On the Very Edge: Modernism and Modernity in the Arts and Architecture of Interwar Serbia (1918-1941)

Abstract

While presenting the complexity of modernist art tendencies in this part of Europe, stretched between the international and local, national and regional, beyond the usual tropes of the civilizational belatedness and of what Maria Todorova has called the East European "Trap of Backwardness", this book reveals a bunch of more or less familiar subjects. While exploring the complexity and entanglement of Serbian modernism in visual culture, literature and architecture, the book helps reveal how global cultural impact of modernity developed interesting local variants which is still an understudied subject, marginalized in scholarly discourse. According to the applied methodological framework marked by avoiding "partisan scholarship" and "politicized discussions" — but also by avoiding the critical interrogation of typical interpretive truisms such as "Academism" or the "Serbo-Byzantine Style" — interwar Serbian modernism, nevertheless, remains largely de-contextualized in this volume. This unfortunately leaves the book lacking the scholarly weight to transform our standard understanding of Serbian modernism that has been firmly entrenched in the existing literature.