Undoubtedly the most drastic example of political government’s intervention in the field of modern art in the period of communist rule in Yugoslavia is the famous attack from the very top of the state against abstract art at the beginning of 1963. Until exact reasons for this campaign are not established, and some of the documents concerning it may be hiding in archives that are still inaccessible, the most information about the said campaign can be found in Jure Mikuž’s study Slovenačko slikarstvo od raskida sa socrealizmom do konceptualizma i zapadna umetnost (Painting in Slovenia from the Breakup with Socialist Realism until Conceptualism and Western Art). According to this source, at the 7th Congress of the People’s Youth Organization of Yugoslavia that took place in Belgrade on January 23, 1963, as Borba daily notes, Josip Broz Tito, among other things, delivered a series of accusations against abstract art. The accusations read as follows.

I am not against the artistic search for the new, for example, in painting, sculpting and other fields of art, because that is needed and good. But I am against giving the community’s money to some so-called modernist works that have nothing to do with artistic creativity let alone our reality. From the artistic side, in modern painting there are important works, sometimes even of a lasting value, as well as those that hold considerable decorative value, but still there is a lot of things here that have no artistic value at all. And exactly these works without value are today much more present at our exhibitions and are swamping, and costing a lot of money, at that, different institutions. Who is responsible that such quasi-art has become so prevalent? Naturally, those who buy this quasi-art and spent state’s money on it, sometimes even giving awards and such. If someone wants to engage in such painting or sculpting, let them do that at their own expense, together with those who represent the ultramodern, abstract art. Could it be that our reality does not offer a material that is rich enough for creative artistic work? And the large part of our young artists dedicates the least attention to it… It is clear that here we cannot speak of some sort of administrative intervention. Nevertheless, the public should not be passive about such problems. (Mikuž 1985: 13)

According to a report from Borba, not even a month later, from the same source and on the same topic the following was said:

I am not only responsible of industrialization and agriculture, but also of culture, because I am not only the President of the Republic but also the Secretary General of the Communist League. And as Party’s Secretary General I am responsible before history and people for the correct course of the development of our country. That’s why such people need to understand and remember that no other way is possible. Besides, as an average person who observes art, I am able to know what is good and what isn’t… Abstract movement in painting has become dominant in Yugoslavia. Realists are being pushed away, and the awards are given to mostly abstract artists. Of course, it is not the artists who are responsible of this, but those communist leaders who were entrusted with the means and who gave awards to those who were not supposed to get them. (Mikuž 1985: 14)

According to the procedure that was dominant in the Communist League it was necessary to develop a directive that would go from the top to the base; the result of the directive was “self-criticism” on the side of certain state authorities and members of federal and republic associations of visual artists. But although it came from a high place, with the exception of discussions at the meetings of communist committees in different associations of artists and verbal confrontations with the individuals, the campaign was short-lived. The consequences of the campaign were not exactly repressive, although it did poison the climate that until then offered, or so it was believed, a limitless “creative freedom”. Viewed from a later perspective, after the rule of the ideology of socialist realism in the early post-war period, the whole case appears as a very intriguing episode of the government’s, more precisely its very top’s, intervention in current events at the contemporary art scene in Yugoslavia.

When, in the context of these proceedings, the term “abstract art” is mentioned, we immediately need to ask ourselves what concrete artistic occurrences that were in place at the beginning of the 1960s this term refers to? The real answer would be – it refers to art informel, which from its very beginning provoked significant polarization pro et contra, especially in the Serbian art scene where on the side of art infromel stood its most agile advocate, the art critic Lazar Trifunović and the circle of painters close to him who were also active as theorists and critics (Mića Popović, Zoran Pavlović, Živojin Turinski). On the opposite side, against art informel and its protagonists, stood two distinguished painters of the older generation, Milo Milunović with his text O slikarskoj materiji (On the Painting Matter) and Peđa Milosavljević with his Pape i biskupi slikarstva i kritike (Popes and Bishops of Painting and Criticism). Published in November 1962 these texts raised suspicion against the appearance of art informel, and could even be seen as an attempt at settling the score with those the texts refer to. However, it is also clear that they did not have a role in it and did not have enough strength to set in motion a political campaign that would soon flare up against abstract art. At the very eve of the attack against abstract art, in November/December 1962 an exhibition under a (perhaps purposefully neutral) title 27 savremenih slikara (27 Contemporary Artists) took place in Sombor. The exhibition, with only a few exceptions, included a considerable number of Yugoslav representatives of art informel. However, it needs to be said that (at least for now) there is no indication of possible connection between the exhibition in Sombor and the political campaign in question.

We can only guess what were the real reasons for this campaign. One of the witnesses of this time and a very influential member of the Yugoslav art scene of the period, Miodrag B. Protić, in his memoirs Nojeva barka writes on this topic:

What was, we asked ourselves, its objective? A concession to the USSR (Khrushchev) in a relatively unimportant matter in order to deny concession to something more important? Or was it a political diversion – to make noise in one hermetic and closed section in order to cover up an intervention in some other, more vital one? Or some group’s influence? (Protić 1992: 509)

Concession to the USSR – by conceding something unimportant in order to deny concession in something more significant, where this more significant, reminds Mikuš, may refer to the foreign policy situation in the world that culminated in Cold War tensions at the time of the Berlin and Cuban crises, which almost led to an open military conflict between the two competing blocs – cannot be dismissed as the real reason, at least as a hypothesis. Namely, merciless bloc confrontations required the use of all possible arguments, not only military and political, but also ideological in culture and modern art. Under such circumstances, the Soviet side launched severe attacks against modern art on the whole, especially on the occasion of Khrushchev’s meeting with the artists on December 17, 1962 in Moscow. This event predates the attack on abstract art in Yugoslavia only by twenty or so days, so it is not impossible that – according to Protić’s predictions – the intervention on the side of Yugoslav authorities truly was a peripheral tactical concession to the USSR in order to deny the same in some much more demanding and committing strategic issue.

However, a proof that this intervention of the top political structures in Yugoslavia was not only an isolated case, but was, most likely, connected to the events that had taken place in the Soviet Union and Poland some weeks earlier, can be found in the book Iza gvozdene zavese (Behind the Iron Curtain), published on the occasion of the exhibition called Zvanična i nezavisna umjetnost u Sovjetskom Savezu i Poljskoj 1945-1989 (Official and Independent Art in the Soviet Union and Poland 1945-1989). This exhibition, staged at the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade at the end of 2010, mostly included the works from Piotr Nowicki’s Warsaw collection. What really happened on the artistic plane in Moscow at the end of 1962 can be made out from Ana Romanova’s text Sovjetska utopija: od “Blagoslovene zemlje” do mesta koje ne postoji (The Soviet Utopia: from the Blessed Country to the Place that does not Exist). This text gives a detailed and suggestive presentation of the following events: at the opening of the exhibition of the works of the participants of Ely Bielutin’s Workshop on November 26, 1962, at the Teacher’s Home in Moscow, Bielutin provoked an incident by claiming that abstract art was allowed in the USSR. The incident happened again at the Manjež Central Exhibition Hall, which was on December 1, 1962, when it opened, visited by Nikita Khrushchev accompanied by members of the Academy of the Arts and Artists’ Association. Khrushchev made very harsh derogatory comments on many exhibits, which immediately raised his reaction to the level of the highest official position of the party and the state. The incident in Manjež was a historical precedent, which would, on one hand, lead to the gradual appearance of the so-called “unofficial” or “independent” art in the USSR, but would, on the other hand, expose the very rigorous attitudes and repressive interventions on the side of the very top of Soviet communist authorities against such art. For now it is difficult to determine what is the connection, be it direct or indirect, between the events in Moscow in the late December of 1962 and the campaign against abstract art in Belgrade in the early January of 1963, but it is more than obvious that this was not a pure and simple coincidence, that is, there has to be a connection. Moreover, it is obvious that these are mutually closely connected events out of which the one in the USSR slightly predates the one in Yugoslavia so it could be logically concluded that the first incident undoubtedly influenced the second.

The position of the communist political government towards abstract art in Poland at the “thawing” period developed in accordance with the circumstances in the country and is thus considerably different from the explicitly “firm hand” in the USSR, yet there too a certain number of repressive interventions did take place. The development of the process from the strict control to the moderate liberalization of art within the Polish society after 1956 is described in some detail in Piotr Piotrowski’s text Umetnost u Poljskoj – između totalitarizma i demokratije (Art in Poland – Between Totalitarianism and Democracy):

Post-Stalinist rule sought for a more efficient confirmation of cultural politics within its own society. They wanted to show that, in addition to all historical changes (political changes, a wave of liberalization, and “closing of the valve”), the “civilized” government is “liberal” and, last but not least, “modern”. In the language of Michel Foucault, they began understanding that the methods of control and supervision are a more effective tool of government than the repression that was present during the Stalinist period. The formula of modernist creativity, which put art in the shackles of aestheticism by declaring its disinterest in the outer world (i.e. politics), perfectly suited this strategy. Against its anti socialist realist rhetoric, modernism gave the authorities the feeling of safety because it avoided directly formulated political allusions. Allowing formal experiments, as the “liberated” Polish communists thought, was not dangerous – it could even be useful. It performed the function of “a security valve”: artists could feel free (they could experiment freely) without asking questions about the limited nature of such freedom because such questions were not part of the modernist framework. (Piotrowski 2010: 63-64)

The said analysis, word for word, could be applied to the dominant artistic processes that were from, roughly, the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s present at the then-Yugoslav, and within it Serbian, art scene. These processes understand the symptoms of the phenomena present at the scene under such concepts as “socialist aestheticism” and “socialist modernism”. As far as artistic situation in Poland is concerned, with regards to internal political disruptions, the government’s position towards modern and abstract art soon changed considerably. In her text Oblici socrealizma i period “otapanja” u poljskom slikarstvu (Socialist Realist Forms and the Period of “Thawing” in Polish Painting), Ivona Luba describes the following turn of events:

The period of normal development did not last long. As early as the September of 1959, The 3rd Exhibition of Modern Art took place in Warsaw – the last exhibition of free avant-garde art of the “thawing” period. Communist Party’s bureaucrats closed it only a few days later. In 1960 the Party issued an absurd directive, which allowed the exhibitions of modern art in Poland to show only 15 per cent of abstract works. Although no one obeyed this directive, in reality it only emphasized the strength and the position abstract painting occupied within society. It was confirmed that after a couple of years of artistic independence in the “thawing” period and the hope that the new spring began in the cultural life of the country, in 1960 winter set in again. (Luba 2010: 84-85)

The situation in the countries on the other side of “the iron curtain”, that is, in the USSR and Poland, was definitely different from the situation in the Yugoslav and Serbian art scene as part self-governing socialism. In other words, artistic freedoms in Yugoslavia were greater. In this sense the episode with the political campaign against abstract art at the beginning of 1963 today seems like an incident caused by outside reasons whose initiators and supporters were present among domestic factors in political, cultural and artistic public. But the very fact that it did happen shows that Yugoslav socialism with its tactical and strategic oscillations “between East and West” occasionally, as this example in the field of modern art shows, knew that it clearly inclined to the “Eastern” model of acting and doing, especially if we take into consideration that according to the “Western” model such campaign would be completely unnecessary and simply unimaginable. What actually caused this campaign and what happened to put it in effect – despite the fact that some light was shed at its possible source in the studies done by Russian and Polish art historians – in our case, these questions still remain unanswered and the task of finding a more detailed and final answer still lays before us.

Bibliography

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