CULTURAL INVENTION AS IDEOLOGICAL MIMICRY: ABOUT „BOSNIAN LANDSCAPES“ BY JOVAN BIJELIĆ, 1919–1944

Abstract

The thematic series of painting by Jovan Bijelić known under the title the „Bosnian landscapes“ (Bosanski pejzaži) was created during many years since the end of the 1910s until the middle of the 1940s. Despite the observed stylistic transitions, as well as the formal and coloristic transformations in Bijelić’s painting, „Bosnian landscapes“ show an unusual contiunity in terms of the depicted relationship toward the nature. This relationship is marked by absence of the mimetical creating process, wherein the represenations of the „Bosnian“ landscapes had been made and interpreted as arbitraty mnemonic constructions and a result of artist’s imagination. However, Bijelić’s vision of Bosnia didn’t represent a result of his individual imagination, nor a suitable interpretative model for the critics only. It conicided with a much larger cultural construction of this province in the complex political context of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In this article the relation between the constructed representation of Bosnia and its political reality will be analyzed through interpretation of the reception of Bijelić’s „Bosnian landscapes“ in its own time, as well as in the later historiographic tradition. The analysis is based on the theses that such conceptions and interpretations of the „Bosnian landscapes“ represented an integral part of creating the ideologically complex and politically instrumental myth about Bosnia that, in a seemingly paradoxical manner, connected the interwar context of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the period of after-war socialist confederation.