ABSTRACT
The post-1945 resurgence of radical art forms such as the readymade and the monochrome in Western art is often interpreted as a superficial repetition of the historic avant-garde, devoid of its original political content. Still, this well-established narrative of the neo-avant-garde only accounts for art in Western liberal-democratic contexts. In socialist Yugoslavia, a distinct strand of neo-constructivism emerged in the 1950s, which sought to recapture not only prewar constructivism’s experimental aesthetics, but also its utopian politics. It was fueled by the revolutionary aspirations of socialist Yugoslavia, which strove to articulate a brand of socialism independent from Moscow, as well as an awareness of prewar constructivism that was unmatched in Western Europe. Represented by figures such as Vjenceslav Richter and the collective EXAT-51, this socialist neo-avant-garde challenged both the traditional historiography of postwar abstraction, and the assumption that experimental aesthetics have not existed under non-democratic conditions since the Soviet 1920s.
