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| The Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Croatian painter Maxo Vanka |
| By Prof.Dr. Darko Zubrinic |
Published
05/6/2012
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Croatian spirituality , People , In Memoriam , Environment , Education , Culture And Arts , Charity , Religion
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Unrated
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A nonprofit public supported historic art preservation organization
The Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka is a nonprofit public supported historic art preservation organization
SEVEN written & performed by Action Camp: Maura Jacob singer/bassist & Bengt Alexsander guitar
recorded live November 10th, 2010 in St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church, Millvale, PA, by David Bernabo.
In the Fall of 2010, Action Camp produced a suite of seven songs as a part of the cross-platform arts initiative Hi:REZ. The suite, titled Seven, responds to Maxo Vanka's murals in the St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in Millvale, PA.
Vanka's work touches upon common themes of his era, including family, labor, and war, but with a focus upon the disenfranchised and the dispossessed. His murals offer strong criticism on human exploitation found both at home and abroad. Seven responds to these and other themes within Vanka's murals--namely the merging of natural and unnatural elements, the use of the trials of Mother Mary as representative of humanity’s suffering and divinity, and the mounting skepticism and dread felt in a world grown increasingly paradoxical.
Sections of the suite correspond to specific murals and are arranged to mirror the progression of Vanka's work from the lives of the newly immigrated to the sufferings of war and industry. In order to mimic Vanka's work, Action Camp employed a progression in the tone of instrumentation and percussion modeled after the musique concrete method of using organic sound as music. The suite also utilizes the seven sorrows of Mary and the subject matter of the murals as a focus for the lyrical content.
This is the final performance of Seven, performed in St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church on November 14, 2010.
SEVEN: written & performed by Action Camp
Recorded live November 14th, 2010 at St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church Millvale, PA by David Bernabo
mural photography
Mark Perrott & Renee Rosensteel
live photography
Larry Rippel
composing photography
Hugh Twyman
special thanks
Alexi Morrissey
Justin Hopper
Mary Petrich
Diane Novosel
Charlie Humphrey
for more information please visit
action-camp.com
vankamurals.org
Source vimeo.com
|  Maxo Vanka at work in Millvale's Croatian Church of St. Nicholas, USA
The Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka: Background & Analysis
Dr. Barbara McCloskey, University of Pittsburgh
Department of the History of Art and Architecture
Maxo Vanka's murals for Millvale's Croatian Church of St. Nicholas are a unique contribution to the American mural movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, government agencies began in 1933 to sponsor the production of murals as part of the largest federal art program in the nation's history. Grouped together under the WPA (Works Progress Administration), these agencies put thousands of artists back to work with commissions to provide art for government buildings, post offices and schools around the country. In a nation struggling to lift itself out of the Great Depression and confronting the perils of world war, these federally sponsored murals were viewed as an important aspect of economic recovery. More controversially, they were also considered key to the construction of a national culture and the safeguarding of the American way of life. The history of the WPA is fraught with conflicts between artists and officials over the role these murals were to assume in defining the America that was then taking shape.
Vanka's Millvale works engage themes readily found in WPA murals--such as labor, the family, and community values. Commissioned by a private religious institution, however, they fall outside the purview of the voluminous literature devoted to this important period of government arts patronage. They also contain a moral intensity and socially critical perspective unacceptable to the idealized image of America that emerged within much of WPA art. From their unusual vantage point, Vanka's murals restore to us the debative circumstances under which this important period of our nation's cultural and artistic heritage unfolded. By addressing specifically the experiences of Pittsburgh's Croatian and African-American populations in his murals, Vanka's works also provide vivid insight into the problems as well as the potentials of Pittsburgh's crucial role in defining the America that emerged from the historic transformations of World War II.
Vanka was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1889. A prize-winning student in the Royal Academies of Art in Zagreb and Brussels, he augmented his studies with travel throughout Europe in order to view the latest developments in art. During World War I, he served in the Belgian Red Cross. Vanka eventually returned to Croatia where he became a professor at the Fine Arts Academy in Zagreb. He exhibited his work internationally throughout the 1920s and several of his paintings were purchased by prominent museums and galleries. He immigrated to New York City in 1934 as part of the great migration of artists and intellectuals who sought safe harbor in the United States from the threat of dictatorship and war in Europe.
Vanka began his St. Nicholas commission in 1937. By then, Pittsburgh had long secured its reputation as the steel capital of the world built by the entrepreneurial know-how of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick and the labor of the many Croatian, Polish, Italian, German and other immigrant groups that flooded into the city's mills. By the time he completed his St. Nicholas commission in 1941, Vanka had also witnessed Pittsburgh's incipient transformation into the industrial backbone of the American war effort.
Stylistically, Vanka's Millvale murals demonstrate his profound knowledge of Byzantine church decoration and Croatian folk art. Integrating such traditional elements into an otherwise thoroughly modern artistic vocabulary derived from Mexican muralism, turn-of-the-century European symbolism, and the most recent developments in surrealism, Vanka's Millvale works represent an important and as yet understudied example of eastern European modernism. His combination of traditional and modern aesthetic elements also set the tone for the central thematic concern of his murals, namely the relationship between the old and the new, and between enduring values and the human cost of accelerated change.
During his years in Zagreb, Vanka developed an ethnological interest in Croatia's folk traditions and devoted his art to preserving those traditions in the face of industrial modernization and its leveling effects. The chance to paint murals for St. Nicholas's small, ethnically proud Croatian community in one of the most industrialized cities in the world provided Vanka with an ideal setting in which to address his long-held concerns. Throughout the suite of murals, mothers, sisters, and daughters attired in traditional Croatian folk costumes echo Vanka's iconic portrayal of the Virgin Mary over the altar, where she appears in the guise of Mother Croatia. Women represent in Vanka's murals a nurturing harbor for the values of family, spiritualism, and ethnic tradition. Counterpoised to them are sons, brothers, and fathers whose lives are cut short by work in Pittsburgh's industrial mills and in the region's coal mines. Other scenes depict men as depersonalized cogs in a war machine whose nondescript gray uniforms, rifles, and bayonets stand in stark contrast to the colorful intricacy of the women's embroidered costumes, their spiritual humility, and their reverence for the hearth and home.
In their moral outrage over war, Vanka's murals follow in the tradition of Francisco Goya, whose etchings chronicled the atrocities of Napoleonic conquest in the early 19th century, and Pablo Picasso, whose anti-war mural Guernica of 1937 drew international attention to the beginning phases of fascist war in Europe. Vanka's startling images of divine figures wearing gas masks and of Christ on the cross being stabbed by a soldier with a bayonet also align his art with the anti-war imagery of George Grosz, one of Germany's most prominent artists of the 1920s. Grosz's incendiary depiction of Christ on the cross wearing combat boots and a gas mask protested the rise of militarism and fascism on the eve of Hitler's accession to power. Grosz's provocative image of Christ also became the focus of a highly publicized, three-year long blasphemy trial in Germany of which Vanka was certainly aware.
The narrative core of Vanka's Millvale commission appears in two murals in the series: The Croatian Mother Raises Her Son for War and The Immigrant Mother Raises Her Son for Industry. Likening labor exploitation to the human exploitation of war, Vanka calls into question unreflective notions of social progress by railing against the manner in which ethnic minorities, the poor, and the disenfranchised frequently bear the burden of--and pay the ultimate price for--such progress. In this regard, the sentiment of his murals contrasts pointedly with two other Pittsburgh monuments: the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall in Oakland, which foregrounds the valor of war, and John White Alexander's celebratory mural of the Pittsburgh steel industry (The Crowning of Labor, 1906-07) that graces the central stairwell of the Carnegie Museum of Art. Historians laud Vanka for his keen observation of and sensitivity to the dispossessed. It is also clear, however, that Vanka was equally observant of his artistic milieu. Though contained within the four walls of a humble Croatian church located in a working class enclave on Pittsburgh's north side, Vanka's murals take their point of departure from and enter into critical dialogue with Pittsburgh's central cultural institutions.
Vanka's sympathy for the exploited, the downtrodden, and the disenfranchised spoke to the experiences of Pittsburgh's Croatian immigrant community. They also upheld the Christian ethos of St. Nicholas church while extending its charitable vision beyond the Croatian congregation to which Vanka’s murals was most directly addressed. In his rendering of the crucified Christ, for example, Vanka used an African-American steel worker as a model. And, in the scene entitled The Capitalist, an African-American servant waits on a well-fed industrialist with a deference that tacitly registers the racial as well as class differences between them. In this regard, Vanka's murals find their closest resonance in the plays of August Wilson and in the collages of Romare Bearden. Like Vanka, Wilson and Bearden drew attention in their art to the realities of racial inequality and the hope for a better, more just life that drew African-Americans in large numbers from the south into northern industrial centers like Pittsburgh in the 1920s and 1930s.
Throughout the early 20th century, Pittsburgh symbolized the industrial heart of America and its future promise. Dwelling on themes of labor exploitation and war, Vanka's Millvale murals introduced a skeptical counterpoint into visions of that promise. But in their profound empathy for the plight of whites as well as blacks, Croatian-Americans as well as African-Americans, Vanka's murals expose another, though less appreciated, aspect of Pittsburgh's historic legacy. Reminding us of the rich and diverse cultural heritage that constituted this city in its industrial heyday, Vanka's Millvale murals preserve an awareness of the conflicts and possibilities that defined Pittsburgh, its social fabric, and its role in what America was and the promise of what it could be in the modern era.
Source vankamurals.org
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Gift to America
In May 2008, the Society to Preserve The Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka staged Gift to America, bringing the murals of Maxo Vanka to life with support from the Pennsylvania Labor Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. As a contribution to the celebration of Pittsburgh's 250th Anniversary, the play attracted four sold-out audiences and helped to raise greater awareness about the paintings and the Society's efforts to preserve them.
The one-hour play is a conversation about the murals between Vanka and Father Albert Zagar, the priest who commissioned the murals. Two female characters also are a part of the dramatic reading, which will be accompanied by Tamburitzan music. Scripted by Carnegie Mellon Professor Emeritus of English David Demarest, the play originally was staged in 1981. Described by Time magazine as “one of the few distinguished sets of murals in the U.S.,” the murals depict the ravages of war and the sacrifices of immigrant workers in early 20th century industrial America. They honor the congregation’s Croatian heritage and their Christian faith. Vanka had recently immigrated when he began to paint the murals in 1937, and called them his “gift to America.”
The vivid imagery depicted on the walls and ceilings of the Millvale church reveal a passion that is universal yet uniquely Croatian. After seeing the murals, Rock musician David Byrne of The Talking Heads called Vanka “the Diego Rivera of Pittsburgh.”
The Society to Preserve The Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka is staging the play, with support from the Pennsylvania Labor Center at IUP, and hopes to raise a greater awareness of the paintings while launching a campaign to fund the illumination, restoration and preservation of the murals.
Source vankamurals.org
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