Slavomir Miletić (born 1930) is a Bosnian Serb sculptor from Bosnia and Herzegovina, now living in the Netherlands. He attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts de l'Institut de France.^[1]

Career

In Yugoslavia, Slavomir Miletić was noted for his (sometimes large) works, characterized by a rough style and for occasionally provoking controversy. In 1959, while living in Belgrade, Miletić won a scholarship to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He had various exhibitions there and married Elisabeth Toutenhoofd, from Holland, who studied Serbian languages ​​at the Sorbonne. After he ran out of money in Paris, he moved to the Netherlands in the early 1960s.

His sculptures also did not sell in the Netherlands, even after media-acclaimeds exhibition in Galerie Loujetsky of The Hague and "De Drie Hendricken" in Amsterdam.^[2] At the age of 32, on the brink of being expelled as an artist without money, he took on work in the food industry at the Honig factory in Koog aan de Zaan. Director Paul Honig read an article in a Zaandam magazine about the artist's hardships and gave him his first assignment in the Netherlands. One month later, a concrete male figure stood in front of Honey's new building: a laborer carrying a heavy burden.

The Woodworker

The artwork for Honig was received so positively that the Zaandam municipal council commissioned him for 15,000 guilders to make a statue for the new Beatrix Bridge. While Miletić was still working on the preparatory clay model, his artwork was rejected by the city. After an appeal, a new committee also disapproved of the sculpture. Miletic nevertheless continued to work on its model. The municipality then decided to evacuate his workshop (a shed in N old gas factory), after which a fight ensued between opponents and opponents of Miletić.

With the molds that were later intended to cast the statue in bronze, Miletić made a concrete copy of De Houtwerker. This sculpture was placed in Amsterdam along the road to Zaandam. Later, the Woodworker moved to Haarlemmerplein to finally end up on Waterlooplein.

In 1986, the 100-year-old newspaper De Zaanlander still tried to get a bronze copy of the statue in Zaandam, but the municipality did not want to make a place available and the budget also did not end up. In 1994, the concrete statue was moved to Zaandam. In 2002, this concrete statue was temporarily placed at the Zaans Museum, after which in 2004 a bronze copy was finally unveiled by Mayor Ruud Vreeman in the presence of Miletić on the Houthavenkade in Zaandam. The concrete copy is currently located at the Art Center in Zaandam.

The Peace Rocket

In 1981, on the eve of the anti-nuclear weapons demonstration of 21 November 1981, a meter-high sculpture was placed on Museumplein. It was removed in 1995.

References

External links

• Official site