This exhibition is a result—and a part—of doctoral research into folklore influences in the work of Ivan Milev. In it we trace the development of one particular folkloric figure, woven through the whole of South Slavic epic; that of Krali Marko, and its visualisation in Milev’s painting of the same name. The painting was made exactly a century ago, during one of the most significant years of the artist’s career: 1926. That year began with especially high recognition for him — an award and a cash prize of 10,000 leva from the Ministry of Public Enlightenment for his decorative work The Mother of God. Then in March, four of Ivan Milev’s works were included in the major exhibition of Bulgarian fine art staged at the Municipal House in Prague. The exhibition committee was chaired by Alfonse Mucha himself, and the show filled ten exhibition halls. It was the only occasion on which Ivan Milev’s work was shown outside Bulgaria before his death.
That same year, Ivan Milev was admitted as a member of the Native Art Association and in May his works featured in the Association’s seventh annual exhibition, held at Trapko Vasilev’s Permanent Art Gallery. Press coverage was not lacking, and it named Ivan Milev directly, alongside comments on the works he showed. An article by the writer Lyubomir Vladikin, for instance, in the newspaper Demokraticheski Sgovor, tells us that Milev exhibited three works: St. Ivan Pusti, Krali Marko and The Legend of Mount Athos. Of that ‘village hunk for whom no splendour is enough, naively exaggerated and still endlessly fantastic, with an untamed and inexhaustible tangle of hair like a wildflower garden of tones and colours’, wrote Chavdar Mutafov too, in the newspaper Slovo.
In 1972, Dechko Mateev published his memoirs in the pages of the newspaper Kazanlashka Iskra. In them, we learn of his 1924 meeting with Ivan Milev in Borushtitsa, and of the artist’s wish to render ‘on canvas the belief in Krali Marko’s footprint at Buzovo Kale’.
Our account begins here — not only to make sense of the visual image shaped by legend and song, but also to attempt to decode the symbols and topoi it depicts, and to trace a connection, unexamined until now, between the painting Krali Marko and two other works by Ivan Milev, painted in the same year — Baba Marta and Shumi Maritsa [Maritsa Rushes]. Starting from the etymology of the names, we will trace their shared semantic root and its possible interpretations.
The Art Gallery Kazanlak team thanks the Sofia City Art Gallery and the Iskra Historical Museum. Our personal thanks go to Adelina Fileva, Dr Stanislava Nikolova, Ilinka Chergarova, Dr Momchil Marinov, Meglena Parvin and Polya Stoynova for their assistance.
All facts and quotations cited in the exhibition are drawn from:
Alexander Stamenov, Ivan Milev; Gatya Simeonova, On the Question of Real (Geographical) and Imagined (Legendary-Mythical) Objects United in the Universe of the Spirit; Dechko Mateev, Ivan Milev’s Villa; Jeni Madzharov, On the Translation of the Name Sharkolia into Hungarian; Evdokia Peteva-Filova, Ivan Milev; Ivan Shishmanov, The Meaning and Task of Our Ethnography; Ivanichka Georgieva, Bulgarian Folk Mythology; Yordanka Zaharieva, The Road to Modernity: The Book and the Garment in the Bulgarian Language; Milena Georgieva, Self-Portraiture as a Path to Self-Knowledge (A Newly Discovered Drawing by Ivan Milev); Mihail Arnaudov, Essays on Bulgarian Folklore; Petar Dinekov, Bulgarian Folklore; Plamen Petrov, On Ivan Milev’s The Legend of Mount Athos; Radost Ivanova, The Restored Water (A Characterisation of the Mythological Layer of the Epic Song Cycle on Krali Marko); Stanislava Nikolova and Lyuben Domozetski, Between Tradition and Modernism: Images of the Native in Bulgarian Art of the 1920s; and Yaroslav Otchenashek, Vihra Baeva et al., A Dictionary of Terms in Verbal Folklore.
The event forms part of the gallery’s cultural calendar, through which our team marks the 125th anniversary of the founding of the art collection of Art Gallery Kazanlak. General media partner: Bulgarian National Radio.