Ordan Petlevski: Biography as a Spiritual Travelogue

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Wishes, will, desire, ambition in art - I am not sure that any ofthese win. All ofthem are subject to wear. Art endures. Its stratification eludes. Any comparison with what we call "norma/life" is meaningless. This was written in Latin script, in the archaic Macedonian language, in minute characters, with a graphite pencil. The way in which it was written, the unusual clash of language and script indicating a dual cultural affiliation, the choice of tiny letters exhausting for the eye, and of an ordinary pencil that seems to invite erasure, all these items, seemingly unimportant at first glance, say something about the man who wrote them, about his character and life story. Somewhere between human modesty and artistic self-awareness, Christian serenity and Classical restlessness, hubris in the idea of creatively exceeding human measure, the painter Petlevski - I might add, my father Petlevski - chose a way of life that was by no means easy, but was in the final instance redeeming. He discovered an artistic and existential balance, his own golden section, and he might have said without any qualms: I can be no more nor less than what I am. My painting is my destiny. He did not write down the thoughts that I record in this text in the form of a diary and they do not show life as a chronological course of events. On.the contrary, these lapidary statements conceal a person who had no strong belief in the diachronic sequence of dates, For him history was an independent history of human ideas, an eternal trans-historic human dialogue in which, like in a letter by Webern of 1909, Schoenberg can communicate directly with Plato, Kant can appear beside

BIOGRAPHY AS A SPIRITUAL TRAVELO(;UE

Kraus and Kokoschka, be answered by Mahler, and listen to his questions. In a cultural salon of this kind, which enriches human spirituality and does not submit to the historical logic of movement from point A to point B, every tradition has its modernity, and every age its Modernism. If the only real admission ticket into that cultural salon is consistency and artistic integrity, then the Modernists who believed, as Petlevski did, in talent had to pay some kind of a price for entering that ideal society which they chose according to their own measure and taste. This price was, of course, paid in the sphere of everyday life, where time cannot be imagined in any other way but as the chronology of norma/life. I have undertaken to place before you the life story ofOrdan Petlevski more or less from first hand, but I must warn my readers that I can and want to do this only from the position of a double witness. By this I mean that I will call less on the authority of biological heritage, and more on the natural right of intellectual heritage of the kind that is established in artistic families where several individuals share the same kind oflife. A moment came in my personal intellectual development when life with Petlevski ended in the sense of the parent-child relationship, and turned into an interesting polemical but gentle dialogue with Petlevski, free from any kind of expectation and enforcement. This dialogue, to my comfort, has continued even after my father's death. How to understand the value of what an individual invested in his life, and how to determine parameters for a biography, is a matter of evaluation, I would say of temperament. If we were to reduce a biography only to the description of a journey along the horizontal axis of existence from one event to another, then death, superior to birth or any other experience, would be not only the last stage in an individual's life but also the highest point of human progress. With some people, remember Pr9ust, hardly anything objective can be found between was bom and died. There was no scarcity of events in Petlevski's life but he had a strong need to reduce them as much as possible. My father slowed down his motion along the line of norma/life to the extreme limit, until he reached the imaginary ideal point at which he could sink into a static centre of self--awareness. Only after he had numbed all of his everyday sensations could he release his conscience, his ethical consciousness, without which the artist Petlevski could not understand why to create art. The notes in that black notebook include the following thoughts: What is important for me- is the moral code of creation. Several lines lower down he wrote : I think that the creator does not move quickly but climbs by the law ofthe spiral slowly and persistently. This slowness, or even better, this unhurried activity of my father's was a way to reach the ideal of an immobile, introspective point, a zero degree of motion . In it a Modernist like himself saw the possible starting point for a spiritual journey upward, a chance to spirally conquer the vertical line, start a new, different kind of adventure. If we want to get close to Ordan Petlevski we will have to believe, at least for a moment, that the stations on his pilgrimage, ethical as much as aesthetic, do not follow the chronology of events but the logic of spiritual development. I witnessed the persistent efforts of my father, who was similar to the knight of Ia Mancha, to experience his biography as a spiritual travelogue. In honour of his Quixotic tenacity in·separating the horizontal line of life from the vertical line of the spirit, I will divide this biography into two columns. The first opens a small window into the trans-historical world of the ideas that preoccupied Petlevski (and not only him). The other (thenarrower one, as is fitting) will show the course of events in time, and the data of his norma/life will be graphically pushed into the margins. In this way I will not cheat either of two different groups of readers - it is unnecessary to say, two different approaches to the world, two different kinds of people.

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A year or two before his death the painter who loved Der Zeuberberg and Dr Faustus, and who was much closer to Andre Malraux's Antimemoirs than to the chronological contemplation of Thomas Mann, just as he liked the Artist in Hunger more than Kafka's diaries, refreshed his memories. Because he had to. I knew that he was not writing a diary because he abhorred dates. Probably persuaded by the determination of some honest man with warm eyes who would not renounce the idea of publishing his talks with Petlevski, my father bent over his small notebook. From political and ideological persecution to the destruction ofeverything that was wise and noble - it was a time of wickedness, hypocrisy, the denial ofall values in life and art. One must realize that it was a time ofartistic isolation. (We knew nothing about what and how people painted in Europe.} Ljubljana was the furthest I had ever traveled. My contraction into my own essence was extremely radical on one hand, on the other (as the French critics emphasized) my paintings carried important features ofthe westem painting tradition. Something fell into place between what I was painting, what was global and what was yet to come. I. Life For People It was the year 1959. It was one of the years when the painter Ordan Petlevski was born. The year when he was bom for people. I mean for the people who like winners, and those are always in the majority. Nothing seemed to be the same after he had won first prize for painting at the first Biennial of Young Artists in Paris. Only four years earlier he had graduated &om the Academy in Zagreb, a Croatian city in a country that was then called Yugoslavia. According to the journalists of Life magazine, it was a country that was very far away, behind the iron curtain of socialism. Everything really had changed, so I will have to justifY why I used that cautious construction seemed to be. But first I must explain what this first prize meant, shed some light on the early sixties. It was a time of the last flash of confidence in the New before the Postmodernist shrugging of the shoulders, the last time when miracles could be imagined and when people could see with their own eyes the burning prophets of Modern Art walking on Earth, or at least on some street in Paris. A time when Malraux could still be minister of culture and together with Cocteau cheer ideas of a kind that could only have been born in the head of a man who did not believe in the boundaries of the period. A man who could place the entire history of art, all the pluralism and all the stylistic heterodoxy of the new age, under the roof of the same imaginary museum. Did not this scheme of things blend perfectly with the intention of exhibiting the youthful canvases of the old masters of Modern Art together with the paintings of the young artists like Hundertwasser, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Downing, Peter Bruning, Werner Schreib, John Koening, Luis Felto, Manabu Mabe, Jane Lebenstein, Helen Frankenthaler, Bernard Buffet and Ordan Petlevski? The idea of an imaginary museum was the only place that could show Simples inscriptions, abstract simple notations by a twenty-nine year old unknown foreigner, on the same wall as the representational allegoric Evocation by Pablo Picasso. Art historians chose Petlevski, and so did Rufino Tamayo, Henry Moore and Ossip Zadkine. Two years later, Michel Ragon singled out three exhibitions among all that had been held in Paris: he linked the display of the already legendary (and too early dead} Wols and Corneille &om the Cobra Group, Millares's exhibition, and Petlevski's one-man exhibition in the Galerie Lacloche on the Place Vandome. II Toward Zero Degree Motion The determined and irrational firmness with which he rejected flattering invitations by gallery owners &om the New Continent was more than a personal fear of America. For Petlevski crossing the great sea would have meant leaving the spiritual space of Europe to whose tradition he had linked his shift from the traditional to the abstract. Petlevski was a real European modern artist because his attitude to the painterly heritage was one of affirmation out of negation, like proving the importance of God through various expressions of doubt. What

Pedevski was born in Prilep, a town in Macedonia exactly at noon, as the first and only surviving child of a mother whose six children had died at binh or in the cradle, on 24 August (a date reminiscent of the Massacre ofSt Bartholomew}, but in 1930. I was bom at a bad time, a time ofpoverry, misery and death -a rime of the greatest recession and world depression, he wrote, just before describing the atmosphere in which he had grown up as one of matchless love. Tobacco dust - a source of money and hope in a better life, but also the cause of a terrible cough, the slow disintegration of the lungs of the people who dried and shredded this most profitable industrial plant of that region enveloped the town of Prilep. The village was a healthier place. Perhaps his mother Ljubica's seventh child would also have died if it had not been for the mountain air above the village of Malo Mramorani and certainly the warmth showered on him by his grandfather and grandmother. Their tenderness for their grandson was similar to parental love for a youngest son but gentler, devoid of expectations and almost completely free of the tension associated with child rearing, in a way that is only possible with people who have already raised their own children. My grandfather was the best bagpipe player. Grandmother, although illiterate, had such a good memory that she was a living calendar. \!\!hen mother discovered my love for drawing, ald1ough her behaviour was othervvise restrained, she could not hide her pride. Not only did she give me suppol1, she began to enhance my natural affinity, patiently and confidendy preparing me for the life ofa painter. Her greatest obsession was for me to become a fresco painter. This obsession did not leave my mother until the end (a death that to my great sorrow canJe very quickly). For the time and the community she lived in, this was cenainly the wish of a non-typical Mother. Ordan Peclevski's childhood, gloomy in the town where he lived as the son of a poor carpenter, and serene in the village where he could drown in the confusion of a numerous but affluent family, was essentially marked by three people - his mother, grandmother and grandfather. Today, as I read my father's notes, one of his characteristics that I also noticed earlier comes clearly to the fore : the strong need of an artist with a propensity for self-analysis to find, in the story of his own life, signs of general conditions, signals of the time, marks of the broader civilization in which he was immersed. The culture from which my father originated had forgotten entire pages of its own history but defended itself &om complete amnesia by an oral iradition that

might be better described by Zumthor's term vocalite. ldentiiy, which could not be found in the continuiiy of the written word, had to be sought elsewhere, for example in some parole fondatrice de Dieux, the creative power of God's word. The price of oral defense was high and was expressed in the loss of connection with the Hellenistic heritage. My father renewed his memories of the three key people in his young life with gentle nostalgia. Later these people became symbols for him: his grandfather as bagpipes, his grandmother as a living calendar, and his mother as an icon. Among these symbols he wove a network of nostalgia and melancholy for a culture that had to agree to an oral identiiy transfer. He was always questioning history, and the wish to find a meaning in historic turbulence was the Leitmotif of many conversations he as a painter had with intellectuals who belonged to other professions, for example, a whole generation of Croatian writers. Remembering the liberal spritin his grandfather's house encouraged my father in his constant search for a higher synthesis of events that might indicate the existence of some trans-historic justice, distant, fragile and hardly discemable. He wrote the following: The family was big, patriarchal to a degree, but much more liberal, especially in the ethnic and religious sense. My father Petlevsk.i had problems in his life because he was different from the majoriiy of people, because he so completely inverted the relationship between two basic concepts of human existence, rree will as choice and destiny as something that is given. Because of this some people respected him as an ascetic and loved him as a guru, while others waved their hand, shrugged their shoulders and ran as far away rrom him as they could so as not to be infected by idealism. \!Vhen he said: An is not choice, a.rr is destiny, Petlevski meant that from his viewpoint ambition in art is the practice of futiliiy. He believed in the measure of his own talent that was no less nor more than what it was, and that is why he serenely handed his pictures over to the fate of historical justice. But here, in my attempt to chronologically reconstruct my father's life, it is more important to emphasize the other side of the same problem. However strongly he believed in the destiny of arT, he just as strongly defended his right to rree choice of elements that are otherwise considered firm points, unchangeable and given in human life. He believed that he had the right to choose the history, heritage and tradition he needed to create his homeland as his spiritual environment. If Macedonia was his homeland by Alexander, Croaria was his homeland by~ Klc:MC

is more, the destruction of tissue and form, which is directly visible on the levels of style and subject matter, and the poetic and philosophical individualism of organic Art lnformel that Ordan Petlevski elevated above a style, was founded on a blend of the denial and confirmation of tradition. In that year, when he was born to the public, Petlevski also took the moral decision to compensate for quick success by slow self-affirmation, by putting an end to any ambition that might distress the soul. He obviously did not want to drown his deeply felt Europeanism (underpinned by painterly procedure and a corresponding art philosophy) in the superficial assimilation plan that lurked behind a seemingly attractive offer to become first tenor ofthe Paris school ofpainting, as French papers were already calling him. Zagreb was the only place in the world in which my father could approach the desired ideal of a zero degree of motion . This was the point into which he could dig his Jacob 's ladder, a vertical line that led the adventure of the spirit upward, and the disease of the body downward. Almost everyone who respected my father asked him, at some point, to explain his behaviour. Such an extreme case of rejection of money and fame suggested saintly ethics but my father, although of an exemplary and sometimes touching level of morality, was no saint, believe me. He was simply unswervingly faithful to the principles of an aesthetic system he had chosen himself, a system which linked the artistic and the aesthetic on the basis of their practical uselessness, which means that Petlevski believed that an aesthetic stand is similar to a moral stand in the sense that it manages to overcome the egoism of expecting some practical purpose to be fulfilled . On the other hand, Petlevski's painting is a rare concrete example of fine art of the kind that could probably have saved even Kant himself, let alone any ordinary skeptical intellectual of our time, rrom the well-known fear of numbing the soul with an excess of pleasant feelings that come from the experience of too much beauty. Abstract art is a Kantian ideal of free beauty divested of any recognizable form, and therefore of any practical purpose that the picture of an object might awake in the viewer. l think that organic abstraction was the only way in which my father could bring attraction, as a source of pleasant feelings caused by beauty, into the cold, inhuman, rational world of aesthetic Freedom. He did this by stealth, in the same way that nature does. But Kant was only one of the books on his shelf. He preferred Aristotle. I suppose that it was here, on this moment of simultaneous veneration and cancellation of mimesis, which my father could only view as finishing what nature had started, that a completely modern, unusual idea about the picture was born. For an artist like Petlevski the picture does not imitate, it does not exemplify nature, it is nature as such, captured in a particular artefact that objectivizes the aaaaesthetic judgement of its creator. You may think that this is a case of the subject judging natural beauty as if it was an object, but what he is really judging is himself. As he painted, my father always approached his work from the aspect of personal morality based on humanity. Ill Shepherds and the Golden Age In 1962 he finished an oil painting with the unusual name of Umec - Burnt Area. As can be supposed, Umec is a place name. What happens when an artist decides to call his work after a point on the map that is not a well-known city and cannot immediately awake pleasant memories of streets people have walked in themselves, or at least streets that people in a novel have walked through instead of them? It is a risky matter to decide oil such a tide even though an unknown, exotic phonetic combination is enough to attract attention_It imJnedi.. ately lets the viewer into a secret, invites him to make a mental effort comparable with boyhood enjoyment of an adventure that makes the skin tingle. For the painrer Perlevski.. Umec was the place name of memory, the evocation of childhood spenr in his grandf.uher's house. It renewed memories of Pelagonia, a large Macedonian plane. and of the rugged IDOUillains above the village in which he sought salvation from his native rown in his cbildhood. SQU&bt rest and salvarion from illness in his youth. Stories of a dragon that could bum acres of land with a single breath, combined with peasant supe> sliliou and a boyhood ~ excired

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and frightened the boy who very early felt the attraction of spiritual adventure, but also fear of crossing the line between the world of bare reality and the landscape of the imagination. I always forgot to ask my father what happened when he walked across Umec. I think that he first encountered the concept of a homeland on the other side. Of course, it was an ideal homeland that he wanted to create by himself, or to re-create, by selecting from its Classical tradition. But first he had to trick the dragon or Cerberus, never mind which, a kind of terrible border guard that separated the poverty-stricken scorched area of twentieth-century Macedonia from the spiritual kingdom of the eternal Golden Age. Grandfather and grandmother saved me, for the I don 't know which time, from a great physical and mental crisis. Especially at a time when I myself thought that my position was hopeless. It was not until three months later that I felt the need to draw, and in ten days I made dozens of sketches and studies of everything that moved in the village farmyard. In this fragment my father describes his convalescence after an illness resulting from his hard life during the first year of studying painting, when he had to sleep under the open sky and in a barn on the outskirts of Zagreb. It made me remember his description of the bliss on the faces of shepherds and peasants who stopped to look at him working as a painter with a kind of dumb awe and comic seriousness. How not to remember here that famous scene with herders somewhere at the beginning of the first book of Cervantes's novel? Don Quixote, offered acorns by goatherds, felt the need to lecture them about the Golden Age . He used Ovid's description of the archaic age with an ideal human community devoid of egoism, even of the very concept of property, as a foundation for a speech that even the speaker thought superfluous for the people who were listening to him. Nevertheless, he continued to deliver his wonderful monologue. The herders sat in silence, honouring the beauty of the useless, the mysterious beauty of what cannot be understood. Many people of the pen often listened to my father in the same way, holding their breath, but his idea of pride in his homeland, his fiery defense of the artist's right to freely choose the spiritual tradition that suits him best, was sometimes better understood by the shepherds. IV Tossed into the Middle of a Garbage Dump I could reconstruct from memory the list of eternal themes to which my father often returned in his thoughts. At such times talks with Petlevski would turn into a kind of dictionary of problems that interested him . It included the concepts of destiny and free will, painterly adventures, romantic enthusiasm, solitude in company, history and individual talent, and also relations established between art and civilization, various media, painting and philosophy, art and memories, artistic ethics and the artist's egoism, aesthetics and politics. Describing his generation's submergence in monstrous spiritual and political terror and banishment, Petlevski added: They constrained my generation, but they didn 't manage to indoctrinate us. We were not weighed down by the Bolshevik oath, we thought with our own heads and waited for the right moment. However, for the painter Petlevski that right moment came too early considering the conditions that existed in the environment he lived and worked in. My father's creative rise happened before the iron curtain was raised. His work coincided with the current stream in Modern Art without any outside influence, more or less spontaneously, and the recognition from the other side of the political curtain confirmed that the direction the young painter had chosen was right. He could not be moved in his pure and noble intention. Witnessing the French-Aiegrian disorders on the streets of Paris, for a short period Petlevski managed to feel the pulse of European changes. This gave him a premonition of the force with which the coming student demonstrations would erupt, reflecting the dissatisfaction of a different generation of young people who loudly defied police cordons. In the gulf between this European experience on one hand, and the experience of his generation that was forced to evolve quiet systems of defense from manipulation, Petlevski developed a thought about existence as a state of being tossed in the middle of a garbage dump. AI-

and Marko Marulic. Mentioning these twO European names of Croatian painting and literature in his norebook, Peclevski explained that he had chosen Zagreb as a link to the western ati tradition of the Renaissance. His patriotism would seem like cosmopolitanism if he had not also been very suspicious of all anempts to superficially equate differences, ifhe had not seen a threat of some new form of cultural colonization in unity of the average. He was proud of the country of his roots. The real nature of this pride can only be explained by considering the world of ideas that has for centuries engrossed artists, including my father: statiing from the idea of the Co/den Age to the evocation of childhood, the eternal theme in the relationship between art and memory. Whoever is interested in more than this will have to step out of the chronology column and into the wider column, to the chapter entitled Shepherds and the Colden Age. Afier 1942 the idyll ofhis childhood ended and the time of war, hunger and solitude in the occupied town began - without his mother who died exhausted by illness and the general disappointment of her soul. This was a time when he was unprotected, a time of hardship without his father Jon who was passing through his own martyrdom first in a Bulgarian prison camp, then in flight, walking across the mountains from Bulgaria to Macedonia. l will copy out some sparse details here: Pedevski matriculated in /948 in the Prilep grammar school. The Ministry ofEducation and Culture sent him to study architecture in Skopje against his wish. It was not until afier the second term that he managed, afier submitting many applications, to withdraw from the Faculty ofArchitecture so as to tiy passing the entrance exam at the Academy ofFine Arts in Zagreb. His notes in the black notebook, which are otherwise measured and written in a concise style, include a &agment that stands out because of the strong feelings it describes. In the year 1950 my only wish finally came true -afier incredible complications I was accepted at the Academy. My drean1 came true, and so did the dream ofmy Mother for me to go to a school for afresco painter. Afier that everything else in connection with d1e Academy depended - only and exclusively- on me and my talent. That same 1950 was the year of the sublimation ofeverything that was bad for Petlevski. This primarily referred to the general atmosphere of fear and political persecution, but also to the unease, even the physical danger of my father's position in the chasm between two cultures, two mentalities and two languages constrained by the force of socialism, that same steely fist under which not only in-

dividuals, but entire peoples, died of suffocation. He filled an entire page with a description of his shattered dreams. The most difficult period of my life began, filled with existential problems, insoluble, almost fatal . When the enraged Macedonian bureaucracy handed him over to cl1e Croatian bureaucracy he lost me right to a scholarship and to live in a student dormitory. In a chain reaction I lost the right to food coupons used to buy bread, without any official documents I became an illegal inhabitant of Zagreb exposed to police maltreatment at a time in which those who had, got even more, and me homeless were punished for not having a home. I was tired, hungry, very ill, disappointed and hopeless. Seeking for Julije Klovic, the painter Petlevski had found the police. But in 1955 he held the diploma from the Zagreb Academy in his hands, and became an associate of the Krsto Hegedusic Masters' Workshop, which finally provided him with good conditions for painting: light, space, material. This was a place for painting and discussions among painters, a place of elite companionship which my father usually avoided. For him the workshop was a place to work on himself for five years, a chance for artistic introspection which, paradoxically, brought him closer to the company of world painters when in 1959 he won a prize at the First Biennial ofYoung Artists in Paris. He then visited Paris for the first time, invited by the organizers. In the masters' workshop Petlevski met the artist Biserka Bareti_. This meeting wim my mother lasted until the fulfillment of the promise, Until death do us part. In 1960- 1961 he went to Paris for me second time, a visit made possible for him by me biennial prize, which put him in touch wim the very peak European art circles. His father died. His first one-man show in the Gallerie Lacloche in 1961 was made up of works made in his Paris room. In 1963 he had a second oneman exhibition in Paris, refused many offers of gallery owners and returned for ever to Croatia. Zagreb became the place of his voluntary isolation. He left me travelling over to his paintings. His works brought him . awards, circulated in world exhibitions, returned to Paris several times, traveled to me international biennials in Sao Paolo, Venice and Tokyo, were shown at the first triennial in New Delhi, brought him the Swiss award for abstract painting from Lausanne. They travelled to New York, Mexico City, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, Amsterdam, Athens, London, Vienna, Barcelona and so on. One of his paintings, exhibited in a selection of twenty works by important twentieth century artists at an auction for or-

though this stand was founded on his gloomy estimate of his own personal and his generation's position in space and time, the metaphor of being tossed on a garbage dump in fact referred more to ideas, and less to people. What is used up always ends up on the garbage dump, he wrote, and in the following sentences expressed his fear of spiritual utilitarianism. He meant that ideas that are turned into messages, given a reason, that target a certain time or situation, that only address the man of the moment and not mankind as a whole, get used up. He differentiated between ideology and the free world of ideas that resist abuse and whose inter-relations create beauty through many useless combinations, just like art. This kind of thinking necessarily affected the level of Petlevski's poetry of painting. He was not satisfied with the modernist imperative where the New was created by consuming the old artistic heritage, which was unconditionally and definitively rejected and tossed on the garbage dump of history. On the other hand, he did not trust the recycling of ideas in the way that was later proclaimed by the Postmodernists, either. He aspired to a picture that would incorporate the entire history of art as a genetic code, but also be realized as a new and surprising form, an individual modern artifact. The following words are symptomatic: It is not influence, it is the normal continuity of European painting starting from Classical times, continuing through the Renaissance to the present. It is thus not surprising that an unprofessional observer called the last oil painting by my father - Combustion - a Rembrandt-type abstraction. It seems that he recognized in it the genetic code of the European painting tradition . In any case, how else to explain the mystery of the strong effect Petlevski's abstract paintings have on uneducated viewers who, when they stand before his work, never feel the need to voice that well-known sentence that ordinary people always say when they encounter modern art: I could do that, too! V. Adventurism and Romantic Enthusiasm For my father, writing autobiographical notes was a chance for retrospection, but also a chance to revalue past actions and choices made long ago from the position of the person who knows what happened afterwards. I was young. I believed, I hoped, that no politics or demoniac force could frustrate what God had given me. That romantic enthusiasm ofmine raised me above reality and freed me from any kind ofcoercion outside art. Art was my salvation, defense and guarantee for everything that was to happen (what I carried in me, desired and dreamt about). This makes me think of something that my father used to say to me whenever I felt discouraged. Talent is not a coin that can fall out ofyour pocket. For him, sinking into the painting was a way of finding salvation from everyday coercion and the ideological pressure of the environment he lived in. My father was an intellectual who liked to think about literature and music. He was a man who did not only keep philosophy books on his bookshelf, but read them. All the same, while he was painting he surrendered to the instinct of creativity, he felt the imperative to work without a direct cause. He called this imperative his destiny in art since, you will agree, talent is not democratically distributed among people. He approached his own gift as God-given, an immanent mysterious development of a higher order than could be justified by any pedagogical optimism or the endless human confidence in progress as the result of study. The progress of talent, manifested through alternating feelings of bliss and damnation, Petlevski called romantic enthusiasm, the inverted commas resulting from the perspective of a man who experienced illness as the closeness of death. Although he viewed the extent of his talent as predestined, he experienced the act of painting itself as an adventure. I see every new canvas as a new challenge, uncertainty, pure adventure. I do not know how the painting will end. When I paint I do not know what I will paint. I usually begin to work on several canvases at the same time and may finish only one, or none. Certainty is not commendable in art. Petlevski was primarily interested in the visual as an adventure in colour or line and he stressed that the artist needs as much intensity of inspiration and as much energy to cover a canvas or paper, because in the beginning

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both are just whiteness. He did not consider it essential to analyze his psychological state, instead he allowed the imperative of the visual medium to lead him through an unknown landscape. He explored that landscape with interest, moving like a pilgrim towards a destination point that the power of art had removed from the chronological axis of change into eternity. My father worked as if he had all the time in the world before him. He believed that playing with those useless things that make art beautiful can never end. In every picture he allowed visuality to be the impulse that naturally led him through stations similar to those on a pilgrimage. If he encountered the company of artists of the past in those imaginary cities he transversed during painting , he would start to play a game with them, which did not recognize the boundaries of centuries in the quest for trans-historical modernity. The following statement should be interpreted in this context: 1am not interested in the state of being, 1am interested in eternity. Not in what belongs to the soul but in what belongs to art. My father often said that a person can choose, if nothing else, his company. When he was young he was sure that the eternally young company of old masters would not desert him even in those days and years when, disappointed in people, he withdrew into himself From the perspective of the end of his life my father also accentuated the other side of this choice, the heavy fate of being alone. The fact that he used to be friendly with Max Ernst in Paris in the sixties only illustrated a time that could never return , the sacred moment of European modern artists who were seizing the last chance to talk in a cafe. Because they suspected that soon nothing would be as it used to. VI. His TragicMuse My father was a romantic adventurer. In his tender boyhood years he applied in an international competition for the post of national park guard in Tanzania. He could not speak any foreign languages, he was not of age and he hated weapons, but he knew how to tame what was wild and win the respect offarm animals. He supposed that he would not have much chance to talk in any of the world languages in the African wilderness and, what was most important, he was already aware that he could spend long periods of time alone with himself without feeling uncomfortable. Since he did not manage to go to Africa, he became a painter. Two things connect Africa with my father's adventure of painting: love of nature and an inclination to solitude. To descend and ascend through the dangerous spheres of the spirit in the company of teachers long dead, as Dante travelled with Virgil and Alain de Litle's human spirit with Aristotle, the artist needs something that fills other people with horror , the art of enduring solitude. At the moment when skill becomes art, which is difficult to logically explain, even the great teachers of the past stand back and the Muses take over. My father was consistent in his approach to solitude, which he needed to travel along the vertical spiritual line. It might sound contradictory, but Petlevski liked to be integrated and stand aside at the same time. That is why he had two homelands and could be doubly loved and doubly alone. When the time came for the guides to pull back during his painting adventure, Aristotle, the teacher he had taken over from Alexander of Macedon, retreated. The beloved Croatian teachers Giulio Clovio and Marcus Marulus also left him. He remained alone with his Muse. His Muse was tragic, but all the same Petlevski called himself a happy man beloved by destiny. It took him to Zagreb, or perhaps it would be better to say that his Muse returned him there. The Croatian city was the place of his greatest relaxation and solitude in an atmosphere of family happiness, the only place where he could sit down, take the black notebook in his hands and with saintly serenity write the last sentence of his memories: Painting is my intimacy. There is nothing after that statement. Not even a full stop. Exchanging looks more than words, my brother and I seek for a place worthy of the paintings. And we are full of apprehension. Because nothing is worthy, nothing safe. Except for the place already ensured for them in Malraux's imaginary museum.

phans in the Gaieties Beaux-Arts, fetched a vertiginous price in dollars, as can be seen from some yellowed papers expressing gratitude. Petlevski is represented in the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris and the Museums of Modem Art in New York, Johannesburg and Caracas, in the National Gallery in Prague, the Museum ofArt and History in Geneva, in many museums and galleries in Zagreb, Skopje, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Ljubljana, and in several major private art collections worldwide. Every year and every day his personal seclusion became more unwavering. I find a post card dated 77.77. sent by my father from Delphi, but this trip need not be counted as a temporary loss of his Zagreb bearings because it was a spiritual trip along the Classical traiL a trip to meet Homer that was by chance materialized. For a moment I fell into a black bottomless pit, then into white desolation, he wrote remembering how he temporary left his body. At the beginning of 1985 he survived clinical death, but the history of dangerous situations he had gone through from his earliest childhood was amazingly long. The little Black Vision that he finished several weeks before his cardiac fibrillation was different from the Black Vision from the end of the sixties. After 1985 he considered all the time that was left as a gift. He always painted standing up, walking in fad, for a moment drawn closer by the magnet of the canvas, then repulsed by it. In the eighties illness sat him down at the table, and it is not surprising that he did more drawings in that period. When he temporarily lost his eyesight in 1989, belief in the third eye saved him from despair. I should write THE END beside the date of22 January 1997. This is not easy for me, so please cross into the left column. Here Iwill add the following: used to death before death, he would have feu nd it easier to leave life if he had not had to leave an environment of matchless love. Because of this love he considered himself a man born under a lucky star. My father only said that he was sorry. He was not afraid.

Post script. Music is the highest imaginable form of abstraction, but it nevertheless always seemed to me that painting is the closest to God's work because it is not only creation, it is embodiment in pigment in which the idea seems to voluntarily, happily agree to be revived, to be incarnated for f,eople even when it seems that it has discarded form and any kind of similarity with the recognizable things in this world. Petlevski accepted painting as a reward, as a rare, precious possibility to touch the spirit. He woke up with the awareness of that wonderful possibility every day. My father did not like chronologies because he believed that art-time surpasses the boundaries of events and individual lives. He would never agree to write a diary, or perhaPs I'm wrong? The Fantasmagie Cycle was a kind of personal diary of gratitude.

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