Muzej Zepter (Zepter Museum)
On my first trip to Belgrade, I must have walked past the Zepter Museum a dozen times and didn’t even notice it was there. Situated on Kneza Mihaila (Knez Mihailova Street), Belgrade’s most famous pedestrian-only thoroughfare connecting Republic Square with Kalemegdan, the museum should be one of the capital’s most unmissable sights, and yet it remains a hidden gem.
Part of the reason the museum blends in so well with the other facades on the street is because the building originally housed the First Croatian Savings Bank before it was repurposed as an exhibition hall. The museum was founded (and funded) by Madlena Zepter in 2010, making it the first private art museum in all of Serbia. As I dug deeper into the Serbian modern art world, the excitement surrounding the celebration of the Serbian-Yugoslav artists of the 1950-80s was palpable and I could sense something nearing vindication from both the collectors and the artists after finally having their works publicly validated.
Before I go any further, let’s take a minute to discuss the labels “modern” and “contemporary,” how they specifically apply to Serbian art and the limitations that come with these labels.
People, myself included, often use “modern” and “contemporary” as synonyms for any art that looks like it was created in a post-Rembrandt world. In general, modern art is an umbrella term for any art made between the 1860s and the 1960s and contemporary art covers anything made after that. Of course, there are many variations and subsets under these big blanket terms of modern and contemporary and the time frames are not set it stone. What is Vietnamese modern art? Guatemalan contemporary art? What about movements like cubism, pointillism, dada, minimalism (and many more) that all found their footing in the modern and contemporary eras? (One could write a thesis on the questions I have just posed!)
When we discuss modern Serbian art, it encompasses many styles and forms; all the pieces have the essence of “modern” characteristics, but with the wrinkle that they are informed by the political, cultural, geographic and religious natures of Serbia at the time. By studying modern and contemporary art, we are simultaneously receiving a history lesson about a people and how they evolved as a nation.
While labels like cubism and surrealism help us talk about artists and their works in broad brushstrokes, it’s also reductive to get too hung up on placing art is such narrow boxes. Salvador Dali in known as a surrealist painter, but not everything he created was surrealist in nature (nor was he only a painter). Likewise, an artist known for his or her pointillism could infuse some elements of surrealism into their works. As you can see, these labels are useful until they’re not.
Post-World War II, modern Serbian art was initially dominated by socialist realism. Yugoslavia had emerged from the war as a communist country, on good terms with Stalin and the Soviet Union. During this period, Yugoslav and Soviet art were very similar. According to the Zepter Museum, socialist art was, “a totalitarian model, programmatically directed towards an uncritical idealization of the new society and the ruling politics.” Artists were forced to only create works that put communist principles on a pedestal and never question those who were installing these ideals.
Yugoslavia’s President-for-life, Josip Broz Tito, had a falling out with Stalin and by the 1950s had created a movement of “non-alignment,” a third alternative to the East vs. West of the Cold War that saw Yugoslavia develop relationships with many countries in the developing world. This reinvention of Yugoslavia as a socialist country splitting from its former communist ally had a profound effect on its art. Socialist realism was out and post-war modernism was in.
Surrealist and abstract elements, strictly verboten in socialist realism, exploded across the Serbian/Yugoslav art scene in paintings, sculpture, architecture and even the burgeoning performance art scene. During my visit, there was a special exhibition dedicated to the works of Milija Nešić titled “Art is Pulsating Throughout the Cosmos,” which embodied all of these post-war modernism elements.
Milija Nešić
Nešić was born in 1934 as a citizen of Yugoslavia, but was ethnically Serbian and has always identified as such. Graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in the early 1950s allowed Nešić to enter the art world in the midst of Tito’s split from the USSR and delve immediately into abstract art.
One of Nešić’s most ambitious projects, “Urban-Concrete Sculptures” never fully came to fruition, but we still have the models of his “objects of ideas” that you see in the gallery above. His goal was two-fold: first he would capture the “state of the spirit” in concrete and metal sculptures that would translate his ideas into a metaphysical form and second these sculptures would be scaled to enormous size and placed around Belgrade. He wanted to create a “new nature” out of art in the capital. This would bring spiritual happiness and optimism to Belgrade’s streets and squares, thus invigorating the lives of the citizens, whom Nešić felt led increasingly lonely and alienated existences. Alas, the full-size sculptures were never created, but Nešić kept them alive in his journals called “My Imaginary World- Unrealized Dreams.”
Disillusioned after the failure to complete “Urban-Concrete Sculptures,” Nešić turned away from trying to capture the human spirit in art and documented a series of his performances in the sand on film and in photographs. He explored the darkness of human nature and was very critical of religion. “Life, Space, Time” is seen as very avant-garde and influential in the performance art world today, but at the time Nešić was operating on the fringes of society.
The third phase of Nešić’s career was his creation of “Motiles.” According to the dictionary, something is motile if it has the ability to move spontaneously and in psychology it refers to mental imagery that arises from sensations of bodily movement and position rather than visual or auditory sensations. Nešić took these ideas and created wooden figures connected by weights and wires that can move within a frame, often posing in humorous and compromising positions. The figures, described as “anti- forms” tell the stories of human conflicts, war, suffering and chaos.
Nešić, who is still alive and living in Belgrade, has been able to visit the museum and finally have his day in the sun that eluded him in his prime.
Музеј савремене уметности/Muzej savremene umetnosti (Museum of Contemporary Art)
Known as the “crystal of the confluence,” the Museum of Contemporary Art overlooks the meeting of the Sava and Danube Rivers in Belgrade. Construction of the museum took five years from 1960-65 and the architects received the highest Yugoslav prize for architecture from Tito for their accomplishment. Like the National Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art was closed for a decade from 2007-2017 for repairs. (This marks the second museum I was only able to visit because of my return trip to Belgrade.)
One of the main alterations made to the museum was the replacement of all the glass with special blue tinted windows that change tone depending on the weather and placement of the sun in the sky. The building now has various “moods” and is affected by the weather just like humans.
For the grand re-opening of the museum, all five floors were given over to a single exhibition: “Sequences: Art of Yugoslavia and Serbia from the Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art.” The exhibition was comprised of 18 sequences that could be viewed in any order and which examined different eras and styles from the collection.
Two main themes run through “Sequences,” the first of which has to do with geography. Before 1991, all the art created had a Yugoslav identity (even if there was a sub-identity of Croat-Yugoslav art, Macedonian-Yugoslav art, etc) and post-1991 the individual nations of the former-Yugoslavia codified their individual artistic identities. With art being so political, we must understand the context wherein we place each piece. (Note that the curators of the exhibition do not see the break between Yugoslav and Serbian art to be so abrupt that it happened overnight. Identities take time to evolve and you could still see Yugoslav traits across exhibitions in the former-Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s.)
The second theme is one of “historical markers of the periodisation of contemporary art.” These are events so critical that they did cause seismic shifts in the art world. Tito’s death in 1980 was one such event, followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The decade-long Yugoslav Wars from 1991-2001 was an extended periodisation of danger for many Serbian artists. Slobodan Milošević (the “Butcher of the Balkans”) became the first President of Serbia in 1991 and remained in power until he was removed from office by force in 2001 on charges of genocide and war crimes committed against Croats, Bosnians and Kosovar peoples. He died during his trial at The Hague in 2006. The final periodisation then began in 2001 with Milošević’s ouster and has taken us to the present day as Serbia has entered a new era of democracy.
The piece above by Sanja Iveković was one of my favorite in the exhibition. It is a newspaper photo of one of Tito’s last visits to Zagreb before his death. The crowd cheers below, but for security purposes, no person could open their balcony window and instead were forced to watch the procession from inside their apartments. The indoor viewers (and their empty balconies) are highlighted in bright red, blue and yellow and the doctored photography can be interpreted many different ways.
Szombathi’s “Lenin in Budapest” had to the be the funniest piece in the exhibition. The artist traveled to Budapest and carried around a headshot of Lenin on a stick, capturing people’s reactions with his whimsical and ironic action.
When people talk about things to do in Belgrade, modern and contemporary art rarely are the first topics mentioned, but they really should be. Both the Zepter Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art are top notch museums worthy of a visit.
Belgrade Street Art
If you want to find the most organic contemporary art in Belgrade, you’ve got to hit the streets. Once you get out of the touristy center of the capital, you’ll notice street art all over the place. The roads and buildings lining the Sava River are an especially fertile ground to find a painted overpass or side of a building covered in artistic expression.
Street art often carries a social message and I noticed calls for animal rights/veganism to be particularly prevalent. (Yes, despite the lies Lonely Planet spins that vegetarians/vegans will have a tough time finding food in Serbia, there is a fast-growing plant-based food community in Belgrade. New vegetarian restaurants seem to pop up overnight and more traditional Serbian restaurants are adding vegetarian items to their menus. The stereotype of the Balkans being a meat-only zone needs to die.)
I’ll never understand checking out someone’s travel blog and reading, “here’s a post about art, but I want to keep it strictly about art and not bring politics into it.” Well, it doesn’t work that way. As you can see, even when the subject of modern or contemporary isn’t explicitly political, you can’t separate the work from its historical, political, cultural and geographic context. How can we look at a man carrying around a photo of Lenin and not see the politics behind it? Sometimes art will make us uncomfortable and if it does then it probably is accomplishing its goal. Modern and contemporary art isn’t for the faint of heart or the literal-minded, but traveling is about broadening your horizons and trying new things. Don’t be put off by something you don’t understand. Give it a chance and you may be surprised how a painting can make a whole city/country suddenly make sense.
