Art: Millvale Murals

Of some 200,000 Croats in the U. S., about 50,000 live near Pittsburgh. No (luckier than any of these laboring people, until last spring, were the 400 families in the parish of St. Nicholas Roman Catholic Church in Millvale, a poor little town on the north bank of the Allegheny just above Pittsburgh’s mills. Then one day in April an agile wisp of a man with a soft beard came to live in the parish house with Father Albert Zagar. Scaffolding went up in the church and every day at early mass Croatian women could see how far along the church’s new artist had come with his murals. By last week report of his completed work had gone far beyond Millvale and Pittsburgh, had put the parish of St. Nicholas in a class by itself as harboring one of the few distinguished sets of church murals in the U. S.

Millvale’s murals were especially satisfying to the artist because they were his first big job in the U. S. and they were done for his countrymen. Born in Zagreb, ancient capital of Croatia, Maximilian Vanka grew up with peasants, did not discover until he was a young man that he was an illegitimate son of a noble family. As a fachook (noble bastard) young Maximilian belonged to a well-recognized caste in Croatia under the gay regime of Austria’s Emperor Franz Joseph. His upper-class connections enabled him to study art at the Royal Academy of Zagreb and then at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts, which awarded him its first prize and gold medal for composition in the year Franz Joseph’s nephew Franz Ferdinand happened to get fatefully shot, not in Croatia, but in Serbia. Artist Vanka kept on painting, after the War became a professor of painting at Zagreb’s Academy. In 1926 he met Margaret Stetten, the attractive daughter of Surgeon DeWitt Stetten of Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital, five years later married her.

Although he became famed as Yugoslavia’s finest portrait painter, what Artist Vanka calls “the ironic title of Professor” irked him. Abetted by his wife and by No. i U. S. Yugoslav Louis Adamic (The Native’s Return)* he came to the U. S. in 1934, gave exhibitions in Pittsburgh and Manhattan (TIME, Dec. 3, 1934). Last November he came again for good. Last spring when able Franciscan Father Zagar, having paid off more than half of his $98,000 mortgage, decided to beautify his yellow brick Romanesque church for God’s greater pleasure and that of his congregation, he got in touch with Artist Vanka through Author Adamic (“Adamich” to Yugoslavs). In two weeks Vanka looked over the church, finished his sketches, watched the scaffolding go up and began to paint.

Every morning at 7 a. m. he started off by pounding his colors. The murals were done in dry fresco, and because paint had to be applied while the walls were wet, Artist Vanka stayed on his scaffolding virtually all day and usually until 2 or 3 a. m. At night Father Zagar stayed with him, droning prayers. Over the domed altar he painted a 36-ft. Madonna & Child in rich reds and blues, violet and silver, on one side wall a scene of Croatian peasants kneeling at the Angelus, on the other Croatian miners in the U. S. standing with heads bowed while a Franciscan priest, posed by St. Nicholas’ pastor, kneels to invoke God’s blessing on their church. For the side altars Vanka painted a Crucifixion and Pieta in cold blues and black, with green lightning. His model for the figure of Christ was a strapping Negro mill worker. It was well toward the end of May before the final murals complementing these on the back walls took shape and made the women on their way out after mass stop and weep and burn candles.

Opposite his picture of the Virgin grieving over the dead body of Christ, Artist Vanka had composed a group of women in Croatia standing beside a shallow coffin in which lies a dead soldier. They are all in white with white headdresses and the bier is covered with delicate, almost transparent white linen. Rows of white crosses converge toward a hill crowned with a church set against a little pile of distant cumulus clouds. For a modern counterpart of this scene St. Nicholas parishioners can look on the other wall, opposite the Crucifixion. Under a black, apocalyptic sky, a young miner lies on ground covered with coal rubble. Weeping women in violet robes at his head and feet avert their eyes as a group of men with picks descend into a smoky middle background. A headline of the Croatian newspaper on which the dead miner is sprawled reads: “The Immigrant Mother Raises Her Sons for American Industry.”

* Author Adamic’s last book, The Cradle of Life (TIME, Sept. 28, 1936), is a story modeled after Maximilian Vanka’s childhood and youth.