As cars whizzed past me, I headed up Route 28 north of Pittsburgh on a bleak, chilly day in March to view the renowned Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka. Even before seeing the murals, I pictured them being hauntingly divine, though crafted by human hands. Or would they be distinctly human, but fashioned by divine inspiration?
My destination loomed above the highway on a hill in Millvale—St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church. The plain, but noble, Romanesque structure stood solidly on its precipice, the amber hues of its brick exterior set starkly against the leaden sky, betraying no hint of the artistic treasures within.
Bitten by a blustery wind in the church parking lot, I stood for a moment gazing at Millvale’s panorama above the Allegheny River. Clusters of modest houses crowded together on the hillside under a soft gray blanket of clouds, while spots of pastel popped out from clapboard homes, interspersed with somber browns from brick dwellings.
Previously an industrial borough, Millvale was spawned from manufacturing. Now instead of iron works and rolling mills, its streets host entrepreneurs with one-of-a-kind businesses, music venues, craft breweries, and more.
Inside the church, I joined others for a tour, asking myself, who was Maxo Vanka and why did he paint these murals? To appreciate the Millvale Murals, you must understand the collective histories of Pittsburgh, St. Nicholas Church, and Maxo Vanka, whose unique background heavily influenced his art.
Inside the church, I joined others for a tour, asking myself, who was Maxo Vanka and why did he paint these murals? To appreciate the Millvale Murals, you must understand the collective histories of Pittsburgh, St. Nicholas Church, and Maxo Vanka, whose unique background heavily influenced his art.
We were transported to a bygone era—the early 1900s—by our docent Aaron Ciarowski. More than a century ago, he explained, when immigration and industry defined Pittsburgh, immigrants toiled ceaselessly in mills along Pittsburgh’s rivers and formed ethnic neighborhoods nearby.
Croatians settled in Millvale and built St. Nicholas Church in 1900, but after fire destroyed the original edifice in 1921, it was rebuilt a year later with its interior restored. Still, the church’s bare white plastered walls pleaded for adornment.
Enter Father Albert Zagar, a Franciscan priest and Croatian native. When he became pastor in 1931, he answered that plea, seeking to embellish the blank walls with paintings recounting the story of his Croatian parishioners, accentuating their humble lives, family devotion, devout faith, and entrenched struggles.
Destined to fulfill his vision was Maxo Vanka whose artwork the pastor admired at Vanka’s one-man exhibit in Pittsburgh in 1935, later hiring the artist to paint the church. That year, Vanka’s visit to Pittsburgh was part of a journey where he accompanied writer and lecturer Louis Adamic around the country, sketching and mingling with immigrants in industrial cities while observing their lives marked by adversity.
A man of the people, though descended from nobility, Vanka was born out of wedlock in 1889 in Zagreb, Croatia. Sent to live with a peasant family until age eight, he was then retrieved by a grandparent and educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and the Academy Royale des Beaux Arts in Brussels. He became a successful artist, was sought after as a portrait painter, and became a professor at the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Zagreb.
Fearing the chaos in Europe preceding World War II, Vanka moved to Manhattan in 1934. His fateful commission from Father Zagar to paint St. Nicholas Church produced his “Gift to America”—his phrase—creating 25 murals during two separate periods in 1937 and 1941, furiously working up to 18 hours a day to complete his magnum opus.
A student of art, Vanka was constantly studying, learning, and traveling with sketchbook in hand. Fomented by his peasant upbringing, he empathized with working class people, sensitive to their heartaches and hardships. His artwork rebelled against their plight, akin to street art today which tackles poverty and social injustice and evinces profound compassion for the oppressed.
During the 1930s and 1940s, muralism burgeoned in America when Vanka painted St. Nicholas Church. Like some of his contemporaries, including Pittsburgh muralists, Vanka strove to vindicate the working class, employing a bricolage of styles which display similarities to Byzantine art and Mexican murals.
Upon seeing the Millvale Murals, I was first struck by the colors. The intensity and beauty of the colors. Forest greens and cobalt blues, deep purples and jet blacks, rich burgundies, ochres, and golds.
Then I was overpowered by the images. Their boldness. Their contradictions. Their psychological depth and emotional fervor. Angels resisting demons, war demolishing peace, justice defying injustice, hope conquering despair. Antithetical themes clashed on the walls and ceilings. In iconoclastic ways, Vanka dared to expose evil in the world, directly condemning violence and attacking capitalism’s cherished beliefs.
Then I was overpowered by the images. Their boldness. Their contradictions. Their psychological depth and emotional fervor. Angels resisting demons, war demolishing peace, justice defying injustice, hope conquering despair. Antithetical themes clashed on the walls and ceilings. In iconoclastic ways, Vanka dared to expose evil in the world, directly condemning violence and attacking capitalism’s cherished beliefs.
Mary, Queen of Croatia is undoubtedly the centerpiece. Holding the child Jesus in her lap, Mary presides over the altar, clad in a royal blue cape and vivid red gown—traditional Croatian colors. With huge hands, sinewy arms, and solemn demeanor, she’s not the pale, placid, delicate Madonna of Raphael, but rather an immigrant mother reflecting suffering in her eyes and projecting stoicism through pain.
Beside the altar, Pastoral Croatia presents a peaceful bucolic landscape in the old country—two women in peasant dresses kneeling and praying at a picnic, their faces uplifted to Mary, while two men stand reverently bowing their heads.
Croatians in America depicts a harsher life in the new country. Father Zagar beseeches Mary to bless a shovel, symbol of the immigrants’ arduous labor, their invaluable contribution to America. The weary men beside him work long hours for low wages in dangerous jobs. As one laborer clasps a model of the church—the workers’ only haven—ubiquitous mills lining the river in the background emit billowing smoke above Pittsburgh’s skyline.
Vanka painted traditional religious images in non-traditional ways, rejecting the dull, the trite, the prosaic. In Crucifixion, with his mother weeping, Jesus dies on the cross against a tenebrous sky streaked with lightning and ominous black clouds. A burnt sienna sun behind Mary represents the eclipse that occurred when Christ was crucified. Yet signs of hope appear—a snowy white Passion Flower at the foot of the cross and redeemed souls arising out of the ground.
Then there’s Pieta, where an inconsolable Mary cradles Christ’s dead body while seven daggers sharply pierce her back, graphically illustrating her Seven Sorrows found in the New Testament.
Human counterparts to these divine images portray the same mother’s grief as Mary’s at the cruel sacrifice of a son. Based on a deadly explosion in the coal mines of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Immigrant Mother Gives Her Sons for American Industry shows a young man splayed on the ground, lifeless, killed in a mining disaster. Under the gloom of a murky sky, his bereaved mother wails above him, flanked by other despondent women, even as miners labor nonstop in the distance.
In Croatian Mother Raises Her Son for War, a soldier slaughtered in battle rests in his coffin while women dressed in pure white gowns and headcovers—a Croatian tradition—mourn his death. The soldier’s mother sits dejectedly, while yet another casket—presumably containing a soldier—is carried to the graveyard below. Dead. Gone.
The tragedy of war is a recurring theme in the Millvale murals. A Red Cross volunteer during World War I, Vanka personally witnessed war’s atrocities, reinforcing his pacifism. With World War II terrorizing Europe in 1941, he stressed war’s ravages even more emphatically in his second series of murals, also illuminating the subjugation and persecution of Croatians under fascism.
Mati poignantly highlights this merciless repression. Mother Croatia is chained to a cross, disconsolate, her head down low, shedding tears of blood, and powerless to render aid to small, supplicating hands symbolizing Croatians who beg for help at her feet.
In another mural, the angel Prudence holds a Linden branch, a Croatian folk symbol, and places a finger on her lips, implicitly warning Croatians to speak cautiously amid tyranny. Another interpretation is that Prudence is alerting the immigrant congregation to be careful in what they say and do in their new land, lest they be judged for their differences.
More graphic depictions of war’s brutality emerge on the ceiling under the choir loft. In Mary on the Battlefield, an exasperated Mary fights soldiers to stop the annihilation, breaking and pushing their bayonets away, her face aghast, her eyes swelled with desperate anguish at the appalling tumult.
Another violent portrait, Christ on the Battlefield, envisions war’s turbulence as a replay of Christ’s crucifixion, with soldiers crucifying Christ again and slaying each other the way the Romans killed Christ. A bleeding Jesus peers out at the barbarous turmoil with sorrowful eyes, savagely stabbed in the heart, while another Christian soldier receives the same wound.
Below the battlefield scenes, The Capitalist embodies Vanka’s belief about the cause of war, capitalism’s bottomless greed.
Below the battlefield scenes, The Capitalist embodies Vanka’s belief about the cause of war, capitalism’s bottomless greed. A wealthy man dines in abundance and analyzes his stocks while ignoring a poor amputee begging at his table. The rich man’s blackened eyes are frozen with apathy, totally indifferent to the indigent man.
On the opposite wall, The Simple Family Meal recalls Pastoral Croatia, celebrating the faith and generosity of the common man. An ordinary man, the mayor of Millvale, shares a meal with his family around a table as they give thanks to God, pointing up the disparity with the greedy Capitalist.
Vanka’s conviction that nothing is more disparate than society’s treatment of the poor compared to the rich is revealed in Justice and Injustice. A serene, benevolent angel with soulful eyes, Justice holds balanced scales in one hand and points to heaven with another hand.
Injustice is a frightening figure berobed in black, with slits of eyes, cold and unfeeling, wielding a bloody sword, and donning a gas mask reminiscent of World War I. Grasping a lopsided set of scales where gold outweighs bread, Injustice personifies the flagrant inequities endured daily by common people.
Offsetting the grim images of greed, war, and exploitation, murals decorating the upper walls, ceiling, and choir loft rejoice in redemption and the kingdom of heaven, resplendent with saints and angels glorifying God and transcending this world.
All this from a man who never painted in a church before. Not only do the murals have a significant impact on Millvale in terms of historical importance and community pride, but their beauty, timelessness, and universality materially impress everyone who sees them. My fellow tourists? They were awed and overwhelmed.
“They’re exquisite!” exclaimed Susan Kalisz from Highland Park. “They’re in the spirit of Diego Rivera in the Detroit Institute of Art.” Vanka’s cultural iconic imagery resonated with her, she said, because of her Polish ancestry.
“Stunning” is how Susan Caffarel from Wilkinsburg described the murals, noting that they justifiably celebrate the tireless immigrants who built America.
Sharing Susan’s enthusiasm for the murals, Lynn Fischerkeller from Aspinwall declared, “I absolutely loved them.” She particularly admired how Vanka wove Croatian traditions into his art, the way ethnic groups proudly displayed their heritages when she was younger.
“Stunning” is how Susan Caffarel from Wilkinsburg described the murals, noting that they justifiably celebrate the tireless immigrants who built America.
Their exuberance confirms the need to protect Vanka’s irreplaceable art for future generations, the mission of the Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka (SPMMMV), an independent non-profit organization founded in 1991. SPMMMV engages the community through special programs and events focused around the murals and raises funds to pay for their crucial maintenance and repairs.
Due to the water-soluble paint used by Vanka, the murals sustained damage from sources like soot during Millvale’s industrial days and water seepage from hurricane rains. Conservation plans include installing a climate control system to remediate these effects and better lighting to enhance each painting.
Anna Doering, Executive Director of SPMMMV, strongly advocates saving the murals so they can continue to “shock and awe” people, as she put it.
Anna Doering, Executive Director of SPMMMV, strongly advocates saving the murals so they can continue to “shock and awe” people, as she put it.
“They reflect things that people experience today,” she commented. “People always find something to identify with. Vanka didn’t shy away from raising important questions of the day. He captures the breadth of experience and forges the connection between the human and divine.”
Vanka himself said, “I painted so that Divinity in becoming human, would make humanity divine.”
Outside in the parking lot, I contemplated my immersion into Maxo Vanka’s world. Mesmerizing. Deeply moving. Impossible not to be affected by his genius. Surely his drastic allegorical images stir powerful emotions in all who behold them.
I imagined him in his monastic solitude, fanatically focused on his masterpieces like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, incorporating his agony and ecstasy into each brush stroke, breathing passion into his subjects, divinely inspired, but altogether human. Mutinous, defying fate, revolting against the establishment.
Vanka drowned in the Pacific Ocean in 1963 in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, dying as he lived—rebelliously. Defeated only by another force of nature like himself.
“Gledaj! The Gaze of Maxo Vanka,” an exhibit of the artist’s original sketches and drawings completed during his visits to Pittsburgh in 1935 and 1937, is on display April 20 through August 25, 2023, at the Bost Building in Homestead, Pa. Presented by the Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka, in partnership with Rivers of Steel. For more information, visit Bost Building — Rivers of Steel.
To learn more about the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka or to sign up for a tour, visit
