Drawn to Art: Serbia’s Sava Šumanović

I am in a Chinese fast-food café on a main street in Belgrade, Serbia. It is filled with people in their twenties, which makes sense since many of the historic buildings of the University of Belgrade are woven into the streets and squares nearby.

The food is as bad as I expected (considering the low prices), but I’ll say this much: the spicy tofu is really spicy—a surprise considering how often dishes heralded as spicy turn out to be disappointing in Europe.

The real surprise, though, is not the spice level of the food. The surprise is the fact that I am in Belgrade at all! Never did I imagine seeing this city, nor approaching it via the Danube. Nor could I have imagined sailing through the magnificent Iron Gate Gorge of the Danube, en route to Bulgaria, where we will end our tour.

As for right now, I’m packing in soggy, spicy tofu, plus one of those small (0.33 ml) cans of Coke to fuel my visit to the Serbian National Museum, a stately Neoclassical building right around the corner. Just weeks ago, I wrote about the rewards of taking on a new body of national art—any nation’s art. Now I’m doing it once again, since the majority of the Serbian works will be absolutely new for me.

Still, the collection surely will confirm what I know about the flow of stylistic periods of Western art across the continent of Europe. This museum is famous, too, for its overflow of archeological treasures, including Roman coins, tools, jewelry, busts, and florid capitals of massive columns, as well as dazzling items from cultures more ancient than the Romans. Simply put, this is a very old part of the world.

Whenever a museum is new to me, my goal is to find a few objects that will pull me from the middle of the room to their side. It’s a bit of a mystery how it works. It cannot be forced or explained. The draw could be the subject matter, the color palate, the way the light is hitting the canvas. It could even be the framing or the way an item is stood or hung in juxtaposition to others. But when it happens, you know you’ve found something that now belongs to you. It will enter your mental repertoire, either as a beautiful object or, perhaps, as a testimony to the sadness and despair of the artist (or the human conditions at that time). Either way, such discoveries are exciting.

* * *

Now I am on the other side of the experience. And yes, I found my painting. Two of them, really. It happened on the third floor, shortly after I’d entered improperly into the long chain of rooms devoted to Serbian painters (or, as the sign said, Yugoslavian Art). Coming from the back side of the impressive “European” wing, I was sure the guard would kick me out and make me go around to the proper entrance. Instead, he stared me down and chose to ignore me, leaving me free to travel back in time from the modernism of the 1960s towards the early Romantic era of the 1830s and 40s.

It was in the third room that this painting by Sava Šumanović stopped me.

Why, exactly, I cannot say. In fact, I almost missed it. But somehow its soft shades of colors, shadows, and odd airiness drew me over to it. A small bench stood before the painting—usually a dead-giveaway that an item is “important.” But no one seemed to be paying this canvas any attention, so I decided the bench was randomly placed, just as the painting seemed to be.

“Who is Sava Šumanović?” I wondered. My phone battery was too low to look anything up. Little information was posted around the gallery, even in Serbian (which I could have deciphered if sufficiently motivated).

After a few minutes staring into this canvas, I broke off and entered the next room. There, a second painting stopped me cold: a large still-life, with a lovely palate of colors.

It was bold, but delicate, given a wonderful depth through stringy brush strokes added to the surface of the colors. Looking at the label, I saw Šumanović’s name again. “Oh Yippee,” I thought. “I’ve found a favorite Serbian painter!” Back and forth I went between those two paintings, maybe half a dozen times.

Still, the clock was ticking, so I continued my trek backwards in time. Two rooms later, I was halted again by two more paintings, so different in style. Both were stark, dark, and crafted in the primitive strokes we associate with modernism surrounding the period of World War I. To my astonishment, these also were by Šumanović! I was dumbstruck (although I shouldn’t have been: this happens often in art). Still, how and why did his style transform from these grim images of the 1910s to the beguiling visions of my two new favorites?

Suddenly time was up. I was due back at the ship within the half-hour and the walk would take exactly that long. I dashed down two gigantic staircases, ready to crash through the museum’s gift shop and find art cards or magnets of all four of these paintings, plus maybe a book on Šumanović. Instead, I popped out of the exit corridor into the entry hall. There stood the same two glass cases and revolving racks I had seen when entering the museum. Within this limited offering, I found nothing on Šumanović. For that matter, the saleswoman I had noticed earlier, her face dripping with boredom, was nowhere to be seen. Even if I had found something, I doubt I could have purchased it.

Later, after another sumptuous ship dinner, I got on-line to search out Šumanovic and learn more. I found only a few blurbs in English, one of which ended with this: “Šumanović was executed in 1942 as one of the victims of Croatian genocide of Serbs.”

Had I not known my Croatian history well, there would have been no context for this tragic statement. But I did know the context. I understood it referenced arguably the darkest period in Croatia’s long history—a time when all lives in the Independent Nation of Croatia were directed by the Ustaše, the feared Croatian secret police that functioned under the iron fist of the villainous Fascist Ante Pavelić (1889-1959).

Telling the story of that time exceeds the bounds of this essay. Suffice it to say that Pavelić oversaw extensive massacres primarily of Serbs, but also others who resisted the Fascists. These can never be forgotten or forgiven. Righteous anger is woven into the fabric of the region. The same anger partly explains why the Serbs (under the banner of the rapidly disintegrating Yugoslav Army) felt a certain justification instigating the attacks on Croats that ignited the terrible Homeland War of 1991-1995.

But back to Šumanović. Viewing the images available online, I saw how many of his earlier paintings were fueled by Expressionist and Cubist styles, including his dark portraits, graphically drawn nudes, and his parodies of classical themes. These works did not seem to have much interesting to say, although clearly two of them had drawn my attention in the museum.

Rather my intrigue lay with Šumanović’s softer paintings. This softening seem to have begun in the mid-1920s with open landscapes depicting country lanes, roads and trees blanketed with snow, and tree-lined paths casting filigree shadows from new spring growth or autumn foliage. These were the fresh visions of a man who would be arrested during the darkest part of Nazi occupation in World War II. His crime, in part, was refusing to sign his paintings using Latin letters, as the Ustaše was forcing Serbs to do, instead of their native Cyrillic. Alas, Šumarović’s compromise to place solely dates on his paintings did not placate the authorities. He was tortured and thrown barely alive into a limestone pit.

How can such things happen in the magic of a place like Croatia? Why do these horrors occur over and over in a part of the world marked by cultured cities like Zagreb and Split, magical towns like Opatija and gorgeous islands along the Adriatic coastline such as Hvar and Trogir? For that matter, how could a modern Serbian army shell the precious medieval walled city of Dubrovnik for weeks in the 1990s?

These things happen because every stretch of soil here, not only in Croatia but across the Balkan peninsula, has been soaked in blood through invasions and horrible wars for centuries. The actions of the Ustaše which ended Šumanović’s life and so many others, while equal to any horror devised by the Hitler’s Nazis, were just another chit in the story.

There are no winners here—just a continuous list of sufferers. And yet the Danube moves powerfully east, seeking the Black Sea. The Adriatic washes her coastline with water so clear, so blue, the eye can barely absorb it. And artists like Šumanović continue to use their brushes to paint both the darkness and beauty of this world, leaving tangible testimonies to the unending stories they witness.