Titomaginarium
When in 2011, more than twenty years after the ‘end of
(a brief
1 Aliyev was the KGB major-general, the
leader of Soviet Azerbaijan and then the
president of the country until 2003. His
son Ilham Aliyev succeeded him. To build a
introduction to
monument to such a figure was impossible
during socialism, but it became possible in
‘transitional’ Serbia. See ‘Otkriven spomenik
diktatoru u centru Beograda’, http://www.
slobodnaevropa.org/content/spomenik_
diktatoru_u_centru_beograda_s/24228326.
the ambivalence
html (accessed 8 October 2015).
2 The historian Vjekoslav Perica reminds
us that there is only one monument to Tito
remaining in Croatia, whereas there are
of the ‘cult’
more than 20 figurative monuments to the
first ‘post-communist’ president, Franjo
Tudjman. See the interview with Perica
at http://pescanik.net/vjekoslav-perica-
intervju/ (accessed 8 October 2015).
of Josip Broz
3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of
Totalitarianism (Orlando: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 1973), p. 308.
Tito in socialist
Yugoslavia)
4 See Bakić, Novine Novine #12, Galerija
Nova, Zagreb, 2007, http://www.whw.hr/
download/newspaper/novine-12-vojin-
bakic.pdf (accessed 8 October 2015).
Branislav Dimitrijević
138 139
communism’, a monument to Heydar Aliyev was erected in the
main park of central Belgrade, it became the first in the city to
be dedicated to someone who could be called a ‘communist
dictator’.1 This bizarre occurrence (motivated by the economic
interests of the post-communist political elite) has drawn
attention to the neglected fact that a major sculptural monument
to the lifelong president of Yugoslavia (also frequently referred
to as a ‘communist dictator’) has never been erected in central
Belgrade, nor in Zagreb, nor for that matter in many other major
cities in the former Yugoslavia.2 Although Hannah Arendt in her
influential study of totalitarianism did not regard the Yugoslav
socialist system as totalitarian,3 the ‘totalitarian paradigm’
remains prevalent when it comes to assessing it.
Within the Stalinist public space the leader was immortalised
in stone or bronze and placed like a totem embodying an
optimistic visionary authority. Yet it was only after Tito had died
that such an initiative was launched in Zagreb. Arguably the
most important modern Yugoslav sculptor, Vojin Bakić, was
selected to create the monument. However, the disintegration
of the country occurred before it could be erected. It is
interesting to note that Bakić’s project illustrates a telling
dualism between the figurative and abstract approaches,
characteristic of ‘official’ art in socialist Yugoslavia. The
monument was to have consisted of a massive abstract fractal
form (in the manner of Bakić’s work since the early 1960s)4
with a smaller figurative statue of Tito in front of it. I do not
want to imply that no figurative sculptural monuments of Tito
existed (they evidently did), but that they were not the main
forms signifying his leadership: they existed alongside other
forms of representation in the everyday environment, but in
less ceremonial and more ‘grassroots’ modes of amateurish
representations and expressions of respect.
Tito’s image was reproduced in a myriad of different graphic and
audio-visual media, from photographs displayed in workplaces
and classrooms to badges and different kinds of merchandise;
from newsreels filming every single activity of the president to
music composed in praise of his deeds. This practice implies
that the capillary or centrifugal strategy of familiarising with
Tito was beyond centripetal bureaucratic control, but also
that official cultural policy favoured this strategy rather than
engaging with monuments resembling either soc-realist cult-
building or the traditional national-romantic personification of a
monarch. When, for instance, a figurative monument to Tito was

Portrait of Comrade Tito painted on the leaf of tree of life,
gift from Ivan Janković from Belgrade to Josip Broz Tito for his 85th birthday
1977
eventually installed in the Serbian town of Užice (a key location
for the emergence of the Partisan insurgence in 1941), designed
by the Croatian sculptor Frano Kršinić, the original plan to put
Tito on a horse was abandoned so as not to imply any similarity
with the equestrian statues of Ban Jelačić and Knez Mihailo in
the main squares of Zagreb and Belgrade, respectively.5
Official cultural policy in socialist Yugoslavia seemed focused
rather on restricting the popular cult of Tito than on boosting
it. Or rather, it was more about locating Tito within a popular
imaginarium of local myths and national epic figures of rebellion
against the mighty imperial powers: the leader who was never
remote from the people, who in fact himself belonged to the
people, not separated from them on some high pedestal, yet still
fetishised in their everyday lives through smaller memorabilia,
stories and songs. However, this did not imply a resolute warrior
but a figure upon whose shoulders the greatest historical
challenges had fallen.6
Arguably the two most influential models for the representation
of Tito as the Partisan commander were already formulated in
the midst of the war. On the occasion of the second session
of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of
Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) held in November 1943 in the Bosnian town
140
of Jajce – when the new Yugoslav socialist federation was
formally established and Tito’s authority was verified with the
7 According to his first biographer, Tito was title ‘Marshall’7 – two portraits of him were made by artists who
very reluctant to take this title and it was
almost imposed on him, primarily at the
participated in the liberation war. Božidar Jakac made a charcoal
insistence of the Slovenian delegation at drawing of him that would later be extensively reproduced, and
AVNOJ. See Vladimir Dedijer, Josip Broz Tito
– Prilozi za biografiju (Beograd: Kultura, 1955). Anton Augustinčić made a bust that would be used after the
war for the first free-standing sculptural monument to Tito,
placed in front of the house where he was born in Kumrovec.
It was recast in a dozen versions, becoming by far the best-
known figurative sculpture of Tito. Today, the two most
prominent versions are in the mining town of Velenje in Slovenia
(the only version to be installed in a central urban area) and in
the park of Tito’s memorial centre in Belgrade.
5 Count Josip Jelačić of Bužim (1801–59)
was the ‘Ban’ of Croatia from 1848 to
1859, who fought for greater autonomy
for Croatia within the Austro-Hungarian
empire. In Croatia he is considered one
of the greatest national heroes, and his
equestrian monument in the main square
in Zagreb has enormous symbolic value
for Croatian national identity. ‘Knez’ Mihailo
Obrenović (1823–68) twice reigned as the
Serbian prince, his second reign ending with
his assassination. In Serbia his second reign
is considered as the period of complete
liberation from Ottoman rule, which led to
the country’s full independence which was
internationally recognised at the Treaty of
Berlin in 1878. His equestrian statue in the
main square in Belgrade is one of the chief
symbols of Serbian national identity.
6 In his book on Tito, sociologist Todo Kuljić
underlines this traditional component of
his cult. See Todor Kuljić, Tito – Sociološko-
istorijska studija (Zrenjanin: Gradska narodna
biblioteka Žarko Zrenjanin, 2004).
Antun Augustinčić, Josip Broz Tito, Kumrovec
1948
141
Augustinčić captured Tito as a somewhat troubled leader. He
steps forward in a heavy military overcoat (šinjel) but his head is
modestly lowered as if he is immersed in complex and profound
thoughts. Neither here nor later was he represented as a smiling,
optimistic leader, or as a leader resolutely looking towards the
future and showing the way to follow, but rather as a leader
who is aware of the precariousness of the situation, of the
responsibility he had not to give any false hopes to the people
but to share their worries and act in accordance with them.
Miroslav Krleža, arguably the most important modern Yugoslav
writer and, like Augustinčić, an insider of the communist political
establishment, describes Augustinčić’s Tito thus:
Caped in his military overcoat, with an almost melancholic
silhouette, Tito is not modelled here in a victorious
manner: it was the third year of combat in perilous
circumstances, in the dangerous uncertainty of daily
guerrilla warfare, and this portrait was made within
reach of the German army ... this is an image of a man
whose head was bowed by constant worries and who,
immersed in his thoughts, walks around the narrow
backyard of the Jajce fortress, as he had been walking for
years in the prison yards before the war.8
In reviewing the otherwise grandiose production of monumental
public-space sculptures in socialist Yugoslavia, it becomes
obvious that a figurative emblem of the leader was replaced by
an abstract symbolism that tended to universalise rather than
to particularise, and personified the Partisan struggle. Instead of
attributing these values to a leader, Yugoslav socialist memorial
sculpture expressed both the immense collective suffering
of the people in the war and their rebellion against the mighty
powers of fascism. The majority of these monuments, erected
most commonly at the locations of tragic or heroic events from
the war, are formally structured in shapes that tend to express
the tragedy of the unarmed subject of a historical rupture, a
symbolic reduction of the bodily gesture of this subject in his
spirited heroism. It seemed that no figurative representation
could convey the underlying universal principle of righteous
insurrection that was the foundational element of Yugoslav
socialist society.
However, while insisting on the everlasting actuality and
presence of the revolutionary impulse, an unlikely impediment to
remaining faithful to this impulse within society was its post-war
development, with its focus on political stability and economic
progress. It could be argued that, even when the revolution could
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9 In the period 1952–61, GDP growth in
Yugoslavia was allegedly almost 120 per
cent. See Denison Russinow, The Yugoslav
Experiment 1948–1974 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1977), p. 127
8 Miroslav Krleža, Augustinčić (Zagreb:
NIP Republika, 1968).
10 I have written about the phenomenon
of socialist consumerism on several
occasions, initially in ‘Sozialistischer
Konsumismus, Verwestlichung
und kulturelle Reproduktion. Der
“postkommunistiches” Übergang im
Jugoslawien Titos’, in Zurück aus der
Zukunft –Osteuropäische Kulturen im
Zeitalter des Postkommunismus, ed.
B. Groys, A. von der Heiden and P. Weibel
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005).
143
be observed from the viewpoint of its successful outcome,
the very discourse of the revolution found itself in dire straits.
How could a revolutionary impulse be sustained in a political
environment that was attempting to establish social stability?
Yugoslavia enjoyed significant economic growth in the 1950s,
possibly the biggest recorded in the twentieth century.9 On the
one hand, this served as proof of the success of the revolution:
prosperity, modernisation, national and international respect. But
on the other hand, the same process also brought about the
conditions for a new social stratification, the creation of a new
elite, known as the red bourgeoisie, and a pragmatic political
modification of one of the foundational aims of the revolution,
economic equality and social justice. The students’ protests in
June 1968 advanced this agenda: they were motivated by the
premise that the revolutionary path had been abandoned and
that narrow individual interests had replaced communal ones.
As it happened, in this precarious situation, Tito sided
symbolically with the students and claimed that their demands
were justified. He thus elevated himself above the emerging
socialist elite and aimed to demonstrate his true revolutionary
nature once more. However, by then Tito was already over
70 years old, and, rather than believing in his omnipresent
power, many instruments of governance had already been
shared among the established nomenklatura. By its own
process of rejuvenation this produced a systemic paradox: the
revolutionary generation got older, but the younger cadres of
the post-revolutionary generation could not be emancipated
by the revolutionary process, but only through an established
discursive continuity in which Tito became more manipulated
as he grew older.
The more the leader of the revolution aged, the more his image
required rejuvenation in order to keep in touch with the young.
Tito’s birthday, proclaimed a Youth Day and celebrated with
stadium spectacles consisting of choreographed performances,
theatricalised the revolution and had become an obsolete
ritual. In the 1960s, with the emergence of consumerism and
the strong influence of Western popular culture,10 there was
an attempt to rejuvenate Tito in accordance with the popular
interests of new generations. The Youth Day celebrations by the
end of the 1960s included emerging rock bands, and the overall
representational modes changed to accommodate to new
trends by ‘faking’ them.
Among other examples was the design of the poster for
the Youth Day in 1972, which resembled models of so-called
‘psychedelic’ design from the 1960s, similar to the graphic art In a photographic series by the photographer Goranka Matić
of, say, Milton Glaser and Push Pin Studio. The benevolent yet made in Belgrade immediately after Tito’s death in 1980, one may
stone-like facial configuration of the leader is surrounded by the observe a mode in which the ‘cult’ of Tito was actually enacted by
curvilinear elegance of a young figure carrying a baton (such as Yugoslav citizens. In the photographs we see different portraits
was delivered to Tito with birthday wishes every year), creating of the president crossed with black ribbons as a sign of mourning,
a strange spectral stylisation in bright contrasting colours. as displayed in the shop-windows of grocery stores, hairdressing
salons and other small enterprises in Belgrade. Matić shows a
poignant yet also slightly comic mode of popular expression
of profound grief for the departed leader. This series precisely
identifies the location of Tito’s cult: not in the state-controlled
programme, but in the spontaneous popular imagination, in its
modest modes of production and consumption.

Dušan Otašević, Comrade Tito, Our Violet White

1969

In an artwork ironically named after a popular song of praise,

Comrade Tito, Our Violet White (1969) by Dušan Otašević,
the image of Tito is treated with a remarkable degree of pop-
artistic ambivalence. This is a very rare example of an ambitious
artwork of the time that directly referred to the cult-building
around Tito. It refers to the usual scenographic setting of
public gatherings – from stadium spectacles to smaller, lo-fi
expressions of allegiance – with the symbolic triad of the state
flag, the Communist Party flag and the image of Tito. However,
the installation, characteristic of Otašević’s ‘socialist pop art’,11 11 See Branislav Dimitrijević, ‘DIY POP,
umetnička radinost Dušana Otaševića’,
consists of a cartoon-like portrait of the president on a wooden in Dušan Otašević – Popmodernizam
panel, surrounded by flags painted on corrugated aluminium (Belgrade: Museum of Contemporary Art,
2003).
and a makeshift five-pointed star on a heart-shaped panel
with a repetitive pattern of flower motifs, like kitsch wallpaper. Goranka Matić, Days of Pride and Sorrow
Otašević treats Titoism as a kind of DIY ideological décor. 1980

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