Portrait of an artist & a culture:

...All in all, it was difficult to discern what Jaroslav Pelikan calls "the spirit of Eastern Christendom" in these conversations...

...A youthful-looking man in his late forties with a ready and open smile, he had none of the world-weary air one observes in many of his contemporaries...

...And the Church of Saint Sava...

...Morning Annunciation" hints at the beginning of a new world...

...Cyril and Methodius, the apostles to the Slavs, "brought not only the Gospel but the consciousness of national vocation to their converts," as Pelikan points out...

...The cross might be falling into the ooze, or something might be pulling it up...

...In others, the painter's imagination has raced into the world of fractal geometry and strange attractors...

...The larger of the two, titled "Border Landscape" (1988), depicts two regions (let's call them East and West) composed of stone blocks...

...Escher in their austerity and technical precision, but suffused with a warmth and mystery that was quite their own...

...Still, it was a fine thing to meet the irrepressible Mojovic, who, whatever he may be, is certainly not a man from a bygone age...

...It appears to belong to both East and West, but it is broken in two...

...The cross is attached to a string which disappears into the water...

...It is a line that runs between Serbia and Croatia...

...Saint Sava, the first independent archbishop of Serbia, was the son of a legendary twelfth-century ruler, Stephen Nemanja...

...Though he apologized for his English, he put it to good use in carrying a torrent of ideas...

...few had much to say about Orthodox Christianity...

...The two halves, though not touching, have been tied together in a cradle of string that appears to be stretched to the breaking point...

...For others, the Orthodox church and the small group of followers who openly supported it under Tito seem to occupy the role that Garry Wills says Catholics once fulfilled in the United States: they are important to those who want to believe that somewhere there are others who "believe...

...he shouted, as we roared through the traffic...

...At the Church of Saint Sava, a well-spoken young man was conducting a daily tour of the site...

...Everyone I spoke with-old friends from my student days in Belgrade in 1962...

...The foamy water begins to swirl, making designs that in their regular irregularity suggest the turbulence and coherence of Mandelbrot sets...

...Where had this structure come from and what did it mean...

...In the center of the expanse of sandy earth that lies between them, there is one block...

...Although no one seemed reluctant to discuss this subject, most appeared somewhat at a loss...

...Except for one human rights lawyer who grumbled at the waste of money, nearly every Serb with whom I spoke seemed pleased and proud about the new church...

...Beneath them, the very earth is cracking...

...There is an older, deeper, line that runs through the heart of Europe: between Rome and Constantinople...

...The mystery of its appearance was easily solved...

...Then, I noticed something else that was new since my last visit...

...Fertility symbols are everywhere- often hidden in mathematical forms (the womblike swirls of Benoit Mandelbrot)- sometimes as tufts of luxuriant soft green grass sprouting between stones...

...PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST & A CULTURE MARY ANN GLENDON A VISIT TO SERBIA My eyes widened as Belgrade's skyline, dom- inated by a massive new church whose cen-tral dome was topped by a golden cross, came into view...

...From its inception, the Serbian Orthodox church was a national church, with a national liturgy and national saints...

...Ah, wonderful...

...As we drove to his studio in an old section of Belgrade, he spoke animatedly about his life, his work, and his family...

...how could parents have transmitted their beliefs to anew generation...

...A few days later, sitting in another great church in Paris, I thought of my Yugoslav friends and their troubled country, riven with ethnic and religious conflict...

...he exclaims with the same delight he displayed a moment before when showing his pictures of "magic squares...

...And then-in a dazzling series of canvasses-egg, cross, and string seem to be engaged in an increasingly elaborate dance, tracing balletic patterns in the air and the damp sand...

...The author of a popular new book on Serbian history and culture stressed the significance of the fact that historically anti-Communist sentiments could be expressed in religious guise before more direct dissent was tolerated...

...Does the new church signify anything concerning the state of Serbian Orthodoxy after years of repression...

...In Belgrade, "East" and "West" do not carry quite the same connotations that the cold war gave those terms in the United States...

...He took obvious pleasure in recounting how the shell of what is said to be the largest Orthodox church in the world sprang up in a mere three years...

...Mathematics is the language of God," he says, pulling out more canvasses...

...The cross and the egg, Mojovic explains, are the spirit and the earth's life force: their dance, in its order and disorder, is the creation of the new world...

...Imagine what powerful feelings must have been aroused on June 25, 1989, when over a million Serbs gathered on the plains of Kosovo to commemorate the six hundreth anniversary of the fateful battle between the Serbs and the Ottoman Turks...

...This is the modern way of Orthodox believing: com-prehension, understanding as an embrace...

...young people and those who remember the war...

...He showed me the others...

...Occupying half the foreground, and encroaching on East and West alike, is what looks like an incoming tide, or perhaps just a slowly spreading primal ooze-blue-green, foamy, more benign than threatening...

...Only a few years earlier there had been nothing in particular to catch one's eye above the jagged rooftops of the capital city of Serbia and Yugoslavia...

...But what...

...Historically, religion and national feeling have never been separate in Serbia...

...On the other hand, it would be a grave mistake to attach too much importance to the fact that strong nationalist sentiments are associated with the apparent resurgence of interest in Serbian Orthodoxy...

...In "Border Landscape" the "old modern world" is passing away...

...I accept everything in my tradition...

...Everyone who studies mathematics," he tells me, "comes to this deep level of connection with poetry and spirituality...

...In the next painting, the foamy blue-green waters are beginning to recede, and we see that the thread that was pulling or holding the cross is attached to something-an egg...

...I remembered Rousseau's explanation of why Diogenes could not find an honest man: he was searching among his contemporaries for a citizen of an earlier age...

...That's how it was in the times when things were good for us Serbs," a friend told me...

...there are all sorts of service to be done, but always to the same Lord...

...It was, of course, to be dedicated to Saint Sava, patron saint of the Serbs...

...On that day, the charismatic Communist president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, addressed the multitudes, with the bearded patriarch at his side, flanked by a retinue of young popes...

...Many of Mojovic's paintings are artistic meditations on "moments" in mathematics ("The Discovery of the Golden Mean") or in intellectual history ("The Enlightenment...

...Though not yet open for regular services, the church was filled to capacity (fifteen thousand) at a special dedicatory service in 1989, with over a hundred thousand persons standing outside...

...When the church is complete, its outer walls will be covered with white marble...

...new friends and acquaintances...

...At his studio, Mojovic explained that the two paintings at the Metropole were part of a cycle...

...Plans to build a great church on the model of Saint Sophia had begun at the turn of the century...

...The foundations were laid in 1935, but construction was interrupted by the war, and the site was nationalized by the Tito regime at war's end...

...On the second mural, "Morning Annunciation" (1989), the tide or ooze nearly covers the whole canvas...

...How could the church have perpetuated-much less renewed-its teachings...

...His background, he said, was in mathematics and engineering...

...Another commonly voiced view held religion to be an important part of Serbian history, and its suppression a terrible form of discrimination...

...Good luck to you, painter Mojovic, and may "corn-prehension" descend upon your land.descend upon your land...

...This close union of religious and national identity is hard for most Americans to understand, with our tradition of separation of church and state, and the adherence of many of us to churches that transcend national boundaries...

...Ranged about the great central dome will be twelve copper-domed bell towers, and five smaller domes, seventeen more gold crosses catching the sunlight...

...Serbians who consider themselves "Europeans" or "Yugoslavs," as well as Serbians who identify above all with Serbia-all were eager to talk about Serbia...

...Nothing else is visible except the disappearing sand, and a slender white cross slanting at a precarious angle above the foam...

...In the Western calendar, it was the Feast of Pentecost, and the second reading was from Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians: "There is a variety of gifts but always the same spirit...

...That's my church...

...In the collective Serbian memory, however, the strong state of the late medieval period and the independent Serbian church are fused...

...There on the walls of the magnificently seedy lobby of the Metropole were two huge murals, reminiscent of the art of M.C...

...And Orthodoxy...

...Saint Sava is obviously a symbol of Serbian national pride...

...between the Latin alphabet and the Cyrillic...

...In 1984, the Yugoslav government finally acceded to the demands of the Serbian patriarch for the restoration of the property, and when construction resumed in earnest in 1986, the brick and concrete structure rose quickly, funded entirely by voluntary donations...

...working in all sorts of different ways on different people, it is the same God who is working in all of them...

...The edifice was constructed at breakneck speed during a period of severe inflation and economic distress, dramatic evidence of the importance accorded the project by thousands of private donors in Serbia and America...

...I had to know...

...Fault lines are visible on many of the stones, and both East and West are crumbling at the margins-in slightly different ways...

...With the help of a friend, I called the artist, Dragan Mojovic, who readily agreed to discuss the paintings with me...

...Toward the end of my stay in Yugoslavia, I returned to the Metropole Hotel reflecting that, after all, there had been forty years of religious repression...

...Even some who were professed atheists and Communists said they had contributed to the building fund...

...In "Border Landscape," East and West are composed of the same stony stuff, though the blocks are arranged somewhat differently...

...In the midst of a discourse on the history of Yugoslav art, he paused to call my attention to a small red brick building that was of no particular architectural interest so far as I could see...

...Yugoslavian communism, though steering its own course in many ways since 1948, was until recently no less hostile to religion than the regimes of other East European countries more closely aligned with the Soviet Union...

...As Timothy Garton Ash has written, the so-called revival of religion in Eastern Europe is an exceedingly complex phenomenon that "cuts several ways," and which cut is deeper, no one knows...