Total Recall" Will Deal with Practices in Other Regions of the SFR Yugoslavia, That Once Used to Form a Unison Political and Artistic Space
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THIS TEXT HAS NOT YET BEEN EDITED. A brief narrative of art events in Serbia after 1948 By Branislav Dimitrijević, Serbia This text is constructed as an illustrated survey of some significant artistic events (some shaping artistic ideologies in their times, some influencing subsequent processes) in Serbia since 1945, and, as any other survey of the kind, it suffers from drastic exclusions. The criteria of selecting artists and events are modified with the aim to capture Serbian art in moments that make it both distinctive for local scene and relevant for wider international context. With only two exceptions, I have narrowed down this text only to events in Serbia by sole reason that other authors of "Total Recall" will deal with practices in other regions of the SFR Yugoslavia, that once used to form a unison political and artistic space. Otherwise I would grossly disregard a sense of artistic community that, especially between late 60s and mid-80s, accommodated a full interaction of ideas. 1. Models of Socialist artistic mainstream: Boža Ilić, Mića Popović, Petar Lubarda. One of the general conclusions about the Yugoslav art after the Second World War1, is that it was not affected by the dogma of Socialist Realism as happened in other countries which became single party states soon after 1945. Only the brief period marked by Tito´s break with Stalin in 1948 is considered the period where Socialist Realism was the official style that was dedicatedly followed both by those artists who were involved with leftist social art of the 30s, and by those who were considered bourgeois in their inclination towards Parisian modernism. After 1948, as the argument goes, it took only a couple of years to completely break off with socialist realism, and modernism was adopted as a lingua franca of visual arts. As a consequence, a work of art was no longer obliged to represent the socialist reality, but to enhance artistic "freedom and self- awareness" as a necessity to create a new Weltanschauung of the "post-revolutionary generation".2 This trend of safe modernism (abstract painting and sculpture with reduced representational references) was labelled by a literature critic Sveta Lukić3 as Socialist aestheticism, and later by some other critics with a more general term Socialist Modernism. It is striking that Socialist Realism in Serbia did not engender artists that had not been known previously, and that the only Homo novus was Boža Ilić who was risen to a socialist stardom in the course of months and then instantly forgotten when this style was no longer considered orthodox for the cultural policy of the new state. As an international trend, ranging from state controlled Zhdanovism in the Soviet Union to artistic currents related to political struggles in capitalist countries (e.g. Popular Front in France), Socialist Realism was not cultivated in Serbia: it was rather a local affair of political opportunism that did not produce any works that formally met standards of the Soviet model. For instance, Boža Ilić painted his most famous monumental painting Sondiranje terena na Novom Beogradu (Driving a borehole in the terrain of New Belgrade, 1948) by strictly following the pre-war academic standards of composing the painterly space and arranging figures in the manner of intimist bourgeois paintings of artists like Milo 1 As in other texts discussing only partially the art-practice in the country that was called the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it is not easy to make a distinction between what was Serbian, Croatian or Slovene art. This text is mostly taking into consideration art events located in Serbia, but given that the capital city was on that territory as well, all of these and other events included artists that were not of Serbian nationality. 2 These are the words of the chief protagonist of Socialist aestheticism, Miodrag B. Protić, who initiated and established the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. See M.B. Protić, "Jugoslovensko slikarstvo šeste decenije – nove pojave", in Jugoslovensko slikarstvo šeste decenije (exh. catalogue), Muzej savremene umetnosti, Beograd 1980. 3 Sveta Lukić, "Socijalistički estetizam", Politika, Belgrade, 28.04.1963. 2 Milunović. Certainly, the subject matter differed from still-lives or other politically withdrawn genres of intimists: Boža Ilić depicted the quintessential motif for the new state, the start of the building of the city of New Belgrade, the biggest monument of the ideology of socialist modernism. This ideology, in words of a leading theoretician of architecture, Ljiljana Blagojević, was based upon confusing "negative reference framework of rejecting both Functionalism and Constructivism and the Soviet practice of 'formalist eclecticism'"4, that marked the Yugoslav socialist project in architecture as an "under-developed and unfinished modernism". The case of Boža Ilić is a symptom of a theoretically conflicting future of Serbian art: the noted Soc-realist leaning on pre-war bourgeois academism depicting the initiation of modernist utopia in situ of the new Socialist state. Soc-realism cannot therefore be seen as a break, but a stage of continuity between underdeveloped Modernism of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the programmatic Modernism of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. When some writers later reviewed works by Ilić, they tried not to consider him a Socialist-realist but rather a Socialist-romanticist, having in mind a great deal of naïveté this artist had in relation to political frameworks. Other artists were not that naïve, they were really realists. Political realists. The best-known Serbian dissident artist, Mića Popović, who was the first to rehabilitate Ilić not so long ago5, has been held to personify the break from Soc-realism with his first one-man show in 1950. This exhibition is one of the greatest myths in mainstream art historiography in Serbia, but actually it was simply the way to establish the position of the dissident artist as someone critically inclined towards the political structures but fully enjoying the institutional benefits that were to be on disposal to many artists within the climate of "moderate totalitarianism" of Tito's state. For example, it was Mića Popović who received the first state grant for a study trip abroad (three months in Paris) back in 1950.6 His show became more famous for the catalogue text written by Popović himself (a very unusual practice in that time) then for the paintings that did not fulfil the modernist promises emitted in the text. The paintings, reproductions of which cannot be found in the catalogue, fully maintained realist principles and did not ensue from the demand to encourage a primacy of form over content that was stated in the text.7 One of the paintings shown at this exhibition, Autoportet sa maskom (Self-portrait with the mask, 1947), may be seen as emblematic for its "content": the face of the artists disguised by a smiling mask symbolises the position of a dissident whose real political identity cannot be discerned and who in public displays false optimism appropriate in the times when bourgeois individualism was seen as counter-revolutionary. In his future career that created more dissident myths, Mića Popović paradoxically kept the spirit of realism alive and has not stimulated any innovative artistic practice. In order to proclaim the first modernist artistic event in socialist Serbia, the dispute was created between those that saw Popović's show as a breaking point and those who are inclined to locate this break almost a year later, in 1951, when Montenegrin painter Petar Lubarda had his Belgrade show. He exhibited monumental paintings relating to folk traditions and inspired by peculiar visual impact of rough Montenegrin mountain landscape. These striking images show an idiosyncratic and autonomous path leading towards abstract pictorial language with some remote echoes of Parisian modernism. His painting Guslar (1951) takes the traditional motif of a folk singer playing a one-string instrument called gusle, that is a particular atavism in remote mountain areas. Singing and playing gusle signifies oral transmission of heroic tales from the past (and the present) accompanied with conceited ascetic identity attributed to Montenegrins. In the time Lubarda painted this and other more abstract paintings, the formalist discourse of art criticism 4 See Ljiljana Blagojević, "Great hopes, false premises, and bleak future: The case of New Belgrade", in Modernity in YU (Marko Lulić, ed., exh. cat.), Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, 2001, p. 5. 5 ULUS Gallery, Belgrade, May 1990. 6 See Predrag J. Marković, Beograd izmedju istoka i zapada, 1948-1965, Službeni list, Beograd 1996, p. 245. 7 Pref. cat. in Izložba slika Miće Popovića, Umetnički paviljon, Beograd, 1950. 2 3 fully took over, and until the late 60s the question how something was painted, rather than what was painted, came to be exclusively discussed. The cultural implications of merging Modernist visual vocabulary with the traditional motif was taken for granted as an ideal synthesis, so paintings like Guslar were celebrated by emerging, internationally informed formalist criticism as breaking with academic norms that had been strictly obeyed previously. The most influential art writer and the future founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (est. 1965), painter and lawyer Miodrag B. Protić, saw Lubarda's exhibition as the breaking point and had illustrated this claim with formidable formalist remarks: for instance, Protić asserts that Lubarda was first to break with rules of Belgrade Academia that did not allow one colour to appear in the same tone or hue more then once on a canvas, and that taught that without a three-dimensional illusion every painting is merely decorative. Lubarda's paintings from the early 50s reduced 'values' of coloured surfaces, and presented these surfaces as flat. Lubarda was the first painter to become internationally acclaimed, and one of the most influential art critics of the time, Herbert Read, wrote about Lubarda as "a painter with great sense of rhythmical composition".8 Politically, Lubarda occupied the position quite different then Popović.