Ivan Milev
1897–1927 · Bulgaria · Expressionism
The story
Ivan Milev is a painter many Bulgarians carry in their wallets. His art decorates the 5 leva banknote, a national honour for a man who was dead before he turned 30.
Born in 1897 in Kazanlak, the rose-growing town in central Bulgaria, the son of a shepherd, Milev fought as a teenage soldier in the First World War before entering the National Academy of Arts in Sofia. There he built a style that fused the flowing lines of the European Secession, the decorative modernism then spreading from Vienna and Munich, with something older and local, Bulgarian folk ornament and the flat, gold-lit figures of Orthodox icon painting. He is usually named the founder of the Bulgarian Secession, and he worked mostly in distemper and watercolour rather than oil.
He lived poorly. A brief marriage to the opera singer Katya Naumova lasted about 18 months, and their daughter later became an architect. In January 1927, weeks short of his thirtieth birthday, Milev died of influenza in Sofia.
