Milet Andrejevic


Milet Andrejevic was a Yugoslav-born American painter in the realist tradition. A classically trained artist who went through a series of different artistic periods, including post-Impressionism, Expressionism, and Pop Art, Andrejevic was best known for his allegorical landscapes set in New York City's Central Park.

Early life

Born Mileta Andrejevic in Zrenjanin, Yugoslavia, Andrejevic studied painting at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts. His brother Krsta Andrejevic also become a well-known painter in the former Yugoslavia. As a teen he lived through the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia and was eventually conscripted into Tito's army at the end of World War II. Andrejevic studied under Ivan Tabakovic at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade where he joined several of the artists who would form the Zadar Group, including Mića Popović, Bata Mihajlović, Petar Omčikus, Ljubinka Jovanović, Kosara Bokšan, and Vera Božicković. His younger brother, Krsta Andrejevic, was also a noted Serbian painter and fine arts professor.
In 1952 Andrejevic relocated to Paris to study art and didn't return to Yugoslavia for twenty years. He married the former Helen Bardeen in Paris in 1956 and came with her to live in New York City in 1958.

Critical success

Andrejevic's work turned toward Pop Art during the late 1950s and he exhibited in the Green Gallery then run by Richard Bellamy. In the 1960s he adopted a more realist style that featured allegories of Greek myths set in Central Park. He received positive reviews from then New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer who called Andrejevic, "clearly one of the most gifted painters of the contemporary Realist school." Kramer went on to write that, "He brings to his art an unusual sense of refinement - an eye calmly and exquisitely attuned to pictorial nuance. His best pictures achieve a purity of tone and a gravity of feeling unusual in the Realist painting of any period and very different, certainly, from some of the more clamorous Realist styles of our own day."
Andrejevic showed his work at the Robert Schoelkopf gallery and is the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
He died of lung cancer in 1989.