Road of Glory

At the end of 1950, Peđa left the diplomatic corps and devoted himself fully to painting and writing. And it was Paris again: “My restless nomadic spirit wouldn’t let me be still so, in the fifties, I headed towards Paris for the third time, this time at my own expense.” It was at the beginning of the 1950s that he created a new poetic pattern, intertwined with imagination, phantasmagoria, with apocalyptic, abstract landscapes. Due to this alone, he is one of the few authors who are represented in Pavle Beljanski’s collection by the works from the fifties. The Road of Glory (1952/1953), just like The Old City of Bar, can be viewed on three levels: on the first there is a man with a trumpet, calling, declaring, proclaiming, the second level is filled with graves, like a warning about the price of glory, the third level is reserved for those who have achieved triumph, and there seems to be no better symbol of this than the eternal Parisian Arc de Triomphe. Milosavljević placed the Arch above everything else, like a cross on the Golgotha, consciously disrupting logical proportions. When viewing the composition, one hesitates: did Peđa succeed in establishing that organization and order of the cycle of life in it, or did he deliberately allow a “lyrical chaos” to prevail? And it seems that this is the very idea he started with and successfully carried out in all his patterns, including all the cycles of his opus.