Rescuing History

A collection of black-and-white photos sat dormant for a decade. Then, the owner took a closer look, and wondered if those photos belonged at the Bentley.

By Amy Probst

The black-and-white photos were initially a mystery. Most were candid shots of enormous and elaborate paintings of Eastern European governmental and religious scenes.

Karen Majewski had acquired the photos a decade earlier—but she couldn’t recall where, specifically. “In general, I buy up old photos,” she says. “As a historian of ethnicity, I’m also interested in ethnic and immigrant artists, whose stories often go untold and whose work is often overlooked.”

After studying the photos more closely, Majewski realized that handwriting scrawled on the backs of a few photographs indicated that these were rare images showing the work of artist Cveta Popovich.

That’s when Majewski decided the photos might need to leave her collection and instead be made available to the public. So she reached out to the Bentley Historical Library.

Creation and Destruction

Cveta Popovich was a Serbian-born artist who arrived in the United States in 1913. He was 22 years old, starting from scratch, and would go on to paint more than 100 murals in the city of Detroit.

By the 1920s, Popovich had established himself as an acclaimed artist with a thriving studio and school in Detroit. An accomplished pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrator, he had contributed to illustrations for Mysteries of the World by Ernst Haeckel, a 1919 book on the theory of evolution. Popovich spent long hours the University of Michigan sketching lab specimen skeletons and embryos for the book, then completed the final drawings back home in his studio.

Popovich also had a growing reputation as a master muralist. The subjects of his murals were often the revered iconography in churches of multiple denominations. Other murals depicted culturally significant political events, portraiture, and opera backdrops. Popovich also worked with artist Diego Rivera in 1933 when Rivera was in Detroit painting his fresco Detroit Industry, West Wall at the Detroit Institute Arts.

But murals last only as long as the walls on which they’re painted.

Early in his career, Popovich’s studio and art school were ravaged by a fire that destroyed everything inside.

Then, in 1928, his mural Stage Curtain in Detroit’s Miles Theatre was demolished when the building was razed to make way for Albert Kahn’s new Griswold Building.

In 1968, as an elderly Popovich continued giving lessons to a new generation of artists, more of his murals and icons inside the Ravanica Serbian Orthodox Church of Detroit were destroyed when the building was condemned and torn down.

In 1978, more than a decade after Popovich’s death, iconostases inside Saint Sava Serbian Orthodox Church in Gary, Indiana, for which Popovich cut every stencil by hand, were destroyed by fire.

Very little of Popovich’s work exists today.

Which made Majewski’s discovery of photographs of his work all the more remarkable.

History’s Human Link

Majewski is the former mayor of Hamtramck, first vice president of the Polish American Historical Association, and holds a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. And she comes across a lot of old stuff.

In 2013, Majewski and her husband, artist Matt Feazell, rescued a whole building in Hamtramck. Today, it’s Tekla Vintage where Majewski sells vintage clothing and treasures.

“I’m always looking to rescue things that seem historically important,” Majewski says. And when she spent time with the Popovich photos, she thought of the Bentley. “I know it’s secure and they will be preserved and made available to researchers,” which is important to her as both humanitarian and historian.

It’s work for which the Bentley is deeply appreciative.

“Today, the ability to see Popovich’s work in person is sadly rare, and so we are grateful to [Karen] for recovering the images and donating them to the Bentley,” says Michelle McClellan, the Johanna Meijer Magoon Principal Archivist for the Bentley Historical Library. “This perfectly illustrates our mission: we preserve materials that might otherwise be lost and we make them accessible for everyone to explore and appreciate.”

McClellan says the photos will be made available to artists, researchers, and anyone who wants to know more about Popovich’s incredible life, as well as “the rich multi-ethnic history of Michigan, and the legacy of Detroit’s mural artists.”

In the meantime, Majewski will keep an eye out for more history that needs a home.

“I see a lot of stuff stashed in people’s attics and basements, and on curbs,” Majewski says. “I’m always asking myself, does this need to be saved? Is it of historical significance? Or is it just so lovely . . . something that will make somebody happy to see?”