Political crisis and the outbreak of the First World War in Europe resulted in a change of worldviews in the 20th-century, which can be seen in style formations - from the appearance of Futurism and Expressionism to the end of Surrealism in the 1930s, when the European society once again sank in a dictatorship crisis which eventually led to yet another war. The historic avant-garde movement was marked by a powerful artistic rebellion against the civil society, economy, class division and the characteristics of European Modernism. Young rebels fought against the public taste, and dethroned traditional artistic values from the contemporary scene. A new art form was born from The Scream by Munch, who called for an artistic revolution and the revaluation of the world as it had been known thus far. Different “-isms” that marked this period were divergent artistic forms, which, nevertheless, had a common denominator: they were based on the poetics of subversion of old canons.
Avant-garde art in Yugoslavia followed the European art tendencies. It was characterized by breaking all kinds of boundaries, discovering and combining new media and the aesthetic revaluation of the world. Tracking avant-garde art intermediality and experiments with the language and writing are particularly interesting, as avant-garde art influenced the future advertisement industry and led to radical aesthetic interventions in human living spaces. Magazines became the main carriers of Avant-garde ideas and creative energy. Many of them were published for a short period of time with limited circulation and represented cohesive points of little Avant-garde art groups, connected by similar ideas regardless of spatial distance. Form the 21st-century viewpoint, synchronization of art practices, that can be seen by comparing periodicals of the time, is almost incredible. The Yugoslav Zenit, Hungarian Ma, German Merz, French Manomètre, Czech Devětsil and Bulgarian Plamk were artistic representations of a time torn by war and political crises.
The collection of Yugoslav avant-garde magazines provides insight into textual and visual traces of a struggle to establish new social relations, humanity and solidarity, and a unique quest for a new human, as it was said at the time. On the pages of these magazines, one can see not only the names of Yugoslav artists and activists, but also some of the greatest names of European art from Gibraltar to the Ural, and from Spitzbergen to the Mediterranean. |
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