Vojin Bakić

Biography

In the spring of 1956 a fire broke out in Ivan Meštrović's former studio in Zagreb. Bakić lost about a hundred sculptures, folders of drawings, photographs and documentation, and several finished plaster models for monuments. Works he had been preparing for the Venice Biennale were destroyed as well.

Within a few months he made new pieces in another space, among them the plaster “Bull”.

Bakić was born on 5 June 1915 in Bjelovar, into a well-off Serbian family; his father built roads and ran a quarry, and died in 1925, when the boy was ten. There were six children. At the gymnasium (secondary school) he was most drawn to philosophy, sociology and literature, but he also modelled in clay and plaster, and in 1933 Bjelovar showed his plaster Moses and a clay female torso. His drawing teacher told him that a talent like his must not be squandered. After school he studied law briefly, then, with the help of his brothers Aleksandar and Milan, entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he studied with Frano Kršinić and Robert Frangeš-Mihanović and also worked with Ivan Meštrović. He graduated in 1939 and visited Florence and Milan. His first solo exhibition took place in Bjelovar in 1940: drawings and female figures in stone, with restrained curves and closed volumes.

In 1941 the Ustaše, the Croatian fascist regime's militia, arrested his four brothers and sent them to the Danica camp and then to Jadovno, where all four were killed. Bakić himself was arrested at the entrance to his flat in Zagreb. He was saved by a written guarantee from Kršinić, who put himself at risk by giving it. Bakić avoided conscription and, reportedly, held a forged identity card in the name of Ivan Stilinović. From 1942 he made models of animals for the agronomy faculty of the University of Zagreb; students used such models even after the war. The memory of his brothers later entered the monument “Bjelovarac”, a portrait of his youngest brother Slobodan.

After 1945 he moved away from his earlier manner and began treating surfaces in an Impressionist spirit, with expressive transitions of light and shade. His portraits of Ivan Goran Kovačić (1946) and Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević (1948) stand out for their psychological conviction. The “Monument to Those Shot in Bjelovar” (1947) was his first public commission. From 1947 he worked in Meštrović's former studio together with Kosta Angeli Radovani and other sculptors. In the 1950s his volumes compress and crystallise: “Bull” (1950), “Self-Portrait” (1952), and sketches for a monument to Marx and Engels (1950–1953) that were never carried out. Then came the series “Nudes”, “Torsos” and “Heads”, and from 1958 open form, interior space and the reflection of light. The monument to Stjepan Filipović in Valjevo was one of the first steps towards renewing Partisan memorials.

International recognition came in 1956, when twelve of his sculptures were shown in the Yugoslav pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 1958 the bronze “Bull” stood beside the Yugoslav pavilion at the World's Fair in Brussels, and the city of Antwerp later bought it for the Middelheim open-air sculpture museum. Another cast was set up in 1959 in the German city of Marl. In 1959 Bakić exhibited at Documenta in Kassel, and, together with Ivan Picelj and Aleksandar Srnec, at the Galerie Denise René in Paris.

From 1958 he was occupied with freeing form from anthropomorphic references. The series “Elaborated Surfaces” (1960–1964) and “Light-bearing Shapes” (1963–1968) were assembled from identical elements and mirror-like circles; he worked in stainless steel, brass, duralumin and other materials. These works are close to Constructivism and to New Tendencies, the international movement of kinetic and optical art, with which he exhibited in Zagreb (1963, 1969), Gelsenkirchen and Mainz. Zagreb presented a sculpture from the series “Circulations in Space” to Mainz. His work was also shown at the São Paulo Biennial.

Memorial complexes became his most visible work. The “Monument to the Victory of the People of Slavonia” at Kamenska, a winged form thirty metres high, was built between 1958 and 1968. Dotršćina near Zagreb, a site of mass graves, was laid out to a design commissioned in 1960 from Bakić, the architect Josip Seissel and the writer Jure Kaštelan; the entrance was opened in 1965, and in 1980 six of his crystalline steel forms were installed in the Valley of Graves. The memorial on Petrova Gora opened in 1981, and in Kragujevac the same year a monument of seven circles appeared. His last major work of this kind was the monument to the victims of the railway disaster in Zagreb (1975–1978). The sculpture “Wreath” has been awarded since 1971 to the winners of the poetry festival “Goran's Spring” at Lukovdol. In 1979 he received the Vladimir Nazor Award, and in 1977 he became a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He usually spent the summers in Duboka bay on the island of Korčula.

In 1987 Bakić and his son Zoran, an architect, won the competition for a monument to Tito in Zagreb. It was to stand in the square in front of the city assembly building for the centenary of Tito's birth, but because of the events of the early 1990s the project was halted.

In 1991–1992, during the removal of the Communist legacy, “Bjelovarac”, “Gudovčan”, the “Monument to the Victory of the People of Slavonia” (parts of it went into tableware) and the “Monument to the Partisans of Bilogora” were blown up or destroyed. At Dotršćina the sculptures were destroyed or stolen, and the bust of Kovačić was destroyed in 2004. The monument on Petrova Gora was badly damaged after Operation Storm. “Bjelovarac” was restored on 8 December 2010. Bakić died in Zagreb on 18 December 1992.