The Curious Case of Ivan Milev: Between East and West

By Rada Georgieva

The oeuvre of Bulgarian painter and poet Ivan Milev (1897-1927) is often considered a phenomenon in the context of the national art scene. While his early work is significantly inspired by the Viennese Secessionist movement, his most accomplished paintings demonstrate this influence through the lens of Expressionism and Symbolism. Ivan Milev was part of a generation, which had lived through two Balkan Wars, one World War and the very bloody and short-lived September Uprising of 1923, organized by the Communist party. Hence, it is natural that Milev’s art is essentially seeking to stabilize national identity during the post-war years, while presenting us with an articulation of a type of sorrow, lying at the core of what he considers inherent to Bulgarian-ness.

Ivan Milev, Poster for an Exhibition with a Self-Portrait, 1920, Public Domain

The national particularity of Ivan Milev’s art is based on—yet not exclusively indebted to—foreign influences. His paintings reveal a fascination with folklore, fairytales, myths and history but also with themes such as the peasant’s relationship to the land and his piety, which were central to questions of national identity. Furthermore, on a formal level Milev’s works retain some orientalist features, namely an affinity for schematization, typification, rich ornamentation, flatness, and facial expressivity. These are all derived from the Byzantine icon. Milev’s men and women are always sorrowful and troubled, but contemplative and sensitive – as they appeared to him in the post-war years. Thus, his art comprises a curios symbiosis of Western and Eastern tradition, but one which makes perfect sense as he appropriates the foreign in an unprecedented exploration of national character.  

Milev’s only surviving portrait, Anna Staynova, 1924 exemplifies Milev’s formal influences. The Viennese Secessionist inspiration is easy to observe in the crispness of the outlines, but also in their fluidity; in the geometric stylization, emphasizing the flatness of the picture plane; in the opulence of ornamentation and the vivid use of color. However, some of these features are also a characteristic of the Bulgarian orthodox icon and its influence on Milev is particularly noticeable in the position of the figure, her elongated hands, and the lack of tonal modeling. The portrait thus synthesizes Milev’s embrace of his roots and his search for new forms. This was the reason his art was so unusual in the Bulgarian context of the 1920s, when most artists were striving for a complete disavowal of everything eastern, wishing to become ’European’.

Ivan Milev, Anna Staynova, 1924, Public Domain

As has been established, Milev’s visual vocabulary was significantly influenced by artistic movements, which were already exhausted in Western Europe by the time they were fully adopted in Bulgaria. This is largely due to the fact, that Bulgaria was only proclaimed a sovereign state in 1878, after being liberated from an Ottoman occupation, which had lasted for five centuries. Therefore, all artistic aspirations after the Liberation were directed towards embracing the developments in the West and stripping Bulgarian art of all Oriental influences. It is clear however, that the rapid assimilation into national context of movements such as Impressionism and Art Nouveau, which were the result of lengthy Western cultural and social processes, was simply not plausible. As a result, Milev’s belated modernism transcends the universal chronology of European modernism, as he was capable of blurring the borders between Art Nouveau, Expressionism and Impressionism, precisely because he came late to the scene.

Ivan Milev, Crucifixion, 1925, Public Domain

Milev’s painting Crucifixion (Разпятие), 1925 is one of his most expressive paintings, conveying a mystical and deeply emotional atmosphere. The silhouettes of three women dressed in black are standing and crouching before a large sculpted, almost medieval crucifixion in a crammed chapel, identified by the icons of two Orthodox saints hanging on the wall. Here, Milev’s distinctive geometric style is softened, however the painting still exemplifies the fluidity of his line and the importance he placed on tonality. The sharp contrasts, the large blocks of unmodulated, saturated color, the absence of negative space and the schematization of the figures are all typical traits of Milev’s art. The distorted shapes seem to emerge one out of another, confusing our conception of space. There is a significant contrast between the energy of line, form and color, and the message conveyed by the picture. Crucifixion was created just after another violent event in Bulgarian history - a Communist bombing of St Nedelya church during a general’s funeral. The black-clad kneeling women in the painting are thus alluding to the perpetual grief and death in the country and the resignation that these entail, but also to the endurance and endless piety of the simple folk at the face of calamity.

Similarly, Milev’s work Our Mothers are Always Dressed in Black (Нашите майки все в черно ходят), 1926 addresses the national theme of sorrow. To Milev the Bulgarian mother, both literally in her human appearance and metaphorically in the form of the land, is the epitome of suffering. After the wars, it was the mother who had lost most of all and Milev often depicted her grief-stricken or as a martyr, with a halo around her head. Our Mothers are Always Dressed in Black depicts a frieze-like arrangement of five women. Some of them have their heads bowed and shoulders slouched, as if crushed by sorrow. One of them looks to the sky and another doubles up in pain, crying. This painting belongs to a later period of Milev’s art where he retained his tendency for flatness, geometric abstraction and schematization, but he reduced to a minimum the decorative details and adopted a more Impressionistic approach, painting with watercolor. The painting is hence formally simplified, its message acquiring new level of amplification. Thus, although the composition appears lighter, the women’s blank faces, the stillness and sheer force of their gestures, almost ritual in character, conveying the sense of unbearable grief, permeate the painting with a heaviness that cannot easily be discarded.

Ivan Milev, Our Mothers are Always Dressed in Black, 1926, Public Domain

Milev is often discussed as the most Bulgarian painter. This, however, raises various concerns about what is it that constitutes national identity and moreover, what qualifies a painter as ‘national’. Milev’s conception of Bulgarian-ness could only be achieved through an intertwining of Western form and Eastern content. In a sense, the icon fulfills its intrinsic role as an intercessor, in Milev’s case bridging native and foreign, revealing one through the other. Thus, it would seem, no nation is an island and as much as Milev’s contemporaries tried to liberate themselves from Bulgaria’s oriental past, it was Milev’s understanding of this past as inseparable from the contemporary identity of the nation, which made his work so unquestionably representative of it

Notes:

Kamenova, Todorka. Иван Милев – „най-българският“ художник. // In „ст. Света гора и българските художници от 20-те – 30-те години на XX век“, Balkanski Forum, vol. 1, 2004..

Peteva-Filova, Evdokiya. Ivan Milev. Sofia: National Library St St Cyril and Methodius, 2012