Wreath

HOMAGE TO BOŽANA JOVANOVIĆ (1932–2020), PAINTER OF COSTUMES, IN THE NATIONAL THEATER IN BELGRADE
Her Third Hand
Somewhere between unreal reality and real unreality blossomed her twenty-thousand-day-long magic. A hand of a master, they say, cannot be described, it has to be interpreted. With her costumes she resolved characters, dressed actors into roles. Even in great scarcity, she managed to surprise everyone. She didn’t dress bodies, she uncovered souls. She tailored rags into a patchwork of her masterpieces. She sewed broken pieces of human characters into a mosaic of their fate. Stevo Žigon, her brother-in-law and associate, claimed that all great writers were in love with her. And director Franco Zeffirelli waited for her until his death

By: Radomir Milić
Photo and Illustrations: archives of the National Theater,
”Atelje 212”, Museum of Theatrical Arts, private collections

Božana Jovanović was born on June 23, 1932, in Belgrade. She grew up with her sisters, Svetlana and Jelena. Their mother Vjera, daughter of legendary Montenegrin hero Mitar Martinović and cousin of queen Helen of Savoy, educated in classy French schools, passed on fondness for art to her daughters. Svetlana was engaged in music, she was a pianist and editor of classical music in Radio Belgrade, Jelena turned to acting and (with her husband Stevo Žigon and daughter Ivana) left an indelible trace in acting, while Božana was attracted to visual arts. She graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in the class of professor Milenko Šerban, scenography department. After the Academy, she spent time in Paris for additional education with Paul Colin. Upon her return from Paris, she began working as scenographer and costume designer. Soon she completely switched to costume design, first at the Yugoslav Drama Theater, then Serbian National Theater in Novi Sad, and finally, since 1963 to retirement, at the National Theater in Belgrade.
All that time, she worked dedicatedly, devotedly, yet with ease and enjoyment. ”My profession engages me completely. However strenuous my work is, it is at the same time so interesting, that it seems to me that I have been wonderfully playing my entire life” – she used to say.
She had a particular relation with ballet: ”I must admit I enjoy working for ballet most. Ballet is a universal, abstract speech, the hands of a costume designer are free, you have full freedom in terms of colors, textiles, visuality…” However, Božana’s free hands never went out of their way into costume design for its own sake. Konstantin Kostjukov particularly emphasized it by saying that nowhere in the world, wherever he played, did he feel as comfortable as in her costumes. She cooperated for about thirty years with pleasure with scenographer Boris Maksimović and choreographer Lidija Pilipenko, and that unrepeatable ”dream trio” presented fourteen great, unforgettable ballet performances.
She approached dramas in a different way, which sometimes made her costumes magnificently unnoticeable on the stage, completely merged with actors who, wearing them, in wonderful theatrical magic, really became characters they were playing. She best explained that magic: ”I can’t stand pure colors, or costumes that show that they have just come from a workshop. I love costumes with a patina, looking as if someone was already wearing them, as if they already had a life, or perhaps even passed the fate of the fundus…” If talent is a sense of proportion (and that is one of its definitions), Božana was a supreme talent, because she unmistakably felt such proportion virtuously submitting her gift to the play as a whole.
The sketches based on which she worked are a separate story. They are much more than mere sketches, they are genuinely valuable works of art. And really, Božana was also an excellent painter. During almost seventy years of her work and five hundred theatrical plays, the audience was able to see her costumes on stage, while this summer they had the opportunity to admire her sketches on meter-long panels at the exhibition in the Museum of the National Theater in Belgrade (from June 7 to mid-September). The exhibition was organized by acting diva Ivana Žigon, Božana’s niece, and Dušica Knežević. The opening of the exhibition was a real small theatrical show, with an unusually large audience. It was officially opened by Božana’s nephew and successor of her gift for painting, painter Nikola Žigon. Going through the exhibition and accompanying catalogue, one can take a look at the unreal reality Božana – painter of costumes – had left us. The catalogue also includes letters of ”her” directors, actors and ballet dancers: Jagoš Marković, Ivana Vujić, Nikita Milivojević, Milan Karadžić, Konstantin Kostjukov, Duška Dragičević, Stevo Žigon, Tanja Bošković, Svetlana Bojković, Ivana Žigon and Paolo Magelli. We are sharing part of it with readers of National Review.

THE GREATEST AMONG THE GREATEST

The greatest among the greatest has departed. I don’t know if there had ever been such a great director or actor, as Božana Jovanović was a great costume designer.
She was actually: a painter.
As costume designer, she indebted us with the greatest and most wonderful! As colleague and human being, she was humbler than the humblest, more loyal than the most loyal. Mysterious to the limits of visibility and altruistic to the point unreachable to us.
We were working on Queen Christina in the ”Dramaten” Royal Theater. When costumes, tailored by wonderful Marina Medenica according to Božana’s sketches arrived, the first actress of ”Dramaten” Malin Ek responded to my question why her acting was no longer complete: ”I’m afraid to tear this beauty I’ve received.” Everyone was amazed by the costumes, both actors and audience, in the middle of Bergman’s and Strindberg’s ”Dramaten”.
This world is not the same after the Beauty Božana has given it. We are her debtors, me first. Telling her thank you – is insufficient!
Still, thank You, Božana, for everything.
(Letter from Jagoš Marković)

SHE DRESSED US IN OUR ROLES

There was no greater artist or humbler human being than Božana Jovanović.
I will never forget the most difficult crisis in the nineties. We were working on Resurrection, based on Mahler’s music and choreography of Lidija Pilipenko. There was almost no money for costumes. And Božana surprised us with seventy costumes made of ordinary gauze… Thus, she reconfirmed her artistic Genius!
Whenever I’d look at myself in the mirror while wearing her costume, before the play, I had an impression that I had actually dressed the role I was supposed to play in just a few minutes.
I am grateful to great Božana for part of the success in my career and I will remember her forever with great gratitude.
(Letter from Konstantin Kostjukov)

A DROP OF BLOOD THAT REMEMBERS

I experienced my first theatrical hug in Little Pushkin’s Tragedies directed by Stevo Žigon. It was a great blessing. Entering the warm embrace and, already on the first step, feeling that an artist is an artist’s closest family, surrounded by the love of two Montenegrin princesses – Jelena Žigon, who acted in the play, and Božana Jovanović, costume designer who, in the scarcity of the poetic theater, created a costume for me from a dyed sack resembling the softest silk.
Only after I had said goodbye to her, I watched Ivana Žigon, Božana’s niece and our diva and favorite, on TV. I heard her speaking about her Montenegrin decent, about Božana’s grandfather Mitar Martinović, president of the Montenegrin government and minister of defense in the most important historical moment, at the time Montenegro was entering the Balkan Wars.
Only then the puzzle was completed. Only then it was clear how the bloodstream in our embrace was eternally flowing with sisterly force. The feeling of unity while Božana, Jelena and I closely worked on Pushkin’s tragedies, got its name. While watching Ivana’s interview, I remembered that my ancestor, Jovana Bošković, was wife of that same Mitar Martinović and that the sisterly embrace from beginning to end was in no way accidental. We had common ancestors and common drops of ascetic and passionate blood. Those who don’t know the word ”no”, those who don’t know a single obstacle to realizing the stage, life and divine Beauty.
(Letter from Tanja Bošković)

BOŽANA’S THIRD HAND

Stories go that, in her youth, she was one of the most beautiful women in the Balkans. However, she used to hide in side streets to avoid glances of enchanted passers-by who turned to see her, just as she did not accept to bow to the audience after the play.
Clothes do not make a man, but a genuine costume designer does not make clothes, they make the human Soul visible.
Božana’s Costume always longed not to dress, but to bare the Body of man, so that their Soul would shine in full splendor before our eyes.
With her craving to wrap human fates with the robe of her refined love towards man, Božana has woven herself into their memory with timeless weaving. In her magical world, in which she ”played the glass bead game”, she unriddled Dučić’s thought ”that every man is like dew, and that everyone is worth crying for”. Božana felt that her brush – her ”third hand” – is equally necessary to those she will, like fate, overwhelm with luxurious robes, and to people whose cruel life she will cover with rough cape and torn rags – so that their sorrow would shine with the sublime splendor of art.
At dress rehearsals, she quietly sewed everything that was still ripped in the acting game – buttoning up the last stitches still open between Actors and their Roles.
We never saw her in theater lobbies, she didn’t socialize with the acting elite at cocktails or attend receptions. She had coffee with dressers, dressmakers, tailors, starting each of her twenty thousand working days with: ”Let’s have a cigarette and start.”
Božana did not pick company for conversations during her sixty years of work, world literature did it for her. Extraordinary characters, sieved through centuries, approached Božana with a pledge to revive them. She never rejected any of them. She precisely measured each of them ”the specific gravity of material” of their souls.
She tailored small rags into a patchwork of her masterpieces. She joined broken pieces of human characters into a mosaic of their Fate.
Božana requested organdy to be more unreal, tulle more transparent, muslin lighter, plush smoother. She touched fabrics with an unusual gift to dematerialize them in her creative rapture, watched them with gentle eyes in which she elevated everything banal to the level of Metaphor. Thus, in the moment she left, it seemed that not only an epoque she lived in disappeared with her, but also all the époques she made actual, close and realistic before us.
When one leaves, we grieve for them, in black. Instead of black, we are dressed in a palette of the softest colors.
Božana, therefore, most certainly did not leave us. She just, as before, doesn’t want to bow at this exhibition…
(Letter from Ivana Žigon)

SUCH A GREAT LOVE IT WAS

Here is the truth.
It was at the time Olympus still existed for all of us, when Zeus decided to make Božana Jovanović a Goddess. A Goddess of smile, charm, beauty and, of course, Goddess of all tailoring shops, male and female, of this theatrical world. That is why Božana’s rehearsals were celestial choreographies. Male tailors were jumping around like pages in an ethereal state, and female tailors were levitating like nymphs. They were all joyful and smiling while Božana’s divine hands caressed fabrics and acting bodies, and the actors were absorbing her peace like a balm.
Sitting and trying to speak about You, Goddess, is a job for a Poet, which I unfortunately am not. I can speak about something many don’t know.
It was at our premiere of Harold and Mod. In another millennium… 1980… A Tuscan came to the premiere. My friend Franco Zeffirelli. At the end of the play, the unpleasant Florentine, irresistible poison, congratulated everyone from the heart and told me: ”I’m staying three more days, organize visiting Božana’s fundus! I must see it! That’s an order, kid!”
Many don’t know that Zeffirelli, great film, theater and opera director, started as a scenographer and costume designer of Luchino Visconti and that he often created decorations and costumes in his works, but, there, he fell in love at first sight with Božana’s costumes.
To cut the long story short, we went to the Yugoslav Drama Theater fundus and watched various Božana’s plays.
Franco called Božana many times. Four or five years later in Milan, he asked me about her. It was a great love. However, she didn’t like to travel. That’s how she was. Divinely shy.
Franco died in 2019. I think he departed to wait for her. He will find her. After all, she is a Goddess.
(Letter from Paolo Magelli)

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Magnificent Božana
Similar to Michelangelo who painted the Sistine Chapel by lying for years and made a humble space divine, Božana made theater a space of divine wonder with her costumes.
(Letter from Ivana Vujić)

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Costumes which Resolve Characters
... At the costume rehearsal of ”Wedding” I heard that Mira Banjac, who played Fyokla, was looking for me in the theater. When I saw her in her costume, she shouted: ”Božana unraveled my character with this costume!”
(Letter from Milan Karadžić)

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Greatest Writers in Love with Božana
We did thirty-three plays together.
It seemed to me that only Božana was able to dress masterpieces of the greatest writers. I would say that it was most probably the reason why the greatest writers were in love with Božana.
(Letter from Stevo Žigon)