Revival of classical antiquity and archaic modernism: Simeon Roksandic's Fisherman (Struggle) fountain

Abstract

The Fisherman fountain, a canonical work of the sculptor Simeon Roksandić, was first displayed at the 77th International Art Exhibition in Rome in 1907. Its artistic value was recognized by the Serbian cultural elite and it soon became part of Serbian cultural space and national artistic decorum. The sculpture was the key artistic artefact in the Serbian pavilion at the Balkan Exhibition in London in 1907. By 1911 the fountain was mounted in Kalemegdan Park in Belgrade, becoming one of the city's symbolic and memory landmarks. The fountain, a classic piece of European sculpture, emerged from the artistic and cultural milieu of Munich, to which Simeon Roksandić, trained at the Munich Art Academy, also belonged. In accordance with the general postulates of the European artistic canon, the Fisherman was defined as unity of the modern and classical value systems. Archaic modernism postulated the revival of original, vital, pre-classical Hellenism as embodied in the vigorous form and dynamic structure of the Fisherman. The creative return to the past materialized in Roksandić's sculpture is reinterpreted in accordance with broader ideational and cultural trends of the period. Freud's archaeology of the unconscious and Darwin's selectionist evolutionism were largely responsible for recognizing primitive protoman in the figure of the Fisherman. According to contemporary interpreters, the Fisherman was seen as a visual sign of a wide-ranging movement based on the idea of classical revival as a prerequisite for the revitalization of modern, late 19th-century man.