Janez Mikuž
Yesterday we said goodbye to conservator, lecturer, mentor and long-time headmaster Janez Mikuž. He will remain our role model and inspiration, and will be remembered for his outstanding professional achievements, his indomitable spirit of research, and his humanistic, intellectual and warm-hearted breadth. We bid farewell to his restless and sparkling image, a creative aesthete, practitioner and professional.
Janez Mikuž is one of the most versatile Slovenian conservators who, in the 1960s, developed and consolidated a regional network of seven branches from Maribor to Piran. His professional career began after graduating from the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana in 1962, when he joined the then District Museum, now the Regional Museum in Koper, as a curator.
He became a member of the Monuments Commission, which at that time was the competent monument service on the coast. After the establishment of the Inter-municipal Institute for Monument Protection, he participated as an external collaborator in a number of commissions and was also a member of the Institute's Council from 1965-1974. It was also with his help that most of Slovenia's regional and inter-municipal institutions were subsequently transformed into cultural hotspots and centres of information on the importance of cultural heritage and how to protect it.
Conservation Assembly Piran
Rare are the people and experts who have more than supported the corners of heritage protection in Slovenia. Janez Mikuž was active among those who built the system, introduced different methods and trained young conservators. His fieldwork covered the whole range of conservation work. His most successful interventions in building monuments represented innovative achievements in the Slovenian conservation profession at the time of their realisation, and he also actively collaborated with Austrian, German and Italian colleagues and services. By transferring successful foreign practices, he has improved and elevated the organisation and methodology of the work of our department to the current European professional framework.
We could count on one hand the Slovenian conservators who have theoretically supported their rich field experience and communicated their views to the professional public within a certain time and space, as evidenced by Mikuže's almost 300 bibliographic items. For a decade, from 1984-1994, he lectured at the Chair of Conservation and Museology at the Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, where he passed on his synthesis of theoretical and practical knowledge to young people.
He also took on one of the most difficult conservation tasks, when from 1975 to 2002, with his cosmopolitan breadth, he successfully managed the Institute for Monument Protection in Maribor until all its organisational and personnel changes in the current Maribor regional unit of the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia. In addition to this and his work in dozens of commissions, he was an advisor to the Programme Director of the ZVKDS and coordinator for state-owned monuments, chairman and member of the Council of the Community of Institutes for the Protection of Natural and Cultural Heritage, member of the Council of the then Restoration Centre of the Republic of Slovenia, and member of the expert group for the protection of cultural heritage at the Ministry of Culture.
Mikuž's, one might say, retracted, art is a special chapter of his work. In his younger years in Primorska, he was the author or co-author of exhibitions of contemporary artists, and then he further developed his sophisticated artistic taste in the numerous photographs he took in the field, in museums, at exhibitions, as an aid to less skilled colleagues, or simply as the result of a hobby.
Until his retirement, he was an authentic conservator, lively in the Mediterranean and Styrian sense, sometimes boisterous and curious, but a man of wide erudition, great sense of art and organisation.
In the days just before his farewell, we unwittingly hosted him for the last time at our institution to honour his contribution to the monument service. This article about our last meeting will therefore, unexpectedly, take on a special weight and a sad and solemn note.
Your greatness remains in the memory... of all of us.
Svjetlana Kurelac, Mihela Kajzer Photographs: ZVKDS archive
from left Janez Mikuž, Svjetlana Kurelac, Jernej Hudolin
