Mikac Marijan: Tri godine rada hrvatskog slikopisa

Marijan Mikac: Three years of work in Croatian painting

He was born in 1903 in Senj. After the initial classes in his hometown, he continued and graduated from the oldest Croatian maritime school, the Maritime Academy "Nautika" in Bakro. He worked in that profession for a short time, and then he started working as a journalist, writer, publicist and film expert.

In the late twenties, he went to the USA, worked in large American film companies, two years at "20 Century Fox Film" and ten years at "Paramount Pictures". As one of the pioneers of Croatian cinema, he brought these experiences to Croatia, unfortunately wartime, becoming the manager of the State Institute of Painting "Hrvatski slikopis" ("Croatia mm"), supplementing his experiences with study stays in France and Germany.

After the war, the new government imprisoned him in a concentration camp and put him on trial, but later, thanks to some of his good connections, he was released. Nevertheless, living in unbearable uncertainty, in the second half of 1947 he fled with his whole family to Trieste, and the following year he moved to Argentina. In the mid-sixties, he settled in Australia. A year later, he moved to Spain, but as he did not like it there, he returned to Australia. He died like a true son of the sea, on the waves of the Atlantic, on March 16, 1972, on the ship he used to return to Australia from Europe. 
Mikac belongs to the old generation, which between the two wars, and then during the war, played an important role in promoting Croatian culture and name. Ever since his youth, he was a prolific contributor to many newspapers and magazines, in which he published short stories, articles and novels in sequels. He became involved in public life in the early twenties as a member of the group "Zenit" (under the leadership of Ljubomir Micić), so it is no wonder that he later published books of Zenitist poetry and prose.

However, he was most attracted to film. Despite the difficult wartime circumstances, more than two hundred film weeklies, a dozen short cultural films and one feature film ("Lisinski") are the result of four years of work by Marijan Mike and his associates.

In emigration, living as a political refugee, Mikac collaborated in almost all Croatian publications, and was most prominent as a writer. He also wrote in Spanish. For the collection of short stories in that language "Vidas sin valor" he received a prestigious Argentine literary award. He left several unpublished manuscripts, among them the novel Two Women and Reds.

He published the following works:
Efekt na defectu (Zenitist poetry; Cyrillic; in Serbian) Belgrade, 1923.
Monkey Phenomenon (Zenitist novel; Cyrillic; in Serbian), Belgrade, 1925.
Under the burden of lengers (hyphens; Cyrillic; in Serbian), Belgrade 1926. Moric Švarc's experiences in Hitler's Germany (satirical novel), Zagreb, 1937. Sailors, women, corpses (stories), Zagreb, 1942. in Spanish), Buenos Aires, 1951. In the death march (novel), Chicago, 1954.
Las Aventuras de Moritz Schwarz (the novel "Experiences of Moritz Schwarz in Hitler's Germany" translated into Spanish), Buenos Aires, 1959. 
Mission in Croatia (edited for the press, wrote the foreword and comments for this diary by Giuseppe Masucci, secretary of Abbot Marcone, who was the special envoy of Pius XII to the Croatian Episcopate during the NDH era), Madrid, 1967.
Majčin hleb (novel), Madrid, 1968.
Film in the Independent State of Croatia, Madrid, 1971