Mica Todorović
I A girl sits on a swing, one hand resting on her chest, the other seemingly holding on. Her breasts are small, hips firm and solid, legs strong, with feet disappearing into tangled shrubbery… legs that don’t yet seem ready for the swing’s flight. Her face is round, calm, serene, with delicate and gentle features. Her hair is blonde, perhaps reddish. A cat is on the apple tree, playful, tensely poised on a severed branch; beside the girl’s legs is a white dove looking at her curiously. Some fish-like shape floats near the girl, puzzling us… one apple is “caught” mid fall, a few lie on the ground. All rendered in earthy, muted tones, everything blending into everything else. You think of Matisse, or early Renaissance masters, yet the painting remains enigmatic. You lean on the symbolism of the cat (independence, femininity), the white dove (innocence), the apple (Eve), but things don’t get much clearer. Meanings slip away, what remains is the gentle flow of color, warmth of tone and expression, a sense of intimacy and fairytale charm. This is “The Swing” by Mica Todorović. A painting that will captivate, confuse, and ultimately exhilarate you—if you’re lucky enough to ever see it.
Independence of the creative spirit. Consistency. Non-belonging. Renunciation. These are some associations I have with Mica Todorović, arguably the most renowned and respected visual artist of Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is one of the rare artists in our history to whom this society has at least partially—though by no means sufficiently—repaid its debt. Unlike many other female artists who fared much worse in gaining public recognition (Adela Behr Vukić, Lujza Kuzmić Mijić, Iva Despić Simonović, Rajka Merćep…), Mica at least has a street named after her in Sarajevo, albeit a tucked-away but beautiful one. You can also see her face, thanks to a bust in front of the Academy of Fine Arts.
Mica Todorović was the first in so many things that it became impossible for Bosnia and Herzegovina’s memory—typically dismissive of women’s legacies—to ignore her. She pushed into spaces where women scarcely had access, documented, founded institutions, taught. And most importantly: she created. Always with complete independence, self-sufficiency, distance, within a niche she carved for herself and guarded fiercely.
She was an original figure, a strong and firm personality. She rarely spoke about herself and avoided cameras. If we had to pick one of her statements as her motto, let it be the one she reportedly told curious journalists year after year, possibly with mild irritation: “Let my paintings speak for me.” So, let’s listen to them.
Born as Mileva in Sarajevo in 1897, she came from the family of a district prefect, or as it was then said, a K. und K. (Imperial and Royal) official—Petar Pera Todorović. Her father had moved to Sarajevo from Pančevo and married Jelka from the old Bosnian Savić family. They were well-off, and there is evidence that visual art was highly valued in her family; in one interview, Mica mentioned her father’s school friendship with the painter Uroš Predić, which partly explains why her parents didn’t oppose her decision to study art at a time when that was very unusual for a young woman. It seems her family supported her artistic ambitions—a crucial factor in that era.
At the time, the artistic life in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia revolved around three centers: Zagreb, Belgrade, and Ljubljana. European avant-garde influences were strongly felt, especially in Zagreb, which Mica eventually chose. There was a weariness with the old, a surge of energy from the new—both in the visual arts and other fields, and the revolutionary impulse was growing stronger. We know little about Mica’s childhood, except her own testimony that she drew well from an early age and that she once vacillated between her two loves: literature and painting. But it is well documented how important Roman Petrović was to her— probably the first to notice her talent and encourage her to pursue further study. Returning from studies in Budapest, Krakow, and Zagreb, full of the latest impressions from European art, Roman gave Mica the push she needed—perhaps during a chance encounter on a Sarajevo street. Let’s picture it: two young artists in passionate, hours-long conversation, perhaps poring over Kandinsky’s “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” in its original German . Or a brief street encounter—perhaps a slightly arrogant young artist encouraging the timid, one year-younger girl… And a decisive sentence: “Well then, become a painter!”
At the time Mica chose her path, painting was gaining momentum even in Sarajevo. “The euphoria of the post-war years, accompanied by many exhibitions and fueled by artists returning to the country, a few collectors, and art lovers, would soon fade with the withdrawal of foreign capital from war-exhausted Bosnia.” Still, the new was happening elsewhere. Surrealism, Dadaism, and Zenitism offered a visual poetics of resistance to traditional views of art, dominant canons, and bourgeois institutions.
II “Avant-garde movements in Yugoslavia were international in orientation and based on interdisciplinary language and almost revolutionary behavior. Young artists advocated redefining cultural and artistic, political, scientific, and technological progress.” She began her studies in 1920 at the Higher School of Arts and Crafts, soon to be renamed the Academy of Fine Arts. She studied under Ferdo Kovačević, Bela Čikoš, and most extensively under the art historian, outstanding artist, and dedicated pedagogue Ljubo Babić.
At the Academy, she studied portrait, nude, and still life, mastering craft, sense of order and harmony, disciplined application of rules. “In the final certificate dated June 30, 1926, Ljubo Babić wrote: ‘Excellent in work. Great diligence and talented mastery of painting tasks. Serious drawing preparation shows that Miss Mica Todorović has all the conditions for independent artistic work.’”
In the only surviving photo from her student days, we see a young woman with a cloche hat and a checkered coat, dressed in the flâneur fashion of the 1920s. Strip away the era’s fashion—the loud pattern, oversized hat—and what remains is her serious expression and piercing gaze from under her bangs, revealing the determination and diligence of a girl eager to learn, to succeed—to be taken seriously. No trace of provincial uncertainty. Just pure focus. In Ivan Tabaković’s portrait from 1923, we see a similar figure—burdened by fads of time, but retaining the same sharp gaze and authoritative expression, plus restless hands in her lap, perhaps more from impatience than insecurity? However, the “Self-Portrait” (1929/30) shows a confident artist in angular lines, strict male shirt, and a bold bob haircut—an almost androgynous embodiment of the so-called “New Woman”, a self-aware artist who presents herself as such.
Painting for Mica wasn’t just about learning and mastering rules—it was also a space for exploration, experimentation, and finding her own voice. A crucial part of that process were her classmates—all major Yugoslav artists, among whom she was the only woman: Krsto Hegedušić, Ivan Tabaković, Oton Postružnik, Leo Junek, Kamilo Ružička, Omer Mujadžić, and others. She was closest with the first three.
The group regularly met at the Esplanade Hotel in Zagreb to debate modern art’s direction and purpose. One of the most important questions was the extent to which art and artists should be socially engaged. Though Mica eagerly participated, she avoided politics —“because she found it deathly boring,” as Azra Begić put it. In one class photo, she sits at the center, legs crossed, relaxed and smiling. She was clearly respected in that group, and her being the only woman wasn’t an issue—at least not in that safe space.
The Esplanade group formed the “Zemlja” (Earth) artists’ association in 1929—the first of its kind in Croatia. Mica declined Krsto Hegedušić’s invitation to join. This marked the emergence of her independent spirit that wouldn’t commit to programs or groups in art. Some art historians call this “passivity” or a “participant observer” position, but it was a conscious distancing that shaped her individualism —and perhaps contributed to her somewhat marginal place in art history. Still, she shared many values with Zemlja: art should serve society, critique injustice, fight against imported styles, dilettantism, and art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art). Inspired by local traditions and folklore, Zemlja advocated for democratizing art.
Architect Drago Ibler writes in the Zemlja manifesto: “One must live the life of one’s time. One must create in the spirit of one’s time. Contemporary life is imbued with social ideas, and questions of the collective are dominant. The artist cannot resist the will of the new society and stand outside the collective. Because art is an expression of one’s view of the world. Because art and life are one.”
Among the important influences was certainly social literature, led by Miroslav Krleža, who himself wrote relevant literary criticism and whose authority in the general artistic field was crucial for young creators. Thanks perhaps precisely to Krleža, among others, the greatest influence on the Zemlja group was exerted by the German painter, graphic artist, and cartoonist Georg Grosz, whose texts were reproduced in politically progressive publications. This influence was solidified through the collective exhibition “German Contemporary Art” (Zagreb and Belgrade, 1931), followed by Grosz’s solo exhibition (1932, Zagreb), as well as solo and group exhibitions in Zagreb where works by Frans Masereel and Käthe Kollwitz—artists with similar poetic and ethical aspirations—could also be seen.
The Zemlja members also resisted “foreign courses,” meaning traditional artistic tendencies, which they saw as reflections of “imperialist art.” Instead, they sought inspiration in local tradition and folk art, which was reflected in a kind of primitivist expression. This approach fit perfectly with the idea of liberating art from the shackles of elitism and democratizing it so that ideas of social transformation could flow freely to the broadest layers of society.
III Yet, in modern retrospectives, Mica is nearly erased from Zemlja’s history. Although she exhibited with them in Ljubljana in 1930, she is omitted from retrospectives and publications. Ivana Udovičić noted: “She witnessed the most important events in contemporary visual art, but her passive, observer-participant position resulted in her never having a clearly defined role in them.” Her name thus stays in the margins, appearing only in footnotes. Her contact with major players in socially engaged art is now framed as “private,” although they clearly exchanged significant ideas.
This erasure of women’s contributions is no surprise. Still, the relationship between Mica and Zemlja is now being reevaluated. For example, she often referenced Hegedušić’s visit to Paris and his horror at seeing WWI amputees—that memory moved her deeply and shaped several of her drawings. From this period comes her cycle of 16 drawings made between 1929 and 1933— socially engaged, grotesque caricatures very much in Zemlja’s and George Grosz’s style. She first exhibited them as a guest at the 1930 Zemlja exhibition in Ljubljana. (“I wasn’t a member, but my friends—Hegedušić, Tabaković, Junek—practically forced me to exhibit,” she told one journalist.) The drawings, in pencil on paper, are stripped down, relying on line and volume. Political or not, these were deeply political works. Caricatures like the president of the animal protection society feasting on meat, or Berta Mondenka awkwardly playing with a long pearl necklace, expose the hypocrisy of bourgeois life. Some feature mythological themes (Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve, Mystic), or sharp critiques of society, like Philistines, Hero Before and After Use—combining visuals with textual irony. “Adam and Eve”, as she put it: “he feminized, she like an asp.” A proto-feminist take on gender relations, subtly engaging with Freud’s ideas. The woman, with an apple on her head, covers her eyes with one hand and reaches out with the other. The man, upright, holds binoculars and reaches toward her. She’s “the woman dragon”—mythologized and exoticized—while he, “Professor Present,” tries to analyze her.
Art historians agree these grotesques— or “tricks”, as one exhibit cleverly called them—are a unique episode in her work. She would not return to this kind of political critique. But they remain fascinating, especially today when art is again seen as a critical, emancipatory force. Ironically, this cycle was long hidden from the public. Azra Begić, in the 1980 retrospective catalog, noted they were shown again in October 1936 in Sarajevo’s National Theatre foyer.
When she returned to Sarajevo in 1932, Mica found a budding cultural scene fueled by new ideological and aesthetic trends. Her old friend Roman Petrović was active, along with a dynamic group of young artists like Vojo Dimitrijević, Ismet Mujezinović, and Danijel Ozmo. However, Sarajevo lacked a developed art scene, with few institutions or exhibition spaces apart from the National Museum’s hall and the National Theatre foyer. It was a cultural periphery. Mica joined the few collective exhibitions and supported young artists and intellectuals influenced by progressive, often Marxist ideas. Many had studied abroad and now tried to apply what they had learned to a city still reeling from WWI, economic crisis, and provincial conservatism. One initiative was the formation of Collegium Artisticum, an interdisciplinary collective of painters, musicians, dancers, actors, critics, architects, engineers, and art lovers. Combining leftist ideals, avant-garde methods, and folk art, it soon became Sarajevo’s cultural powerhouse.
Again, history repeated itself—although Mica supported and exhibited with Collegium Artisticum, she never became an official member. This mirrors her earlier pattern of voluntary distance, shaping her individuality and possibly contributing to her marginalization. For several years after graduation, she didn’t paint at all. Instead, she focused on grotesques—perhaps a preparatory phase for more profound dives into motifs later. During this time, she also published a valuable essay, “A Glimpse at Bosnia and Painting” (1939), in which she re-discovers the region that shaped her through the painter’s eye:
IV “Artistically diverse, never banal, it first attracted foreign painters, then us,” she writes. “True art must reflect the land, life, nature, and circumstances—and Bosnia, despite its immense artistic diversity, remains largely unpainted. Poverty here is accepted as fate; the poor are humble, without protest. Roofs are black and damp, roads muddy, with skinny cats and thoughtful people dragging along. Dark hills eternally covered in mist and clouds. Then rain and humidity. That’s Bosnia—one and only. In sunshine, it briefly turns into a shimmering image of light, radiance, and color, especially in early spring. Dark corners vanish, replaced by a vibrating landscape where the air shimmers with lightness. Despite the bleakness of reality—which her brush and pencil continued to document with realism—Mica chose to see light and color, brilliance and ease, foreseeing a future for a country that “is not a land of painting’s past but of its future—wild and gentle at once.”
When she finally returned to painting, she focused on intimate themes: still lifes, landscapes, figures, and what Azra Begić called “interior-exterior hybrids,” where outside light penetrates inside, blurring boundaries. Especially moving are portraits like Gypsy Girl (1938/40), Young Man (1938/39), Bosnian Girl (1940), and Bosnian Girl – Nude (1940/41). Having weathered the turbulence of -isms and self discovery in her twenties, Mica now painted authentically, guided solely by her creative instinct. She was drawn to the oppressed, the discarded— often finding inspiration in children from a nearby Roma settlement. Had her female figures been able to speak, they would undoubtedly testify that Mica’s brush freed them from the male gaze, from objectification. They are authentic female visions, rendered in a unique blend of sober realism and gentle impressionism—natural, unidealized. Critics observed:
“A striking and unambiguous visual demystification of the body replaced earlier idealized images, which were composed and arranged to showcase the dominant presence of the nude female form. In Mica’s paintings, the women are direct, without odes or pathos. What dominates is not their nudity, but the life within and the personality she so masterfully captured.”
World War II disrupted Mica Todorović’s artistic work in the most brutal way. She provided shelter to resistance fighters in her Sarajevo home, including prominent revolutionaries Avdo Humo and Svetozar Vukmanović Tempo. In 1942, she was arrested and sent first to Stara Gradiška concentration camp, then to camps in Germany and Austria. According to Dragana Tomašević, she testified that it was a neighbor who reported her to the Ustaše “as a Serb woman.” At the time of her arrest, she was working on illustrations for Goethe’s Faust. Thanks to her resourcefulness and knowledge of German, she was transferred to a labor camp in Germany, from which she eventually escaped to Belgrade, where she remained until the war’s end. [1] After the liberation in 1945, she responded to the call of the State Commission for War Crimes to document the final victims of Ustaše terror—bodies floating in the Sava and Danube rivers. The result was the harrowing drawing cycle “The Last Victims of Jasenovac and Gradiška”, in which she applied her full artistic skill to a deeply anti-war and humanitarian mission. She was the only artist to respond to the commission’s call. With a few swift strokes, she sketched contorted, tortured, mutilated bodies— faces fixed in death, recording the horror of fascism with devastating restraint. “Her torn lines, the bloated bodies, skeletons without flesh, fish-eaten corpses, hollow heads without eyes—this is the true face of fascism, deformed by the hand of a great witness.” It is impossible to fathom her emotional state, having endured her own trauma, while watching boatmen pull corpses from the water. Still, she suppressed personal horror with professional detachment. Later, she published the essay “Through Prisons and Camps”, ending her wartime story with dignity and truth. She never capitalized on her suffering, never used it for political gain. As Azra Begić recalled, she dismissed it all as “ordinary hardships.” [1] After that—only light remained for Mica Todorović.
V After the war, Mica returned to Sarajevo and engaged in the sweeping postwar renewal of society. The fervent spirit of Yugoslav reconstruction revived cultural life even in Sarajevo’s periphery. Her colleagues returned from the front—Vojo Dimitrijević, Ismet Mujezinović—and key initiatives were launched by prewar doyens like Roman Petrović. This was a time of institution-building: the founding of the Association of Fine Artists of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ULUBiH) and the State School for Painting and Applied Arts in Sarajevo (today’s High School of Applied Arts).
A true pioneer, Mica became one of ten founding members of ULUBiH, and one of the first visual arts educators in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “In our School of Painting and Applied Arts (…) we have such raw material that it will depend only on our abilities whether those immensely rich natural talents are developed,” she said in an interview for “Nova žena”, expressing the importance of her new teaching role. In the immediate postwar years, art faced strict demands: it was to re-educate the public in the spirit of socialism. Subject matter was restricted: struggle, youth work actions, rebuilding the country, heroic figures—what is now called socialist realism, portraying the idealized male and female workers with utopian gleams in their eyes. Mica never expressed resistance to this new era and its (yet another) ideological and stylistic revolution—after all, she had long resisted previous pressures to make art serve anything. Her first postwar works focused on the theme of labor, especially women workers, such as the cover illustration for the AFŽ (Women’s Antifascist Front) magazine Nova žena (issue 19, 1946). The bodies are strong, maternal, tree-like—straining with the effort of postwar reconstruction. Yet her exploration beyond schools, movements, and ideologies never stopped. It emerged again once the grip of socialist realism began to loosen in the early 1950s. In fact, given her prewar and wartime merits, some say those ideological demands may never have fully applied to her. One art historian claimed that during the peak of socialist realism, Mica Todorović could paint whatever she wanted. Evidence? In 1949, she was the first to exhibit a female nude, stepping far from the worker’s body tensed in effort. Apart from her wartime documentation for the War Crimes Commission, her postwar works contain no war, no bloodshed—but archival notes still mention a Party remark: “Of Western European formalist direction, but we are re-educating her!”
Over time, the human figure gradually disappeared from her canvases, replaced by objects and landscapes—reflections of everyday beauty: the intimacy of a studio interior, empty cafés, urban and natural landscapes. Some of her early postwar canvases opened up again to vibrant color, airy and playful, even in works like Ruin (1945), overtaken by nature and gently testifying to human destruction, or the urban solitude of Spring in Babić’s Garden (1948), shimmering under generous sunlight.
“Theme? What is a theme in painting? That’s for literature, maybe for graphic art— but in painting, I can’t stand storytelling. My paintings are my feelings—they come from my eye. I like a certain color—and there’s the painting!”[1] This was her refrain in interview after interview. She seemed bored by standard journalistic questions and preferred to leave words to critics, theorists, or the occasional colleague able to articulate her work with inspiration. One such colleague, Ismet Mujezinović, insightfully noted how central color— especially yellow—was to her vision: “It seems that, somewhere in her early youth, she swore to tame yellow—that unruly, mischievous little devil from the noble family of colors. And indeed, Mica succeeded like no one before her: in her works, yellow radiates effectively, though you can still sense the wiry temperament of the tamed beast.”
VI Not everyone admired her apolitical introspection. Critic Nihad Agić observed: “It has long been noted—by critics and parts of the public—that the painting nurtured by this artist belongs mostly to the past, that it stands apart or merely on the margins of the historical current of art (…) The cult of the intimate and naively wistful, the monotony of interior settings, natural moods with their bright or somber chords—these are the elements from which this self-satisfied, exalted painting is built. In short: art without broader (and deeper!) communication with the world and contemporaneity.” Yet even he confessed at the end that her paintings were hard to part with—“like anything that touches us deeply.”[2] Mica Todorović had long drawn creative energy from travel. Her first trip to Italy after graduation enchanted her with the Florentine early Renaissance and shaped her early work. A later trip to Paris in 1962, during her mature years, opened another crucial phase in her art. The sketchbook she made there continued to inspire her canvases until her death. Her preferred technique became a combination of oil and pastel in varying proportions. Her earlier painting Venice (1959) marked the start of her so-called “white phase,” in which she explored Dubrovnik, Počitelj, and the old neighborhoods of Sarajevo. In these cityscapes, the human figure recedes—if present at all, it becomes a
blurred patch of color, nearly indistinguishable within the city’s rich
ecosystem. Walls and domes breathe color, reflections flicker from windows
and shopfronts, outlines dissolve in a festival of light.
“Her opus still rests on counterpoint, intertwining two fundamental melodies: one gently lyrical, which critics routinely labeled ‘feminine,’ and another—surprisingly strong, sometimes raw, dramatic—not through external events (thematic layer), but through the tension within the plastic elements of the painting,” wrote Azra Begić, pointing out the laziness of critics who relied on gendered readings in the absence of more refined understanding of her lyricism. The 1970s brought Mica full public recognition. In 1975, she was elected to the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the Department of Literature and Arts, and in 1978, became a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She received nearly every major Yugoslav award: the Sixth of April Award of Sarajevo, the 27 July Award of BiH, the Banja Luka Salon Award, the ZAVNOBiH Award, the AVNOJ Award, the Order of Merit for the People with a Golden Star, and the Order of Labor with a Red Banner. Yet she was never one to chase laurels. It was noted that she remained productive into old age, painting until her final breath. The great 1980 retrospective curated by Azra Begić crowned her decades-long career and shaped how we see and remember Mica Todorović, one of the longest lived and most respected artists of her time. Begić also played a part in Mica’s final trick: unwilling to accept that she was born in the 19th century, Mica forced Begić to record her birth year as 1900 in the exhibition catalog instead of 1897—thus giving herself the last word in how her legacy would be remembered: as a woman and artist of the 20th century.
Mica Todorović died in 1981. An unfinished painting remained on her easel, according to those close to her. She left behind an opus of 300 paintings and 100 drawings—a permanent contribution to the visual art of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her legacy is one of stubborn independence, rejection of fads and collectives, authentic aesthetic exploration, and lifelong devotion to art as a calling. Whether as defiant avant-gardist, meditative witness of wartime horror, quiet observer of life, dedicated teacher, seeker of the perfect yellow hue—or something else altogether—the multifaceted Mica Todorović remains an indispensable milestone in Bosnian and Yugoslav art history.