That year, the 7th Congress of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia addressed not only the organisation of production within a rapidly growing economy, but, for the first time, the question of consumption, considering it to be a marker of social development. Whereas in Zagreb in the early s the more radical artistic practices were influenced primarily by forms of constructivism exemplified by EXAT 51 and, later into the s, by the New Tendencies movement , in Belgrade the influence of surrealism was much more pronounced, for two reasons.
The double-sided influence of surrealism suggests that the usual distinction between official culture and dissident culture in Yugoslavia is untenable. Indeed, dialogue between policy makers and practising artists was not unusual; sometimes this led to a conformist compromise, sometimes to active critical debate.
One of the most striking examples of such dialogue was initiated by the increasing visibility of American culture in Yugoslavia during the s. Within artistic circles this was associated with the rise of pop art, to which hostility was shown both by official policy makers who were not so much ideologically anti-American as culturally anti-American and by artists and critics, who identified American pop art to be symptomatic of the de-humanised denigration of art in the aggressively commercial, consumerist culture of the West.
American pop art was met with almost unanimous resistance from the artistic establishment in Belgrade when it arrived in Yugoslavia in the s. This resistance stemmed in large part from the anti-Americanism of European high culture, and stifled the development of an adequate discursive framework for examining such art. As a result there are only a few references to pop art in Serbia in the s, and the same is true of other Yugoslav and central European countries.
Serbian art education of the s still relied upon traditional formal strictures, especially in the conservative milieu of the Belgrade Art Academy. The first, Smoker fig. While some interpretations have read such works as exclusively ironic — that is, as ironic reproductions of communist iconography — it may be more appropriate to read them as ambivalent. Comrade Tito, Our Violet White… is particularly emblematic of this ambivalence, and unique in the context of Yugoslav art of the time.
