Milena's Blue wedding dress

Pictures, drawings, fashion illustrations and other exhibits of the exhibition The duality of Milena Pavlović Barila in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, the original copy of the magazine "Vogue" from April 1, 1940, from Sretenj Model of a blue wedding dress Milena Barili on the front page.

photos: promo / msu

Blue wedding dress is her most famous fashion illustration. She drew it in America, where she traveled, so to speak - suddenly.

She bought a return ticket thanks to Siba Miličić, who was working at our embassy in The Hague at the time. She begged him to send it to her Angels, the painting she exhibited there; it was impossible for him because it was already packed with the other exhibited works, so he proposed to buy it. The war, it turns out, turned that card into a one-way ticket. Just before departure, opposite the Paris Opera, Jean Cassou comforted her that he would not come to him and that she was free to go.

She said she wanted to see the great World's Fair in New York, where surrealists Max Ernst, René Magritte and Salvador Dali were the main event. "Carrying something nomadic in her, Milena suddenly wanted to cross the ocean, to see an exhibition," wrote Miodrag B. Protić, an art historian.

RIM, PARIS

photo: promo / msu

She left on the ship "De Grasse" from Avro on August 18, 1939 with her paintings, which she exhibited in Rome and Paris shortly before that.

In Rome, in February 1935, she exhibited at the Second National Quadrennial with Italian artists. The opening was attended by several hundred painters and sculptors from all over the country, as well as Mussolini. His mother, Danica Pavlović, wrote in Požarevac: "Mussolini entered our hall with his entourage of ministers and academics." He didn't look at pictures much. Opo (the president of the exhibition) said the names of all the painters in turn, and Mussolini went on. When Opo said 'Signorina Barilli', Mussolini stopped and asked: 'Shi, la figilia di Barilli? Shi eh?' I came out a little closer, and he asked me what my things were, and I pointed with my hand, and he stayed a few moments looking at me and smiling more and more. Almost all the newspapers that wrote about his visit carried this about me".

After that, she had a solo exhibition in Rome and then in Paris. "I am, in fact, satisfied," he writes to his mother. Our press also talks about the success of the exhibition. The reporter of "Vremena" claims that he discussed the exhibition with Breton and that he experienced Milena's painting close to the ideology of surrealism, that Jean Cocteau did not hide his enthusiasm, that Paul Valéry was at the exhibition for an hour praising especially The girl with the fan since, in his opinion, it contained most of what all Milena's paintings contain - pure poetry, that André Lott said that the pure poetry and completely personal expression in her paintings resemble surrealism.

"VOGUE"

photo: promo / msu

As soon as she arrived in New York, she wrote to her mother: "I have arrived. It's two o'clock in the morning. I am sending you the first thoughts and words since the ship docked... I can't be happy about anything, I guess because I am completely poisoned and crushed by these short news about the war".

Milena spent the last six years of her life in America. Getting along with the new environment was difficult for her, she constantly thought of her country and Europe, where the war was starting. He writes to his mother: "Darling, my golden darling, if you know how much I think of you and how I am by your side with all my soul, always in the red room, in those beautiful armchairs where we sit, in our yard, everywhere. I see both God and all those who enter and exit. And Lilika and Otter. I see you when you read Truth and when everyone is asking you about me and when you are waiting for News and the postman". At first, she lived in the western part of the city near the train station, in a house with rooms for rent, popular among Yugoslav emigrants. "A little further down the street is a cafe and we eat there, there is a small garden at the back. The waitresses are Italian from Piedmont, the owner is from Novi Pazar, and his wife is French. Various guests are coming." Americans, attracted by the bohemian atmosphere, would often visit the restaurant there. One day, the couple Ekstrom, co-owners of the "Cordie-Ekstrom" art gallery in New York and Paris, came, they became friends, and after some time they helped Milena move to a safer and more beautiful part of the city, in eastern Manhattan, to the hotel that is now called "Henry IV". They hung out almost every day.

Milena lives hard, especially at the beginning of her stay in New York. Like most émigré artists, she paints portraits. In January 1940, he informed his mother that he had heart problems due to exhaustion and a hard life, but also that he was going to draw the front page for the March issue of the fashion magazine "Vogue" "so my eyes fell out while working, they paid me later, but they won't print because the fashion didn't come. Then they gave me one side inside, shoes and gloves and a hat, one blouse and a scarf; they took it today, they tell me it's special, but here's how I do it: I got it last Monday, today is Monday again - I haven't left the house since last Thursday, I can't, I don't have time to get dressed".

In addition to "Vogue", Milena collaborates with other well-known fashion magazines and interior and exterior design magazines. Her illustrations are characterized by the lightness of the line, the fineness of the pen strokes, the color transparency of the watercolors, the elegance of the movements of the female figure, the simplicity of the dresses with the then fashionable dropped waist and the irregularly shaped neckline that ravishingly exposes the shoulders and back. All this with lots of fashion details – beads, flowers, brooches, scarves, fans. In creation, Milena had no role model. For "Vogue" and other magazines, she created models that she would wear herself.

SHE'S MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN A MODEL

Many, including Cocteau, De Chirico, Paul Valeri, said that the painter was more beautiful and lovely than her models. It is said that when Milena entered a room full of rich women dressed in high fashion creations of fabulous value, everyone turned to her, in a simple dress without jewelry and a hat that she made herself.

In the center of art, in a city full of the best, Milena managed to hold her first exhibition in March 1940, in the "Julijan Levy" gallery, where Surrealist exhibitions were held. Criticisms were numerous, extremely positive. He tells his mother: "I now have what I need to live." Julian Levy says that I do not despair, that neither Dalí nor De Chirico sold a single painting for the first exhibition, and both are his painters. He would like to launch me as a fashionable portraitist, to make two or three a year for 3000 dollars". In the sequel, she writes that she is currently working on "a small, very cheap portrait" of the Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who will become her friend from then on. Four years after that, she created the costumes for his ballet Sebastian in the then newly founded "Ballet International". Critics were visibly amazed by her designs. Undoubtedly, if she had continued to create costumes, she would have had great success.

It was only after the second exhibition, in 1943, at the Organization for Mutual Aid of American Friends to Yugoslav Prisoners in Italian Camps, that Milena felt that she had succeeded. Most of the exhibits consisted of works done in New York and confirmed her as an artist. The most notable work of the exhibition was Sv. Jovan. By an inexplicable coincidence, Milena started this work on April 6, 1941, the very day of the fascist attack on Yugoslavia.

Little is known about Robert Goslen, whom she married at the end of 1943. She informed her father only the following year that she had married "a nice young man, an American who was a soldier at the time... He was here with me until yesterday. Now he went to find some employment". During the war, Goslen was an aviation officer, and art historians believe that Milena, entering into his way of life, also changed her style: painting with less poetic meaning, and her portraits become more realistic.

The end of the war in Yugoslavia brought her hope to see Europe and her native Požarevac again. But she was interrupted by an unfortunate fall from her horse. In the card that Bruno Barilli sent from Rome to his wife in Požarevac in 1947, he described the last days of their daughter: "Milena and her husband were together on a horse - it was raining, the road was paved (in the vicinity of New York), the horse slipped, Milena's stirrup broke. Our daughter fell over the horse's head with a cry... Milena was in plaster for five months, immobile, from her waist to her neck... In the first days of 1945, she was able to dress, walk, and came to New York. She found a house with Goslen - she seemed to feel well, she seemed to have completely recovered. On the evening of March 5, 1945, Milena was happy, even dancing with Goslen in the restaurant of the Plaza Hotel. They went to sleep… early in the morning… her poor heart stopped”.

The news about Milena's death and the photo were published by the "New York Times", noting that the sudden death occurred as a result of a spinal injury during an earlier fall from a horse. The news was also reported by the Italian press. Grossman brought the urn with Milena's ashes to Bruno Barilli in Rome. "Milena rests in a wonderful place, in the cemetery near the gate of St. Paul, full of great memories of poets, artists, people who came from all over the world and now rest there, next to her," he told his wife in Požarevac.

Exhibition The duality of Milena Pavlović Barila where hers is now Blue wedding dress model on the front page of the magazine "Vogue" is open until March 17. The author of the exhibition, Mišela Blanuša, M.Sc., and assistants Kristina Armuš and Zlata Vučetić, have chosen about 150 of Milena's works and exhibits in order to tell about the phenomenon of duality in her art, as one of the peculiarities that mark her oeuvre, permeate all aspects of her creativity and make Milena Pavlović Barili simply - Milena.