An Insight into the Reception of American Art in Yugoslavia 1965-1991

Abstract

This essay examines the reception of American art in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugo-slavia (SFRY) from 1965, when a reformation of the Yugoslav political and economic systems began, until 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence, thus setting in motion the break-up of the SFRY. In 1964 at its Eighth Congress, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia announced two fundamental reforms: one concerned with a greater liberalization of the economy and its reorientation toward a market economy, while the other rejected the use of Socialist Yugoslavism in the service of a stronger federalization of party and state. These reforms opened a path towards political and cultural liberalization, which led to the establish-ment of Socialist Modernism as the dominant artistic paradigm. The year 1991 was also the year in which the Soviet Union ceased to exist, marking the end of the series of revolutions in Eastern European countries that had begun in 1989, of the Warsaw Pact, and finally of the Cold War itself. Furthermore, 1965 was the year in which the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCAB) opened in Belgrade, the first museum of its kind in a socialist country, while 1991 is the year in which the museum’s director at the time, Zoran Gavrić, responding to a series of cancellations of exhibitions from abroad (including plans to exhibit Andy Warhol’s lithographs from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York) due to the unstable political situation (protests in Belgrade starting in March of 1991), temporarily halted all further activity at the institution