Artists in Service of the Masses

It could be claimed that no period in Croatian and Yugoslav art history is as despised as the Socialist Realist period. Already in the early 1950s, art from the first years subsequent to the liberation and revolution in 1945 was regularly accused of being “moulded by dead and superficial patterns.” ¹ Such denunciations, coming from advocates of autonomy of artistic creation, became especially frequent after the July 1948 Resolution of Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), signed by all other members of Cominform, which condemned the policies of the new Yugoslav socialist government. They should thus be viewed in the light of the geopolitical change that led to the breaking of Yugoslav–Soviet relations (the ‘Tito–Stalin split’) and subsequent Yugoslav orientation towards the West in the Cold War. It was “one of the most important turning points in the history of Tito’s Yugoslavia, when the Yugoslav Communists decided to tilt the country westwards in the Cold War, shift the domestic system towards ‘market socialism’ and decentralise the state.” ² From the year 1948 onwards, the development of the often-misunderstood “Yugoslav path to socialism” began. The change in economic and foreign policy was inevitably followed by a shift in cultural policy (although not until the 1950s). The cultural shift was most visible in the explicit abandonment of Socialist Realism.