On the Very Edge

Book excerpt: Revealing a vibrant and intertwined artistic scene in the Balkans On the Very Edge brings together fourteen empirical and comparative essays about the production, perception, and reception of modernity and modernism in the visual arts, architecture, and literature of interwar Serbia (1918–1941). The contributions highlight some idiosyncratic features of modernist processes in this complex period in Serbian arts and society, which emerged ‘on the very edge’ between territorial and cultural, new and old, modern and traditional identities. With an open methodological framework this book reveals a vibrant and intertwined artistic scene, which, albeit prematurely, announced interests in pluralism and globalism. On the Very Edge addresses issues of artistic identities and cultural geographies and aims to enrich contextualized studies of modernism and its variants in the Balkans and Europe, while simultaneously re-mapping and adjusting the prevailing historical canon. Contributors Jelena Bogdanović (Iowa State University), Lilien Filipovitch Robinson (George Washington University), Igor Marjanović (Washington University in St. Louis), Miloš R. Perović (University of Belgrade), Jasna Jovanov (The Pavle Beljanski Memorial Collection and University EDUCONS, Novi Sad), Svetlana Tomić (Alfa University, Belgrade), Ljubomir Milanović (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts), Bojana Popović (Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade), Anna Novakov (Saint Mary’s College of California), Aleksandar Kadijević (University of Belgrade), Tadija Stefanović (University of Belgrade), Dragana Ćorović (University of Belgrade), Viktorija Kamilić (independent scholar), Marina Djurdjević (Museum of Science and Technology, Belgrade), Nebojša Stanković (Princeton University), Dejan Zec (Institute for Recent History of Serbia)