MARJANCA
Lifesized Statue | 1949
". . . When the statue was completed, she inspected it again. She said it made her shudder because it was as if she was facing a woman who was her exact replica. . ."
It seemed so alive that I thought the woman could see me. . .
The life-sized statue which clearly showed that Bergant’s primary talent lay in sculpting held a commanding presence. It seemed so alive that I thought the woman could see me – not with her eyes, which were closed, but with the groping fingers of her right hand, her shapes and features. The carver explained that Zora Bergant, his wife (whom he met in the same workshop in 1940), had brought the blind woman to Bajtica to have her portrait done – and just before the statue was completed, the woman carefully traced the lines of the statue from the headscarf to the ground, and said that it was a quite good liking but that something was wrong with the nose. Indeed, it was the nose that had yet to be finished…
When the statue was completed, she inspected it again. She said it made her shudder because it was as if she was facing a woman who was her exact replica.
The statue’s eeriness may extend beyond the woman’s personal reaction: in this impressive sculpture, Bergant modelled the visible world through the absence of vision, needing only a pair of closed eyes to channel the subject’s uncertain, fumbling body into a gaze of irresistible intensity.
An excerpt from the book "WOODCARVER MAKS BERGANT, A LIFE DEDICATED TO BEAUTY"
Author:
Miklavž Komelj
Artwork Details:
Plaster | Lifesized Statue | 1949
Photo:
Žiga Mihelčič
But there was something else that shook me even more – a mysterious creature in the corner, whose presence and radiating white light dominated the place. This was a white plaster statue, a stunning life-sized portrait of an old blind woman with a headscarf and a groping hand, to which Bergant always referred as a living being; it was Marjanca.
Bergant talked about his model with genuine empathy.
He told me how isolated her life was, how she was teased and tormented by children, how she bred Turkish hens and roosters, and how once someone strangled a rooster in her presence; she did not see it but she could hear its neck bones snap.
Bergant’s accounts about the old woman, who died under the wheels of a train, referenced to the mysterious statue so vividly that I felt as if I had entered the forbidden world of her blindness, which must have contained some secret knowledge so commonly attributed to ancient sightless bards. The uncompromising emotive presence of the blind woman allowed me to enter a completely different world in which she resided. And I shuddered at the thought that it was the world in which all sculptures must reside. I heard the cracking of bones; the gentle gesture of the subject’s hand and the friendly yet enigmatic face of the statue beckoned me to follow into another, dark existence, which I found strangely familiar.
I left the master carver’s shop overwhelmed by a sensation for which I found the explanation years later in a poem by Rilke, who said that beauty was nothing but the hardly bearable beginning of terror.
Plečnik was the central figure in Bergant’s story about Marjanca.
On one of his visits to the workshop, when Bergant was absent, Plečnik wrote a few words of praise on a piece of paper and put it in the statue’s conveniently shaped left hand. The family has held on to the note, now yellowed with time, and treated it as a holy relic. Maks and Zora both spoke of Plečnik with great respect. Although years had passed since his death, it was as if they were talking about a person who had paid them a visit a day before. And even though Bergant only collaborated with Plečnik during the last five years of the architect’s life, and his personal carving style showed no sign of Plečnik’s influence afterwards, it seemed that Plečnik remained with him in spirit. Bergant’s son Damijan says that his father “learned to walk with Plečnik’s help.”
