the artist’s modernist explorations of sculpture. The allusive, anthropomorphic form of a girl on the balcony is given in the “opposing” relation of “masses” — with linear crossing of vertical and horizontal lines of the balcony and subtly placed, stylized body of the girl in a highly suggestive posture. The girl has long, defined extremities, her head devoid of any attributes and dominated by a mop of hair captured in movement. The lightness of the sculpture, reduction and “drawing” treatment of form, subtle stylization, the opened-closed play in the space which is part of the work itself, make this sculpture particularly interesting.

Some of Kovačević’s works are reminiscent of emblematic, archaic totem head sculptures with marked gesticulation. In these sculptures, the artist boldly employs other objects, inserting, for example, a glass form into the cavity of the eye, or “perforating” and deliberately “injuring” the body leaving a sharp-pointed object to “stick” out of the head. On another wooden head, the artist uses red paint to draw the basic features of the face — mouth, eyes, brows... This sculpture resembles the work of Montenegrin sculptor Krsto Andrijašević in its infantile and archaic treatment of the form, as well as a delicate executional simplification and an extraordinary feeling for the semantic subtext. At once monumental and light, with the dichotomous relation of carved and uncarved parts and rudimentarily treated hair, this sculpture appears very interesting (with and without the hat).

Srdan Kovačević created his work of several decades in the spirit of Matisse’s visions “...of a balanced, serene and clear art, free of the themes which cause uneasiness or dejection”. His sculptures have a tranquilizing effect, as they “conceal the causelessness of human existence in its unrepeatable fragility”. They do not signify something outside themselves... they signify something by/for themselves.

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ANASTAZIJA MIRANOVIĆ Ph.D.

1  O.B. Merin, Prodori moderne umjetnosti, Beograd, 1962, 63.

2  Slobodan Tomović Ph.D. , Nikola Vujošević, S. Kovačević ‘93/94, Retrospective Exhibition (exhibition catalogue), Blue Palace, Cetinje; Art Pavilion and the Gallery of the Republic Cultural Centre, Podgorica, September 1993; Art Colony, Danilovgrad, Herceg Novi, Belgrade, 1993/94.

3  Gilles Neret, Mikelanđelo, Taschen, Daily Press, Podgorica 2007.

4  Edward Lucie Smith, Umjetnost danas, Mladost, Zagreb 1978, 7.

5  E. L. Smith, Umjetnost danas, Mladost, Zagreb 1978, p. 358.

6  Eaglemoss collections, Veliki slikari — život, djelo i uticaji, Magic Calmels, Eaglemoss international, 2010, 20.

7  Volkmar Essers, Anri Matis, Taschen, Daily Press, Podgorica, 2007.

Embodied: The Work Of

Srdan Kovačević

As I compose this essay as part of a book made by a now-American son in memory of a Montenegrin father, I sit in a paradisiacal garden in Provence. I know, I know, lucky me. I know, I know, what does Provence have to do with Montenegro? But if I were sitting on a balcony overlooking the mountains and valleys of Montenegro, would my writing about the work of artist Srdan Kovačević make more obvious sense to my reader? Perhaps, but conversely, Monsieur Kovačević’s imagery composes itself, not around location, but around a placeless universality and an attention to the human condition that is timeless. His work, over a lifetime of participatory observation of bodily gesture and expression (participatory in that Monsieur Kovačević is fondly remembered as a person fully engaged in the humanity around him), encompasses both large and small-scale works. It includes wood, stone, metal, and glass sculpture, bronze relief tablets, bone carvings, and charcoal sketches, among a variety of other mediums. As a body of work it expresses humanity as omnipresent in relation to nature, rather than being limited by history or by geography.  In his sculptural forms nature and the figure are intertwined as mark-making attests to individual memories, bodies of experience that attain universality over time.

Similarly, from where I write today, nature and memory are inseparable. The marks of human memory, collapsing distant past with yesterday and today, are here in this small village in the south of France etched in and merged with the materiality of nature. The surrounding rocks morph into sculptural heads and then back into rock again, as decades of artists have spent summers in this mountain village in order to obtain a new or renewed inspiration. So many of the limestone rocks have become portraits, immovable. Once specific individuals are understood now as archetypes, carved of stone, fragments of bodies and faces, marking timeless human presence. The village caves have been transformed into congruous living quarters, the stone into benches, the trees in the valley into the borders between farms and vineyards that have been harmonious with nature since Roman expansion. Srdan Kovačević also grew up in a small mountain village, though in Montenegro. His sculptures, as I consider them in relation to my own sense of place, reinforce this awareness of an in-between state, the delicate borders of possible co-existence between man and nature. So many of his forms announce and maintain their origins in natural curves and natural knots of wood and in un-manipulated organic movements of stone, pieces of wood and stone that he must have chosen so carefully because in them he saw pre-existing forms, the expression of something human, something already contained within the materials of nature.

A 1967 portrait of the artist (page 6) hints at this visual and material harmony, as do the forms throughout his extensive oeuvre produced over a lifetime of dedication to sculptural form. The handsome 34-year-old artist, stares out of the photographic frame, quite serious in demeanor with stylish button-down shirt underneath his dark-colored studio smock reminiscent of the Bauhaus artist-engineer’s work-a-day costume. One hand in his smock pocket, his casual stance counters his distant stare while he balances against his own wooden sculpture, his hand grasping the “shoulder” of an elegant yet fragmented form, part tree and part torso, part human and part nature, its limbs an extension of the artist’s own.

From my position in the world now in 2011, just two years after Srdan Kovačević’s passing, and having been born just after this photograph was taken, I am now only a few hundred kilometers away from Montenegro, though still on the same continent and in a mountainous Mediterranean landscape with some shared features. From here, I am reminded to notice that in Kovačević’s works there is a return to the human form embedded within wood, within stone, and carved in bone. I am struck by the confluence of a few key issues. I am struck by the power of image making as a memorializing practice, marking living time spent and the desire to leave a record in materials: scratching, carving, re-shaping, whittling, molding, sketching, photographing and even collecting (as the artist spent years maintaining and organizing museum collections as well). I am struck by the importance of familial memory and affection, the kind of dedication to the memory of a loved one and his or her own practice that it takes to produce a book like this; an homage to a father’s lifetime achievements. Finally, a circuitously related issue is that of the respectful timelessness that can evolve when one (or an entire nation of individuals, imagine!) chooses to exist in complete harmony with the natural world and its materials rather than at odds with nature as most western cultures so often do.

Srdan Kovačević’s sculptures speak to these kinds of harmonies: familial, memorial, material. His works express these issues however with a whispered sentience, one with ties to the soft forms of Brancusi. Kovačević’s forms, like Brancusi’s, often seem to remain partially embedded in their natural materials, part nature and part culture, not necessarily needing to claim sovereign power one from the other, but instead they are harmonious in form, line, texture, color, and even expression. In this essay, these issues are structured around a series of visual analyses of the artists’ sculptures. The ideas are perhaps less connected by a direct line and are more loosely threaded through a serpentine map of observations.

The photograph of the artist mentioned above, connecting with and representing himself next to a hybrid work of both nature and man, woman and tree, points toward so many of Kovačević’s sculptures as they are themselves positioned in relation to the history of art. In wooden figures made in 1960s and additional female figures in wood which he made in the early 1980s, bodily forms emerge from fragments of wood, each one half woman and half tree. Their bark is smoothed over, softer than skin. The marbling and knotting of the wood of each figure is left to dictate the texture and linearity of each. It is as if the limb or the trunk is chosen because it already is embodied. The artist must have seen this hidden form and then chosen it. Each primary form just needed to be recognized as such. These emerging figures, which seemed at first to be so “mod” in their economy of design, with more concerted looking begin to reveal their “ancientness.” These tree-form-figures can be seen as participating in a larger historical chorus of artists compelled by the recognition of the human body as nature, a dialog at times about mysticism, mythology, spirituality, conceptualism, and even performance. In this sense, Kovačević’s production can be seen in relation to numerous artists whose work engaged in a push and pull motion about life and death that is, if not resolved, at least it is articulated through the body’s transfiguration into and out of the materials of nature.

For instance, when I first saw these figures, I thought immediately of Donatello’s Mary Magdalene (1454), who lives, not in the Louvre, but across the Alps in Florence. Though bedraggled, her sinuous body is united with the poplar from which she is carved. The wood becomes her body. The expressivity of wood is made to equal the expressivity of penitent humanity, the tree as representative of the passion to which this Mary was said to have been witness. Another, similar figure is contained within a large-scale painting by Andrea Mantegna in the Louvre. The painting is entitled Minerva Chases the Vices from the Garden of Virtue (1502). It is animated by, not only Minerva herself and the mythological and maimed vices she expels, but also by a tall tree-trunk of a woman to the painting’s far left. Her form is entirely sculptural; her arms and torso sprout branches, while her head morphs into a treetop mop of green leaves. At once dead and living, while not necessarily menacing, the figure hovers over the painting, on her way to becoming an element within the landscape and the architectural ruins of the scene. She is woman and Nature at the same time. Of course, Bernini’s graceful, Daphne (1622–25) as she escapes Apollo by becoming one with the foliage, shows us this transfiguration in action, a life not dying but assuming an alternate form. And while Srdan Kovačević was perhaps at the height of his own creative energy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, across the Atlantic the work of artist Ana Mendieta, though not an obvious connection, performs her own body as united with nature, skin as earth and bark, while raising critical questions for the time about the patriarchal associations of the female body as somehow more natural and therefore limited. The figure as nature, and Kovačević’s participation within this larger visual history, point one to consider also the particularity of this artist’s economy of line and how his imagery both departs from and shares in this history.

In additional key works by the artist, the quality of a line carries with it as much expressivity as the wooden sculptures, while the themes of nature-figure relations explored above remain consistent. In a metal relief Plate 4 made in 1965 the linearity of a tree-like, abstracted form is at once decorative and sculptural. Like a wingspan, it reaches upward and outward to encompass bird figures composed of delicately placed marks and circles. Small triangles are beaks, and the birds’ bodies face north, south, and east as if part of a weather vane, which has been rendered pictorial rather than utilitarian by its containment within the metal tablet. The image has a comedic quality, quite reminiscent of the expressionist Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine of 1922. In both Klee’s and Kovačević’s compositions, the birds assume attitude and personality, their chatter and repetitive motion expressed in relation to metal, to machine, to a character of line that is entirely precise and efficient while full of emotive energy.

Also, the works carved in pieces of bone from 1965 to 1968 unite some of these ideas and remind us of an artist who was also a curator and a great collector of unusual objects and artifacts. Bone, not a typical material choice, has capacity as expressive surface and form and the material itself also has a timeline that is both interior to the body and posthumously exterior, a choice that makes sense given Kovačević’s interest in figurative embodiment within the natural world. In one such bone sculpture, the sloping curves of a fisherman’s shoulders follow the gently folding-in shape of the bone itself. The man’s round collar is a simplified, bowl-shaped line, his brows and almond eyes carved as singular lines, expressing a quotidian moment as he carries his day’s catch, a man whose existence is united with and daily dependent upon Nature.

So, a reflection about a male Montenegrin sculptor by a female American writer who has been only nearby to Slovenia and to Yugoslavia, but has yet to travel to Podgorica or to Sveti Stefan on the coast, or to Budva? I’m sorry to say, it’s true, though I do hope to travel there at some point in order to redeem myself! However, it is Kovačević’s expression of humanity rather than the specifics of place that seem most important. His images speak to the congruence of man and nature. They quietly announce a harmonious balance not limited to nationality, place, or gender. His work dedicates itself to a shared experience of material form and mark-making that is indifferent to divisions and disconnections. It sparks a unifying dialog within the history of art, one which melds body and earthen materiality – as the artist is remembered fondly for inspiring and sharing laughter in times of mourning, and for his ability to “celebrate life and death at the same time.”1 Monsiour Kovačević’s work speaks to this lived experience and to still living memory, a material form that will grow in its universality with time.

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LISA JAYE YOUNG Ph.D.

1  This quotation is from emailed observations sent to me by the artist’s son, Blažo Kovačević (July 2011).