Background
Milan Pribićević was born in Kostajnica in 1877.
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Milan Pribicevic
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Milan Pribićević was an ethnic Serb Yugoslav who led ORJUNA, a short-lived but influential fascist party in Yugoslavia during the 1920s that supported Yugoslav nationalism, promoted the creation of a corporatist state, and attacked communism, democracy, Jews, separatists, Croatian and Serbian nationalists.
Career
He came from a well-known Serbian family of politicians in Croatia. He had three brothers, Svetozar Pribićević, Adam Pribićević and Valerijan, all of them were writers and politically involved in every day affairs, and so was Milan, an Austrian officer who defected to Serbia in 1904. When the Balkan wars broke out, Milan was the first to enlist.
On the eve of the Great War, Milan Pribićević, a highly decorated veteran of the Balkan wars and one of the founders of Narodna Odbrana, began preparing his association which had as an object the formation and equipment of bodies of volunteers for the coming war against Austria-Hungary.
There was no serious attempt to recruit volunteers in the United States until the arrival of the Serbian military mission headed by Colonel Milan Pribićević in November 1916. One of the reasons for this lay in the neutrality of America in the war until near the end of 1917 when it too joined the Allies.
Milan Pribićević visited the United States that winter of 1916-1917 to recruit as many volunteers among the United States. newcomers for the cause as he could. During Milan Pribićević"s military mission, Hoffman modelled two portraits of him, the first smaller but represented him in military uniform, "A Modern Crusader", which followed, shows him lifesize, also in uniform, with epaulets and an ensign on his chest and with a knitted helmet covering his head and framing his strong features.
While the head covering looks like chain mail such as was worn by crusaders in the Middle Ages, it is actually a woolen type worn by Serbian soldiers during the cold winters they had to endure from 1912 until 1918.
In 1919 Hoffman travelled to the newly created Yugoslav state on behalf of the American Relief Commission to report on the distribution of American supplies to relief victims. At one point, Milan was accused of promoting secession of Lika and Banija from Croatia and seeking their unification with Serbia, but all this was sheer speculation and suspicion meant to undermine Serb-Croat dialogue and compromise during the 1930s. Pribićević died in 1937.
Casts of "A Modern Crusader" are at the New York"s American Sculpture Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Art Museum, Washington District of Columbia, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
