Since 2009, the Zagreb, Croatia-based Virtual Museum of Avant-Garde Art has been the online home to the Marinko Sudac Collection. In 2004, Croatian art collector Marinko Sudac started accumulating the Avant-Garde art of the former-Yugoslavian region, primarily art produced in Yugoslavia from 1914 till 1989, but later his interest included related materials from Central and Western Europe.
Today, the collection comprises some 20,000 items that include not only works of art but also publications and documents ranging from private letters to documentary photographs, videos and films. According to museum curator Branko Franceschi, whose winter exhibition "Tune in Screening: Psychedelic Moving Images From Socialist Yugoslavia 1966–1976" at New York City's Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, was included in the Village Voice's Fifteen Best Art Shows of 2011, the later is very important considering the documentation of public art, installations, performances and happenings occurring during 60s and 70s. Sudac's strategy is simple, says Franceshi, "to collect all that was relevant to enable present day and future research of the local Avant-Garde production, its connections and collaborations with the international movements and artists of its epoch. This research should become the foundation in positioning the local avant-garde production within the existing narrative of the 20th Century history of arts and culture which is predominantly west oriented."
As the Sudac Collection’s vehicle for ongoing development and research, the Virtual Museum of Avant-Garde Art is a portal for the dissemination of information about the avant-garde art that connects and integrates those interested in how the visions, methods, and ideas of the historical avant-garde can contribute to contemporary cultural discourse and practice, including its participatory potential, proclaimed social responsibility, and ability to humanize technology.
While annual exhibits at regional museums of key parts of the collection have been well attended and well received, Franceschi believed that a permanent presence was required in order to fulfill Sudac's mission of disseminating information on the Yugoslavian-region avant-garde. The Virtual Museum of Avant-garde Art fills that void.
While many arts-minded Americans are more familiar with Avant-Garde art of Russia and Western Europe, most probably don't know much about the Yugoslavian strain. So I asked Franceschi to give a brief history and overview of the movement:
Yugoslavian Avant-Garde art of the early twenties was, like everywhere else, influenced by Futurism, Dada and Russian Constructivism. Though the first Futurist manifesto published in our parts is considered to be the one published in Rijeka in 1914 by the group of local futurists, the most influential Avant-Garde movement was gathered around the magazine Zenit published by Ljubomir Micic in Zagreb (1921 – 1923) and later in Belgrade (1923 -1926). Zenit was international and published texts in the original language of its many contributors, among them works by the most prominent Yugoslavian avant-gardists such as Josip Seissel (Jo Klek), Eduard Stepancic, Josip Goll, Bosko Tokin, Branko Ve Poljanski, and others. Its marketing included pamphlets and evening events organized throughout Yugoslavia and Central Europe, employing Futurist strategy and aesthetics.
Zenit, during its peak, promoted constructivist aesthetics in typography and illustrations promoting work by Lajos Kassak, Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Archipenko, etc. Zenit's program was basically international: It aimed at creating a completely new and united Europe, regardless of race, nationality, language, conceptual, or ideological orientation. Zenit confronted disputed European tradition and its still very strong reverberations in contemporary life, the political and economic systems being developed on the ever-stronger power of capital, all in the name of acceptance of the values founded on the assumptions of internal reconstitution of man by overcoming external materiality with internal spirituality.
Antieuropa, Poezija, 230 x 156 mm, 1926
In terms of originality, Zenit advocated "Balkanocentrism" by promoting shifting of interest towards aesthetics of primitive, archaic forms of thought and display. Highlighting such an identity and mind meant detachment from the European cultural supremacy, which in turn should be Balkanized. The program was announced with the manifesto ‘Zenitism as the Balkan Totalizer of New Life’. Barbarogenius, the key term of Zenitism, was never a completely defined concept, it wandered from Nitzscheanism to slavenophilism, from anthroposophy to communism, becoming ever more depreciating, anti-European, pro-Balkan and pro-Serbian.
Ljubomir Micic in 1924 also organized the International Exhibition of the New Art in Belgrade and prepared the Yugoslavian Zenitizm section for the Revolutionary Art of the West exhibition held in Moscow in 1926. Zenit influence was evident in Avant-Garde magazines that followed such as Dada Tank published by Dragan Aleksić in 1922, Ut published by Csuka Zoltan in Novi Sad (1922 – 1925) or Tank in Ljubljana published by Ferdo Delak in 1927. The other striking movement occurring during the 20s was the activity of Zagreb's group Traveleri (1922 – 1932), marked by the identification of art and life in their public performances and theater plays, as well as, significant production of collages by Cedomil Plavsic and Miha Schon. Josip Seissel (Jo Klek), Travelers most famous member, in 1922 created „Pafama“, the first abstract composition in Yugoslavia and entire region.
Trained as an Art Historian at the University of Zagreb, for more than 20 years Franceschi has initiated and curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary art for exhibition venues in Croatia and beyond. He was curator of the Croatian pavilion at the16th Sao Paulo Biennial (2004), 2nd International Biennial in Prague (2005), 52nd Venice Biennial (2007), 11th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennial (2008) and member of the curatorial team of 2nd Biennial of Young Artists, Bucharest (2006). In 2005, he initiated the Biennial of Quadrilateral in Rijeka, Croatia.
Franceschi initiated, managed, and coordinated a residency for Croatian artists at MoMA's PS1 in New York from 2001-2007, and Croatian participation in Art in General’s EERE program since 2004, and has participated in other cultural exchanges between both Croatia and the United States, and Croatia and the EU.
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