Conceptual Boundaries of Modernity

Gamulin, Babić, Focht,and Lisinski in Izraz (1959)

Abstract

In 1959, Izraz – the Sarajevo journal of literary and art criticism – entered a tense phase marked by Grgo Gamulin’s response to an attack by the Soviet critic V. Skaterchikov. Gamulin’s defence offered him an opportunity to underscore the necessity of using the dialectical capacities of modernism. Ljubo Babić replied, continuing an earlier dispute and refusing to accept the modernist prescription to devalue both form and content. Both of these aspects, now articulated through the skill of drawing, were presented as new guarantors of collective perception and of an ethnically coded identity. This variation on Babić’s earlier thesis of “our expression” reminded the Izraz editors, rather uncomfortably, that conservative inertia was still present and firmly positioned, making carefully calibrated responses indispensable. Based on unorthodox Marxism and on Henri Lefebvre, these responses, each in its own way, proved affirmative with regard to the hermeneutic stance of Gamulin’s contribution. Ivan Focht insisted on the individuality of abstraction, while Hrvoje Lisinski, in an unusual move, brought together Freudian postulates and Rembrandt’s painting, all with the aim of placing existential dread and the dialectic of form and narrative implications grounded in it at the problematic core of modernity.