A visit to MoCAB and what Yugoslav modernism has to say about being caught between two worlds
Where do you put a museum that holds the art of a country caught between worlds? At the confluence, obviously. At the exact point where the Sava meets the Danube, where two rivers pull in two directions and somehow produce one city. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade did not choose this location by accident. It chose the most geographically ambivalent spot in the entire city, and then built itself there as if to say: this is the only honest place to stand. The building deserves its own moment. Ivan Antić and Ivanka Raspopović won the architectural competition in 1959 to 1960, and the result opened on 20 October 1965: six interlocking cubic volumes faced in white marble, rotated forty five degrees against a rectangular base, the whole composition reading at distance like a crystal that landed on the New Belgrade side of the river and decided to stay. Skylights pull daylight down into galleries arranged on a cascading spiral, so that you can stand on one level and watch other visitors moving through the rooms above and below. Where other modernist museums of that decade chose monumentality, MoCAB chose transparency.Coming from Berlin, where institutions occupy the centre and announce themselves accordingly, I found MoCAB's position quietly radical. It chose the confluence over the capital, the edge over the argument.
The permanent collection currently on view, Turning Points to Modernity: Art of Society 1900 to 1945, belongs to that rare category of exhibitions that reward the slow, unhurried attention contemporary art has largely trained us to abandon. Four and a half decades of Yugoslav painting and sculpture, beginning at the moment when Serbian and Croatian artists were returning from Paris and Munich carrying Cézanne and Matisse in their eyes, and ending on the eve of a war that would change everything.
What strikes you immediately is how intensely these painters were living between two worlds and how productively uncomfortable that position made them. Take Sava Šumanović, born in Vinkovci in 1896 and murdered by the Ustaše in Sremska Mitrovica in 1942, a figure whose biography fits into a single line and yet contains the entire tragedy of the century. He trained under André Lhote in Paris, absorbed Fauvism, Expressionism and Cubism with the appetite of someone who understood that time was short, and yet borrowed from them only the elements that suited his own sensibility. His painting was called painting by feeling, and in the room holding two of his works that phrase becomes literally true. A woman in pink pulling on a stocking by the window, a vase of gladioli beside her, a second figure leaning on the balcony, a scene so Parisian in its breath that the signature Choumanovitch in the lower right reads almost as a declaration. Next to it the Large Nude of 1928, a woman seen from the back on a chair, ochre and rose on a red carpet, and you understand that Šumanović was the rare student who digested Paris rather than imitated it, and returned it with a Balkan temperature.
The next room belongs to Nadežda Petrović (1873 to 1915), and her presence demands a separate pause, because the biography of this woman reads like a screenplay no producer would buy for being too overpacked. Painter, photographer, pedagogue, art critic, women's emancipation activist, and finally a wartime nurse who died of typhus in Valjevo at forty two. Munich, Paris, Italy, and every time a return to Serbia, and every time the Serbian soil grew louder in her palette. Her Two Peasant Women with a bucket on a yoke between them, two figures in red turned toward each other, holds an expressionist colour intensity so charged that the paint physically breathes off the surface. Her work carries the rare gesture of an artist who has been through three academies and one war: a confidence in colour that has nothing left to prove.
The National topoi section explains the temperature of these rooms better than any wall label could. Between 1900 and 1920, Serbian art unfolded inside a historical meat grinder: the late phase of the Principality and Kingdom of Serbia, the Balkan Wars, the First World War, and finally the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918. Painters turned to national costume, folkloric scenes, landscapes of native Vojvodina, and they did so because they were simultaneously building the visual language of a country that did not yet technically exist. Mihailo Milovanović's Woman in National Costume of 1908 to 1910, a bent figure in an embroidered headscarf and white blouse with full sleeves, reads as something far closer to visual sovereignty than to ethnography.
And then you step into the red room, Experimentation in Painting Moving toward Abstraction, and understand that the twenties here were as radical as anywhere else in Europe. Jovan Bijelić and his Abstract Movement of 1920, Cubism shot through with Futurist dynamics, Constructivist order colliding with Balkan turbulence. The painters of this generation studied in Paris, Vienna and Prague, and brought home Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and Constructivism, then sewed all of it into something that holds its own place in the history of European modernism even today. And for anyone tempted to assume that Serbian Surrealism was a footnote to its Parisian counterpart, stand in front of Radojica Živanović Noe's Apparition in Smoke of 1932, flesh and helmet and a child with the wrinkled face of an old man floating on a black field, and try to argue that this is second tier work.
The thirties in this museum are arranged as a slow exhale after the avantgarde fever. The Intimate and the Poetic gathers painters who, after the dramatic experiments of the preceding decade, turned toward quiet interiors, solitary figures, landscapes loaded with emotional depth. Roman Petrović's Forest Landscape of 1933 paints the sun as an explosion in the sky above blue mountains, post impressionism that has passed through personal melancholy. Petar Dobrović in Villas on Hvar assembles Mediterranean white, ochre and blue into a composition that reads simultaneously as a postcard and as a manifesto: one can live on the Adriatic, paint villas and cypresses, and remain entirely an artist of one's time.
The most interesting ethical turn in the exhibition is the Engaged Art room, devoted to the groups Zemlja (Earth, 1929 to 1935) and Život (Life, 1934 to 1940), artists who decided that art was obliged to function as a weapon in the fight for a fairer society. Đorđe Andrejević Kun, whose Mother of 1937 shows a woman in a red dress, barefoot, nursing a child against a brick wall, direct gaze, zero sentimentality. And Árpád G. Balázs, Digging 1934, a linocut of bent peasant figures on a black field that works as political poster and as formally impeccable graphic object at once. The artists of this circle chose printmaking deliberately, as the most reproducible medium capable of carrying a political message across every stratum of society. And when you stand in front of Milan Konjović's Little Ministrant of 1936, a small altar boy in a white surplice with a pink collar against a blue ground, the expressionist paint laid on so that the boy's face becomes both icon and accusation, you understand that the premonition of catastrophe was inscribed in these canvases long before the catastrophe began.
The question the exhibition keeps asking, never quite stating it directly, runs something like this: what happens to artists trained in one visual language when they return to a place that speaks another, and whether the friction produces work that belongs to neither world fully, or to both more deeply than either could have managed alone. I walked out on a Tuesday in May without a clean answer, and I suspect that is the point. Belgrade has been living inside that question through its geography for centuries, caught between rivers, between empires, between east and west, and the painters in these rooms did not resolve it either. They just made it into something worth looking at for a very long time.
📍 Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade · MoCAB Currently on view: Turning Points to Modernity: Art of Society 1900 to 1945 · until March 2027 📷 Photos by @belgradeart.official