The exhibition honoring the winner of the 2025 Little Prince Award - Zdravko Micanovic

Opening: 22nd September 2025 at 1.15 PM

Gallery Open University Subotica

IMAGINATIVE, WITTY, IMPRESSIONABLE

In the past - and for quite some time - superficial experts in different fields of working with children used to believe that those involved in artistic creation for the youngest should be able to lower themselves to the level of a child. Later, of course, it turned out that this was not entirely true. At the end of the last century, the great inventor and scholar Radivoj Raša Popov made the famous statement that those who wish to be successful in working with children must be able to rise to their level.

However, there is, I would say, another necessary condition: every renowned children author has- guaranteed - retained their inner-child despite of all the changes that they may have undergone along the way. This commendable trait is clearly a staple of the author of the exhibition "Learning Cyrillic (towards the alphabet with a bit of sweet torment)"- artist and graphic designer, master of illustration, posters, comics and - I would add - picture-books, Zdravko Mićanović, a long-time professor at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade.

I mentioned picture-books for a reason, as they are literary works (sometimes devoid of text) closest to "readers who cannot yet read." Seventy-five years ago, Sima Cucić (country’s pioneer of children literature theory) said: "The issue of picture books is important and complex. The younger the reader (or just a viewer) is, the greater the artistic demands and responsibility. It is the first book – even prior to the alphabet textbook - that children come into contact with."

Interestingly enough, if you were to ask anyone, they would probably dismiss picture-books and immediately think of alphabet textbooks as the first book a child encounters. Unfortunately, the alphabet textbooks have changed very slowly and very little throughout history. As Dušan Radović has noticed this in his essay The Sad Story of Alphabet Textbooks: “Amidst all the learning, knowledge, major and rapid changes and the greatest exchange of international experience in every area, the alphabet textbooks remained untouched and unchanged. The herbariums of long-withered spiritual flowers. Coca-Cola has invested more knowledge and skill (intelligence, spirit, imagination and taste) in promoting its tinted sweetened water than schools have in glorifying and extolling reading and writing."

In another essay entitled Why Children Don't Learn, Radović concludes: "School knowledge lacks the naivety, simplicity and directness of children's questions. It does not build upon the existing basics of children's experiences and knowledge."

Zdravko Mićanović is certainly familiar and respectful towards "Dušan's literary code." By taking on the task of helping with the initial reading and writing classes, he has shown that he is both a skilled teacher and an excellent teammate: imaginative, witty and impressionable.

Although the 23 displayed panels of his "2D plays for children" are mainly intended for children who have previously mastered the Latin alphabet and are now moving on to the Cyrillic, they are also interesting to children for whom the opposite is true. Since these works were originally published in a children's magazine, Mićanović could sometimes afford to poke fun at his readers, bypassing the strict rules of curricula and programs that lead from letters to sounds, from sounds to words and on to sentences - showing what true complementary learning through fun looks like.

I’d like to mention a few charming intentional exaggerations which should not bother those with normal interests and abilities, but will be welcomed among the above-average curious and especially lovers of humour. On the panel "Winged Alphabet," each letter is accompanied by the name of a bird species and its appearance. Under the letter H is the Latin name of Hesperornis along with the appearance of this bird from the late Cretaceous period. On the panel where the author uses the terms for car parts, under the letter Đ is a drawing of master Đuro, an expert in car maintenance and repair. Among the animal names, under the letter NJ, there is a drawing of a pig to illustrate what other animals also have – a snout, while the animals assigned to the letters Ć and U have been swapped as if to test the viewer's attention. The same panel also features Latin names and additional information, which - in the age of modern technology - can present a new research challenge with the help of parents.

Finally, I will take this opportunity to paraphrase the great researcher and expert in developmental neuropsychology, Svetomir Bojanin. In his belief, it is necessary for adults to push children to learn, but children will only be successful if they wish to.

Branko Stevanović