NON-ALIGNED MODERNISM: YUGOSLAVIAN ART AND CULTURE FROM 1945-1990

ii This thesis seeks to understand and recover contemporary social, political and aesthetic value from the often dismissed or marginalized history of Yugoslavian modernism. The significance and complexity of the Yugoslavian experiment with modernism has often passed unrecognized. It has been dismissed as derivative and marginal or else eclipsed and tainted by the collapse of the Yugoslavian state in the early 1990s. To understand Yugoslavian modernism’s particularity we must recognize that socialist Yugoslavia existed as an in-between political power that negotiated the extremes of the Cold War by building a version of socialism independent from the Soviet model. Its art and culture were equally idiosyncratic. Although Yugoslavian cultural and political elites accepted modernism as a national cultural expression, the way that modernism developed did not strictly follow Western models. As a mixture of various aesthetic, philosophical, and political notions, Yugoslavian modernism can only be described by a political term associate