View of Belgrade

Miličević returned to the country in December 1918 on a small French ship in the same group together with young lieutenant, Veljko Stanojević. Weakened by seasickness, he was not able to take the voyage to Dubrovnik. Instead, he had to get off in Herceg Novi and there is no information on how he managed to get to the new Yugoslav capital. One thing is certain; at the beginning of 1919 he was with his brothers Živorad and Momčilo, and with Svetomir Nastasijević in their flat in Kneza Miloša Street. Too exhausted, neurotic, unable to start his life anew, fearing loneliness and death, he frequently wandered the streets aimlessly. In a way, he was alienated from his surroundings and even from his closest friends. Under such circumstances he naturally could not paint. He often started to paint but invariably ended up charging angrily at the canvas and suffering from an enormous psychological shock. The only preserved landscape from the final year of his life, A View of Belgrade, was painted at Bežanijska kosa. The canvas was left unfinished, unsigned, but it clearly shows the artist’s dilemmas. He attempted to transfer the vague, grayish-blue atmosphere of spatial depth from his Corfu motifs to a continental scenery of relatively sharp contrasts and solid form. Using broad horizontal strokes, he applied layers of a grayishblue, considerably undifferentiated in tone. In the synthetic sense of the arrangement of masses, the shape of the objects is disintegrated to such a degree that the painting borders on the abstract. This landscape represents the total opposite of Miličević’s planned figural composition with the topic “Vido – the Island of Death” and leaves us wondering what this artist’s true orientation would be in the future.