Југословенско опредељење Надежде Петровић: култура, модернизам и конструкција идентитета

English title: The Yugoslav Orientation of Nadežda Petrović: Culture, Modernism, and the Construction of Identity

Abstract: This article forms part of a broader research framework on political culture, nationalism, collective memory, cultural nationalism, modernism, and symbolic power in modern Serbian and Yugoslav history, with particular attention to the role of art, intellectual elites, and cultural institutions in the construction of national and supranational identities.

The paper examines how Nadežda Petrović used Serbian tradition as a basis for constructing a Yugoslav cultural project, positioning modern art as a means of integrating the South Slavs. Although Petrović has been the subject of numerous studies as a painter, humanitarian worker, and national activist, her Yugoslav orientation has not previously been analyzed as an independent cultural and ideological phenomenon. This article therefore approaches her Yugoslavism not as a secondary biographical feature, but as a distinct form of cultural and symbolic action.

The analysis follows the evolution of Petrović’s views through several key activities: the First Yugoslav Exhibition in Belgrade in 1904, the Yugoslav Art Colony, her close cooperation with Ivan Meštrović, and her work in the Committee for the Organization of Artistic Affairs of Serbia and Yugoslavism in 1913. These initiatives show that Petrović understood art as an active mechanism of spiritual unification, cultural emancipation, and modernization.

Special attention is given to the way in which elements of Serbian ethnosymbolic tradition, especially the Kosovo myth and heroic cultural patterns, were reinterpreted within a broader Yugoslav framework. Rather than rejecting Serbian national tradition, Petrović sought to transform it into a wider symbolic language of South Slavic unity. In that process, modern art was not merely an aesthetic field, but a cultural instrument through which new forms of collective identity could be imagined, represented, and legitimized.

The paper also examines Petrović’s relationship with Ivan Meštrović and the wider artistic milieu that promoted the idea of an integral Yugoslav cultural identity before the First World War. Their cooperation reveals the close connection between modernist artistic expression, cultural nationalism, and the search for a supranational South Slavic identity. Petrović’s Yugoslavism thus emerged from the intersection of Serbian patriotism, modernist aesthetics, cultural emancipation, and the belief that art could contribute to the formation of a new national consciousness.

The article argues that Nadežda Petrović’s Yugoslav orientation should be understood as a conscious cultural project rather than as a vague expression of political sympathy. Her work demonstrates how artists and intellectuals participated in the symbolic construction of collective identities in the early twentieth century. The case of Petrović also reveals the complex relationship between tradition and modernity, national culture and supranational integration, and artistic autonomy and political imagination in the making of modern Serbian and Yugoslav culture.