BETWEEN THE SPECTRE OF FORMALISM AND THE TROUBLE OF SOCIALIST REALISM: PETAR LUBARDA AND SOCIALIST REALISM

Abstract

The majority of our historiography places the time of “socialist realism” in Yugoslavia in the period immediately after the Second World War: 1945–1950. During this time, in all areas of the institutional organisation of the state, as well as in the life of society in general, Yugoslavia understandably followed the experiences of the Soviet Union, as the first socialist country. Although the Soviet model of “socialist realism”, as a particular expression of the “objective”, cognitively inevitable clash of Art and the Revolution, was taken as a template in art and literature, this doctrinaire artistic style inarguably had some quite specific characteristics in the Yugoslav context. This text deals mostly with the anatomy of an individual artistic experience in the given historic circumstances. And it is precisely the artistic experience of Petar Lubarda, one of the most prominent Yugoslav artists after the war, which shows the impossibility of treating this short period of “socialist realism” in Yugoslavia monolithically. The term “experience” seems appropriate because it points not only to a concrete oeuvre, but also to what accompanies it – including the artist’s thoughts on the relevant topics of his day: esthetical, ideological, political and social. The text analyses in particular a certain always present duality in Lubarda’s attitude to the ideological and political imperatives bearing on the field of aesthetics between 1945 and 1950. Lubarda vacillates, tries to find his bearings in the given circumstances, and feels the pressure of the powerful ideological agitprop machinery of the Party, probably in part through the critical remarks directed at his paintings by the ideological high priests of the time. On occasion, this pressure would leave a trace both in the initial discussions at professional fora at which Lubarda took part from the very beginning and in the forced formal framework of his earliest paintings from the period, such as The Sufferings of a People (1944–45) or Remembrance of 1941 (1947). On the other hand, the obvious indebtedness to current ideological and political orders, primarily visible in the choice of the “subjects” of the paintings, did not hinder Lubarda in his search for a new concept of art. His efforts in this direction can be seen already early on, in the painting Scene from Combat (also known as The Bomber), from 1945, and more clearly in later paintings such as The Uprising (sometimes also known as Assault), Boxcar and Seaside Motif, all from 1948. On the one hand, the physical encoding of the figures in these paintings points to “mobility”, to “bodies in action”, to the martial and work enthusiasm of the builders of an epoch; on the other, turning to the field of purely plastic means, procedures creep into and gather in the paintings to gradually lead to the articulation of a new language of painting. This language included the abolition of literal illusionist mechanisms of rendering a motif through the increasing deformation of natural forms, even to the point of surrealism; the shortening of illusive space in the paintings, up to and including their total flatness; and, finally, the invention of a specific, wall-like material structure for the paintings.