Boža Ilić was born in 1919 in a small Serbian village called Žitni Potok, one year after the end of the WW1 and the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in the Peace Treaty in Versailles. However, despite spending his childhood years under the crown, the majority of his adult life he was a citizen of the socialist Yugoslavia, while he died in 1993, in the mist of the raging war of the now broken Federation.
From an early age he lost his hearing while he focused on painting having as a personal tutor the local icon painter, with whom he completed his first drawing, these being copies of various saints’ icons. His talent in the arts was quickly recognized. Therefore, with the support of his family he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade and graduated in 1945, while he did not participate neither in the WW2, nor in the partisan struggle due to his medical condition.
He was, however, a great supporter of the regime and through his paintings, especially the first years of the Federations, he attempted to depict the glory of communism and socialism. His career started to take substance after his initial exhibitions in 1947. Ilić, in the beginning, was heavily inspired by the official Soviet art scene and art style, which was called Socialist Realism. The Soviet painters had implemented this artistic means of expression since the early 1930s, while it remained the official iconography since almost the dissolution of the Russian Federation. According to this style, art had to devote itself in the depiction and promotion of the socialist ideology and values. Protagonist was the everyday working proletariat, the factory worker, the farmer, the emancipated women. Realistic figures of the new Soviet Man are building with his bare hands the future of the glorious Socialism was central to the heavily politicized art scene.
Yugoslavia, as a socialist state, the partisans of which fought in the WW2 in order to demolish the previous royal regime and, inspired by the Marxist-Leninist views, was influenced by socialist realism in its initial depictions of the glorified now Anti-fascist socialist struggle against the Axis powers. For the first 5 years of its existence, the South Slav regime relied in the beforementioned art style in presenting the new Yugoslav man, an idealized image that all nations inside the Federation could relate with. Because the majority of the new independent state had a rural and traditional background, the regime connected the notions of socialism with that of modernism, urbanization and industrialization. Modernity, as it was visualized in the 1940s, the creations of an urban ideology and the radicalization of the heavy industry and production were intertwined with the socialist ideology, since Yugoslavia was lacking the important step of the much needed industrial revolution, in order to make the “leap”, from communism to socialism.
Therefore, socialist realism projected the ideas of the man in and of the Future, the one who will bare in his arms the hardship of creating the socialist utopia. Boža Ilić, as the story goes, was interested to find this new Yugoslav man in the streets of Belgrade. He seeked, in other words, to experience socialism, to see the future before his own eyes. Unable to do so, he crossed the river and found himself into the new province of New Belgrade (Novi Beograd). This part of the town had not yet built, but its construction was commissioned by the Committee in order to expand the capital and offer to the citizens the spatial visualization of the realist socialism, the lived socialism in other words. There, he examined a group of workers, both male and female, holding a big metal pile and forcing it into the ground in order to see whether the ground was able to withhold the construction of New Belgrade. This image, in his mind, was the actualization of the regime’s ideology and he made a quick sketch of the event and later made the now famous artwork called Gauging of New Belgrade's Ground (1948). This piece of art is considered the first officially authorized work of Yugoslav socialist realism and Ilić was at the time an artist of high respect.
Yugoslavia, as a multinational and multicultural entity was very diverse in its core and the ethnic groups that consisted it have various and at times contradictory collective identities, and in the first years of the Federation, had to be moulded at one singular socialist Yugoslav identity. Art was an essential key for the Party policies in the implementation of the new political and cultural identity and socialist realism, as it was developed in USSR, seemed an ideal form of expression of the official sentiments. Tito, it has to be noted at this point, was a fan of figurative art, where abstract creations, such as the ones offered by the previous art nouveau styles of Russian avant-garde, as it was represented by Kazimir Malevich, or French Dada, by Marcel Duchamp, were not popular in Yugoslavia.
However, the great split of Yugoslavia with USSR in 1948, caused a shift in the aesthetic preferences of the regime that now condemned socialist realism as a dead art form, that left little to no imagination to the artists and was put aside. This caused for Ilić to be left in the artistic background and made him shift his art into depictions of nature in small canvases, with the occasion big projects, although being socially funded for his survival. So, we come to understand that the work of the artist can be split in to two periods, the socialist realism up until 1950 and the period after that was devoted to nature and small artistic projects.
Overall, Boža Ilić was a painter that was left unacknowledged for a big period of his life due to political circumstances, but after the Fall of Yugoslavia a great interest in this art style was reembraced and his artwork now is considered a very important Yugoslav socialist heritage in his depiction of a different, now long-lost world and worldview.
Sources:
Mišina, D. (2013). Shake, Rattle and Roll: Yugoslav Rock Music and the Poetics of Social Critique (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315608549
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/socialist-realism:Visited 21/2/21
https://www.britannica.com/art/Socialist-Realism :Visited 21/2/21
https://yuhistorija.com/serbian/kultura_religija_txt01.html:Visited21/2/21
http://narodnimuzejnis.rs/ :Visited 21/2/21
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