Non-Aligned Modernism: Yugoslavian Art and Culture from 1945-1990

This thesis seeks to understand and recover contemporary social, political and aesthetic value from the often dismissed or marginalized history of Yugoslavian modernism. The significance and complexity of the Yugoslavian experiment with modernism has often passed unrecognized. It has been dismissed as derivative and marginal or else eclipsed and tainted by the collapse of the Yugoslavian state in the early 1990s. To understand Yugoslavian modernism’s particularity we must recognize that socialist Yugoslavia existed as an in-between political power that negotiated the extremes of the Cold War by building a version of socialism independent from the Soviet model. Its art and culture were equally idiosyncratic. Although Yugoslavian cultural and political elites accepted modernism as a national cultural expression, the way that modernism developed did not strictly follow Western models. As a mixture of various aesthetic, philosophical, and political notions, Yugoslavian modernism can only be described by a political term associated with the international movement that Yugoslavia participated in at the time: Non-Aligned. I make a parallel between Yugoslavia’s political ambitions to build a country outside of the two Blocs and its rising modernist culture meant to reflect ideas of Non-Alignment, self-managing socialism, and nation-building. Yugoslavian Non-Aligned modernism also had strong anti-imperialist characteristics influenced by the country’s colonial and semi-colonial status vis-à-vis Western Europe. Modernist influences were therefore refracted and changed as they penetrated the Yugoslavian cultural milieu. Artistic and intellectual groups, exhibitions, and political ideas discussed in this thesis show a tendency to oscillate between revolutionary socialist ideas, and more conservative aesthetic and political attitudes. But it is precisely this curious mixture of aesthetic utopianism and aesthetic and political pragmatism that make Yugoslavian modernism interesting and valuable to reconsider now. Instead of reading Yugoslavian modernism as derivate of predominantly Western forms, we should read it as a form of alternative modernism that developed its complexities not only because of the Western colonial and imperial cultural project, of which Yugoslavia was a part of, but in spite of it. Non-Aligned modernism is therefore both a critique and a continuation of the modernist project and as such deepens our understanding of modernism and its struggle to actualize its progressive ideals.