This historical essay recounts the story of the EXAT 51 collective—the
first Yugoslavian
abstract art
group—and how it shaped the idea of abstract socialism by associating
socialist cultural politics and modernist artistic practice.
As the Cold war gained momentum in Europe, Tito's break with Stalin led to
Yugoslavia being expelled from the Eastern bloc in 1948. Confronted with
this new reality, the Yugoslav government decided to bridge the
indeterminacy of its cultural politics through a creative strategy: it
commissioned young artists and architects to draft the aesthetics of a
non-Soviet form of socialism. Guided by abstraction and the idiom of
modernism, four friends and later founders of the EXAT 51 collective—
Ivan
Picelj, Zvonimir Radić, Vjenceslav Richter, and Aleksandar Srnec—gave
shape to this endeavor. During the 1950s, they produced exhibitions at home
as well as developed Yugoslav pavilions for trade fairs around the world,
arguing the case for the possibility of an abstract socialism.
Agents of
Abstraction frames the liaison of socialist cultural politics and
modernist artistic practice by interlinking ideas of decentralization,
experiments in state-funded arts and architecture, non-representational
forms, and self-reliance. The cultural and geopolitical contexts are
accompanied by rare visual material, much of which appears in print for the
first time.
