Tucked away in the gritty working-class Pittsburgh suburb of Millvale and hidden behind the walls of an unprepossessing Catholic church are some of the most extraordinary and overlooked murals of the 1930s and '40s.
Created in protest against industrial capitalism, World War I, and the rise of Fascism, the paintings are the work of a Croatian expatriate artist, Maximilijan "Maxo" Vanka, sometimes called "Pittsburgh's Diego Rivera." If you prefer legend to history, that's here, too: St. Nicholas Catholic Church is also the site of one of Pittsburgh's lesser-known ghost stories.
Though his origins are obscure, Maxo Vanka (1889-1963) is rumored to have been the bastard child of Hapsburg nobility. Born in the days when Croatia was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the infant Vanka was given away and raised by Croatian peasants until his maternal grandmother discovered him at the age of eight. She allegedly sent him to live in a castle. Vanka went on to study art in Zagreb and Brussels, graduating with top honors in 1914, the year World War I broke out. The 25-year-old artist–already a confirmed pacifist–joined the Belgian Red Cross as a medic and saw some of the worst horrors of the war on the Western Front.
In the 1920s, Maxo Vanka became one of Yugoslavia's leading painters, but in 1934, with Fascism on the rise in Europe, he immigrated to the United States.
St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Millvale, Pennsylvania, was the first ethnic Croatian parish in the U.S. Its parish priest in 1937 was Father Albert Zagar, who commissioned Vanka–like most of his own flock, an immigrant–to paint a set of murals at the new church. Vanka was an unorthodox choice for the job of creating what has since been called Pittsburgh's "Sistine Chapel." Though he described himself as spiritual, Vanka wasn't a practising Catholic, he was friendly to Socialist politics, and was also married to an American Jew (Margaret Stetten, daughter of a New York surgeon).
Over the course of eight weeks between April and June 1937, the artist completed the first round of murals–eleven paintings all told. The rest were finished in the summer of 1941, just months before the U.S. entered World War II.
Though Vanka's Millvale murals depict a plethora of traditional Christian religious themes, he brilliantly wove his own anxieties into the old Christian story, graphically illustrating the evils of money, the horrors of poverty and war, and Croatia's "crucifixion" by the Ustaše, a homegrown Fascist organization that was also fiercely Catholic and anti-Semitic. The murals are an incredible translation of Christian motifs into 1940s politics. In two startling images, Jesus and the Virgin Mary are bayoneted by American doughboys; in another, an androgynous "Spirit of Injustice" toting the garb of a nun wears a gas mask and holds a bleeding sword and a set of scales in which money outweighs bread; in yet another, a female depiction of the artist's beloved Croatian homeland hangs chained by her arms to a horrid cross, the life slowly draining out of her.
Several of Vanka's murals delve into the travails of American labor. In one image, the dark, satanic mills and mines of western Pennsylvania–once the king of American steel production–burn ominously in the distance while a dead or dying worker lies huddled on the ground surrounded by weeping nuns. Over the entrance to the church, an American capitalist in a top hat eats a sumptuous breakfast brought in by a black servant. As this king of industry (a jab at Pittsburgh's rich) pores over a stock report, a skeleton reaches out toward him, cupping a handful of fire. The year is 1941.
Several of Vanka's paintings could be set either in Europe or America. One shows the resurrected Christ giving his blessing to a working-class family dressed in traditional Croatian clothing, surely showing Jesus' solidarity with their struggle to survive. Around the altar and under a large painting of the Virgin and Child with a Croatian inscription, Vanka's countrymen in folk dress gather to watch the Mass. Vanka later wrote: "These murals are my contribution to America -- not only mine, but my immigrant people's, who are grateful, like me, that they are not in the slaughter of Europe."
Then there's the ghost. One night in 1937, a contemporary legend goes, Vanka was up late, hurrying to finish the first round of murals. That's when he saw "The Millvale Specter." This is the title of an article published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on March 28, 1938. (The story later came out in Harper's Magazine.)
As Father Zagar told the tale, the distraught Vanka claimed to have seen a "black-robed figure making gestures at the altar" that night. Zagar himself had already heard of this ghost, but never seen it, "because the Croatians have believed for many years the ghost of a former pastor comes back at night to pay penance for failing to serve the parish well." The priest stood guard outside the church door to make sure no one else came in. Zagar swore that he heard dogs howling outside, though only Vanka himself saw the spirit, moving down the aisle. The painter almost collapsed in fright, then saw the ghost blow out a candle in the sanctuary. "Never before had it gone out," said Father Zagar. "I saw the sweat run down the face of Vanka." Zagar offered to say prayers for the dead priest, one of his predecessors, who (if Catholic belief is correct) was in Purgatory, haunting the living to get their attention and encourage them to pray for the still-troubled dead.
Maximilijan Vanka went on to teach art at a community college in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, but he never acquired lasting fame in the U.S. His Millvale paintings remain his greatest work. In 1963, while swimming off the coast of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, he drowned in the Pacific. Some believe he died of a heart attack, others that he swam out to sea on purpose. His widow Margaret later became a friend of the great Pittsburgh-born California poet Robinson Jeffers and donated many of her husband's works to the Croatian Academy of Science and Arts.
Tragically, Vanka's murals were nearly lost to air pollution and mildew. In just a few short decades, Pittsburgh's notoriously dirty air and the lack of air conditioning inside the church took a severe toll. Even some regular parishioners at St. Nicholas were unaware that these stunning murals lay hidden underneath the grime coating the walls. Professional restoration is ongoing today–with some dark squares left in a few places to show the extent of the filth that once covered these murals. The restoration is spectacular and these historic paintings–an amazing testimony to the coming-together of faith, art and social justice–are set to become one of the city's greatest off-the-beaten path attractions.