Pomnik

During the era of NOB monument construction in Yugoslavia along the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, there were very few examples of monuments which took the form of mosaic art. The three primary examples which were created during this time period were all the work of one artist: Joko Knežević. Born on the Dalmatian coast near the town of Omiš in 1907, Knežević spent most of his artistic career working on creating artwork in and around his the region where he grew up. While trained as a painter, Knežević came to be recognized as the first great Croatian mosaic artist of the 20th century, creating many hundreds of unique mosaic portraits during his life. After making a large mosaic mural for the Museum of Sinj depicting the 1715 Battle of Sinj, Knežević was commissioned in 1963 to create the first of his memorial mosaic works, which was a Monument to Fallen Fighters at the Adriatic village of Mimice, Croatia (just 5km east of his hometown). This Mimice mosaic was of a very stylized nature, almost "cubist" in style, depicting mourning women and children as their Partisan sons went off to war. In 1974, Knežević created a second mosaic monument at Drašnice, another nearby coastal village south of Omiš. This work, titled "Women of Biokovo" commemorated the women who gave their lives during WWII. It was crafted in a much more traditional figurative style, showing a woman bravely and defiantly bearing her chest as she is about to be executed by Italian soldiers. While both of the above mentioned memorial mosaics which Knežević created still exist to present-day and are in good condition, a third memorial mosaic dedicated to Partisan fighters which he crafted in his hometown of Omiš in 1981 was subsequently destroyed and removed during the early 1990s.