Catalogue: Dušan Džamonja. Sculptures. Drawings. Projects.

Gallery of the Serbian

Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, November 2004, no. 103, p. 42- 53.

Ierina Subotić

Dušan Džamonja: an Art That Survives

The best and most impressive answer to possible questions posed by new, young
generations about the place of Dušan Džamonja and his opus in art history is present in
his works and the texts written on him. The great number of monumental sculptures by
Džamonja speak of the bygone period oppressed with an ideology, and a whole library of
texts, books, monographs narrate about the artist’s place in the world. There are general
and specific reviews, catalogue prefaces, studies, critical reviews, articles, essays...
signed by the most renowned experts from the second half of the twentieth century, from
Giulio Carlo Argan and Umbro Apollonio, Herbert Read and Giuseppe Marchiori, Vera
Horvat Pintarić and Radoslav Putar, Gillo Dorfles and Lawrence Alloway, Lazar
Trifunović and Zoran Pavlović, Pierre Restany and Zoran Kržišnik, to Jasia Reichardt,
Miodrag B. Protić, Radovan Ivančević, Marco Valsecchi, A. M. Hammacher, Roger-
Pierre Turine, Andrej Medved, Miroslav Klivar, Ješa Denegri and numerous others, older
and younger... For almost half a century critics have been writing about the works of
Dušan Džamonja as the highest paragon of the consolidation and rise of modernism, and
not only within the framework of Croatian and Yugoslav, but also European and global
art. People have analyzed his devotion to formal elements, considered his relationship
towards space, volume, materials, new and classical. Authors have talked about his
feeling for life, ambience, old crafts and inexhaustible light changes on the epidermis of
his sculptures; they have written about the classical balance of masses, about the
synchronization of all elements and the organic movement similar to swelling of a
nucleus that can be read in the outlines of the works and that endows his sculptures with a
humane dimension. Some mentioned the consistency of his development with the layers
of historical and traditional reminiscences, or the weavings of Western and Eastern
influences, typical of the Balkan environment. Simultaneously, others noticed the logical
correlation of his sculptures, drawings and architectural designs. Džamonja’s intuition has
been compared with the creative works of Henry Moore and Cèzar, and his totem-like
forms with the creations of Antoine Pevsner. Authors have written also about Džamonja’s
unswerving belief in tactile values, about his supreme aesthetics, and mention his
concentration on the plastic features of the work, its communicative and metaphoric
qualities, also about the absence of suspicion and skepticism as categories that eliminate
the look forward and faith in progress, or crisis that denotes different phases and historic
limitations of modernism. People have also noticed his inexhaustible engagement in
monumental commemoration of historic dates and events, his unselfish giving of his self
to public spaces, equaled to the concept of the artistic credo exteriorization and at the
same time identified with the preservation of the belief that personal example can
contribute to the creation of a brighter future.

With the current and continuous reexamination of the previously established values, with
the loss of faith in the intense dimension of the discovery of something new, progress
and personal skill, individual knowledge and expertise, with the discontinuation of the
formerly established aesthetic views on the project of modernism, as proclaimed, among
others, by Hal Foster, Kenneth Frampton, Craig Owens and Douglas Crimp, we now
perceive theoretical approaches and interpretations differing from those that had treated
the work of Dušan Džamonja. A critical reexamination of the legacies of the century of
learning and a systematic creation of modern world institutions, including the institution
of independent artistic practice, fed and developed in accord with its internal logic, will
erase, among other things, clear distinctions between artistic categories and disciplines,
and the once glorified, but already overcome, autonomy of art will be neglected, although
art used to fight fiercely for that status.

It seems that through the new outlines of interdisciplinarity, within the sphere of touching
upon the other, we recognize the power and instinct for survival in the works of Dušan
Džamonja. So, it is not a coincidence that the artist himself looks upon his current
projects with so much confidence although, like the majority of visionary proposals, they
remain in the domain of fiction, waiting for the moment of their realization. They are the
points of contact between sculpture and architecture, precisely the idea of making his
sculptures grow into monumental architectural edifices, raised hundreds of stories
upwards or distributed over thousands of square kilometers. Those projects comprise
monuments and public sculptures, architectural-plastic and multi-modular proposals for
public buildings – for skyscrapers with different functions, for religious and cultural
centres, even hospitals, and a special segment – already realized to a great degree – is
meant for personal needs, spaces for living and work, foundations, or endowments.
Emphasizing the fact that Džamonja defines the ambience with minimal means and that
his autonomous spatial quality has remained unburdened by purpose, Dubravka Kisić
places him, justifiably, among the foremost “protagonists of sculptural architecture” –
Franck Gary, Peter Eisenmann, Daniel Liebeskind and Zaha Hadid, but with an inverse
value: he has approached architecture through the transformation of his sculpture, and
they have developed their architectural projects towards sculpture. Džamonja’s recent,
exceptionally well accepted exhibition in the prestigious Royal Institute of British
Architects in London was founded on the same premises.

Džamonja has proved his talent in altered living conditions as well, where one can no
longer expect official commissions for grandiose monuments or, at least, designs for
them, such as the commemorative memorials for Dachau or Auschwitz, Moslavina,
Kozara, Dubrava, Barletta, Jajinci, the Sirmian Front... The artist has found a solution for
his work: he still makes what best suits his creative impulse – sculptures of large
dimensions for open spaces. He first established the fabulous Sculpture Park in the small
Istrian town of Vrsar, his endowment which he approached with the same enthusiasm as
any of his works. His monumental sculpture is in perfect harmony there with the
environment, the long Adriatic horizon, the Mediterranean greenery and the natural mild
incline of the terrain. In the exceptional area of his summer-house-foundation-park
Džamonja has displayed his exceptional talent for the realization of each, carefully
studied detail, with an emphasis on the fitting of large sculptures into the open space. The
arrangement of his sculptures at the Costa Smeralda of Sardinia was done in a similar
way: with an absolute harmony of nature and art.
The artist also engages in other, new challenges: he makes sculptures for urban settings,
full of life, spaces of live culture dialogues. These are no longer places of the past, heroic
deeds, horrors and memories, but favourite environments of daily, chance pilgrimages
where Džamonja’s sculptures enter an active dialogue with their surroundings, first with
the passers-by, later with the buildings around. Those spaces are neither decorations nor
neutral backgrounds for his sculptures, because they have their own history, artistic
values and meanings. On the contrary, the prestigious old town nuclei become excellent
partners in conversation with Džamonja’s works. It could be Mansard’s Place Vendome in
Paris, one of the most beautiful urban entities in the world1, or the spacious downtown of
Lisbon, then Zagreb, Prague, Varaždin or Brussels, where sculptures were also placed at
arm’s reach and where the view amalgamated the architecture of times past. In a similar
way Džamonja’s sculptures live in encounters with pedestrian crowds they intertwine
with in the streets, as has already happened at the Corso in Rijeka, at Stradun in
Dubrovnik, and as has been planed for Knez Mihailova Street in Belgrade – the loudest
town artery, the promenade of the young, a business and artistic centre. In all of those
urban environments that sculptures were deliberately made for Džamonja’s works obtain
new qualities – they absorb the radiation of the surrounding space, then change and begin
a new life. The arrangements depend on the potentials that sculptures adapt to and change
their appearance; they are not static in a classical way and one can even call them
installations (J. Reichardt). However, the stable quality of those arrangements is achieved
in a provocative meeting of the classical and contemporary, and such a confrontation
enriches Džamonja’s works in the same way that the surrounding spaces have always, at
least temporarily, acquired different meanings, vistas and plastic sounds.

The exhibiting of Dušan Džamonja’s sculptures in Belgrade, after many years and all
those catastrophes that have happened in our lives in the meantime, has many meanings
and significances. It not only reminds us of those, presently already historic, times when
we exhibited together in the world, when one believed in the meaning of the true
humanist mission of art and its role as creator of a happier, more progressive, more
beautiful and better world, but it is an occasion to present Džamonja’s works to new
1
In 1998 Džamonja completed a cycle of ten sculptures specifically made for this square, but due to their
dimensions the largest had to be exhibited in the nearby Place de la Bourse.
generations and with new connotations, in a reduced but essentially coherent aspect,
already seen in big European capitals. A comprehensive presentation of his works
comprises all the segments that make it unique – granite and steel sculptures in gallery
formats and the monumental ones meant to stand in open space, drawings and
architectural projects. All of that now blends into a uniform homogenous body here, in
Belgrade. Namely, according to his own words, Džamonja spent World War II as child,
with his family in Serbia, in Ljig and Belgrade, where he first showed his interest in and
inclination towards sculpture. When he was fourteen or fifteen, his father enrolled him in
a private art school.2 He could also admire then, almost secretly, the gigantic works by
Meštrović in the collection of Prince Paul’s Museum, in the centre of the city, in the
former Royal Palace. Meštrović’s Kosovo cycle must have appeared awesome to young
Džamonja inspiring him to think about the enigma called sculptural creation. He will later
endeavour to resolve the same enigma with his professors who largely shared Meštrović’s
views – with masters Antun Augustinčić, Vanja Radauš, Frano Kršinić, but also during
his visits to the great museums of the world, in front of Hera from Samos, the Victory
from Samothrace, the Venus of Milo and the head of Nefertiti, in front of Michelangelo’s
metaphors of Day, Night, Morning and Dusk, before Rodin’s Citizens of Calais and the
reclining figures of Henry Moore. All the qualities he discovered and loved in the works
of anonymous or renowned geniuses he wanted to “absorb” and transpose in his own
works – their strength and simplicity, beauty and harmony, élan and largess, dynamism
and movement, their relationship to internal and external space, the respect and
requirements of materials... During his entire work he has relied on the settled
experiences of the civilization he was appropriating, conquering, using, quoting – and
above all, admiring and respecting. It happened also, after a short period of figurative
attempts at the beginning of his career in the 1950s, when he captured, early enough, the
expressive and gestural abstraction of the organic but not anthropomorphic world.3 His
works from that period possessed the qualities of classical creations although evidently
they grew out of his impressions of the contemporary visible and tactile world to which

2
It could be the Private school of Mladen Josić.
3
From the moment he abandoned a referrential relationship to the real world, more precisely to figurative
representation, Džamonja also stopped naming his workds: he made only numerical, technical notes of the
material.
they belonged. Džamonja has always instinctively recognized the contemporaneity and
transformed it into his works.

Drawings in India ink, sepia, with pen or roller are organic parts of Džamonja’s creative
process. One could also say vital parts. This has always been a discipline that faithfully
followed the impulses of his gestures, body and thoughts that revealed his personality and
freed him from any rational postulate and imposed limitation. This is the most loyal and
most direct idiom of his poetic being that accepts no borderlines or technical,
technological, semantic or any other inconveniences. It is defined by the freedom of the
author’s idea, unrestrained imagination, his entire energy and creative power. Džamonja’s
drawings can be three meters long, sepia endows them with tonal accords related to
corroded metal sculptures, they take into account spatial relationships, the penetration of
light and a play of shadows, just like the volumes of his three-dimensional works.
Drawings frequently indicate the internal world of a sculpture but are also quite
autonomous.

His sculptures that most closely approach the drawing of gestural expressiveness were
made in the late fifties and early sixties, when all of his investigations into the negation of
traditional visual features and the introduction of the new qualities that built up the
contemporary art after World War II approached informel art, action and gestural
painting. According to the broadest professional circles, Dušan Džamonja was a pioneer
in the consolidation of the new postulates of modernism. He added to the classical
sculptural material – stone, granite, marble, wood, glass, metal – some of the oldest
artisan products like nails and chains, later combined with concrete and black quartz.
With the technique of welding he achieved the effect of accidental and almost
uncontrolled impact of fire. There, like in “three-dimensional calligraphy”, his signature
proved to be an expressive and powerful means of communication, until the 1980s when
he showed an interest in minimalism and cylindrical, reduced geometric forms
culminating in his project for the monument on the banks of the Rhein-Main-Danube
canal in 1990. Two purified, semantically defined segments of this monument, placed like
mirror reflections opposite one another, denoted the beginning of Džamonja’s new
creative stage that will deal in prefabricated series comprised of seven elements. His
comment on these new works, composed of repeated fragments, was: “If symphonies can
be written with just seven notes, why could not spatial compositions consist of seven
elements?” Although made of identical serial parts, the sculptures from the past decade
possess quite different outlines, some critics mention their extended gesture; they have
varied visual angles and dynamics, but one still feels that unique elements make them
compact.

The artist had already used a similar system, in the regular distribution of set nails. The
application of prefabricated chains also suggested repetition, continuity, flow, so that the
line of his consistency can also be identified in these compositions of sculptures. That
line relates upon the post-modernist concept of repetition with difference.

Dušan Džamonja has remained true to his confidence in the real mission of art, even
today when so many illusions have been shattered and so many values crushed and
denied. He is still a great enthusiast, a great individualist, extremely autonomous, capable
of opposing the systems that can endanger him. In that sense he continues with his
emancipator’s role. Therefore, there is no end of ideology for him. His life impulse is
identical to his creative power and new ideas are born from that unbreakable connection,
new sculptures, drawings and projects. This makes even more provocative the issue of
Džamonja’s survival in the changed historical, artistic, social, economic and, of course,
political conditions that have marked the turn of the century. It does not concern his
works, but their current reception in view of the great differences in the reading of art,
particularly sculpture, and Rosalind Krauss’s concept of expanded field. Džamonja has
developed with the changes and has always found adequate, correct solutions. That is the
key to his survival.

Irina Subotić Belgrade, August 2004