S IS FOR SERBIA

The most famous woman artist today hails from Serbia and lives in New York. But before Marina Abramovic, there was Milena Pavlović-Barili, a modernist painter and poet who lived all over Europe, where she got inspired by the likes of Jean Cocteau and Giorgio de Chirico (my favorites, both), and finally, in NYC, where she worked for Vogue and died after falling off a horse. I love nothing more than a good portrait, and Barili’s modernist dreamscapes, often with her at the front, mixing the European sensuality with the Byzantine fierceness, are, in my opinion, flawless. She reminds me of Kate Bush, Isabella Bow and Leonora Carrington, but of course, she was the proto-oddball babe, a contemporary of Frida Kahlo and a force to reckon this. Google the Voguecover she did: now that’s a fashion magazine I’d go out and buy even in 2018 (which, by the way, I will check out next time I’m at Parsons’ library, where I sometimes lurk as an alumna).