Serbian art: from Paja Jovanović to Marina Abramović

About Serbian art: from Paja Jovanović to Marina Abramović

From the grand history paintings of the 1890s to the performance art that made Marina Abramović world famous, Serbian art has rarely stood still. Here is a guide to the movements and artists that shaped it, and where to see their work in Belgrade.

The turn of the century: grand painting and the first modernists

Around 1900 Serbian painting was dominated by artists trained in Vienna and Munich. Paja Jovanović painted vast, vivid historical scenes and portraits that won him admirers across Europe; his Migration of the Serbs, commissioned in 1896, became one of the best-known images in Serbian art. Uroš Predić, his contemporary, painted the beloved Kosovo Maiden and scenes of Serbian village life with a gentle realism.

At the same time Nadežda Petrović, trained in Munich, was bringing bold colour and expressive brushwork to Serbia, and she is remembered as the country’s first great modernist. Before the First World War the young sculptor Ivan Meštrović, a star of the Vienna Secession, gave Belgrade the Victor, which still looks out over the rivers from Kalemegdan.

Yugoslav artists looked west as well as east, and Belgrade became one of the most open art scenes in socialist Europe.

Between the wars: Paris and the avant-garde

In the 1920s and 1930s many Serbian artists went to Paris. Sava Šumanović studied there and painted The Drunken Boat, an icon of Serbian modern art, and Milena Pavlović-Barili carried her dreamlike, surrealist painting from Belgrade to Rome, Paris and New York. Belgrade had its own avant-garde too: the magazine Zenit, founded by Ljubomir Micić, championed radical modern art in the early 1920s, and in 1930 the Belgrade surrealists published the almanac Nemoguće (The Impossible), one of the most important surrealist publications outside France.

Art under socialism

After 1945 Yugoslavia briefly followed Soviet-style socialist realism, but after Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948 its artists were allowed to look west as well as east. Petar Lubarda’s exhibition of 1951, with its bold, almost abstract canvases, is often seen as the turning point. Painters and sculptors explored abstraction, Informel and new figuration, and in 1957 Leonid Šejka, Olja Ivanjicki and their friends founded Mediala, a movement that mixed the old masters with fantasy and science. The new Museum of Contemporary Art, opened in 1965, became the showcase of a modernism that set Yugoslavia apart from the rest of the Eastern bloc.

Pop art and the New Art Practice

In the 1960s Dušan Otašević created a distinctly Yugoslav pop art, built not from American brands but from the everyday objects and hand-painted signs of socialist life; his work has since been studied by Tate. In 1971 the Student Cultural Centre (SKC) opened in Belgrade and quickly became one of the most adventurous art spaces in Europe. Its April Meetings brought international artists to the city, and Joseph Beuys spoke there in 1974.

Around SKC a group of young artists, Marina Abramović, Raša Todosijević, Neša Paripović, Zoran Popović, Era Milivojević and Gergelj Urkom, pioneered conceptual and performance art. Abramović made some of her earliest performances there, including Rhythm 5 in 1974, before leaving for Amsterdam and international fame as the world’s best-known performance artist. In 2019–2020 she returned home for her retrospective, The Cleaner, at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Contemporary art and fine art today

Belgrade-born Vladimir Veličković built an international career in Paris with his dramatic studies of the human body, and today a new generation shows at the October Salon, the Cultural Centre of Belgrade, ULUS and the city’s independent galleries. Alongside conceptual and new media art, fine art painting remains strong.

Among today’s painters is Jelena Bibić, a Serbian fine artist working in oil and acrylic and a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, known for her powerful paintings of eagles and wild birds, her horses and her portraiture, from commissioned portraits and her IDOL series of celebrity portraits to many portraits of Nikola Tesla, whose legacy she promotes around the world, especially in New York; she has been commissioned to paint a Nikola Tesla portrait mural in central Belgrade, on a building to be announced. A member of ULUS and ULUPUDS and of the board of Galerija Ikar in Zemun, she has exhibited in Serbia and abroad, and is Serbia’s Tesla Ambassador.

Where to see it

Start at the National Museum of Serbia on Republic Square for the great 19th- and early 20th-century painters, then cross to the Museum of Contemporary Art at Ušće for Yugoslav modernism and the avant-garde. The Paja Jovanović Legacy, the Zepter Museum and the Gallery of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts are all in the centre, and the Cvijeta Zuzorić pavilion and Galerija Ikar show living artists. See our Serbian painters & sculptors section for more.

Programmes, dates and opening hours change, so please check with Serbian art: from Paja Jovanović to Marina Abramović before you go.