| Summary: | At the beginning of the 20th century in Serbia, female painters, following
modern European artistic trends became leaders in the dissemination of
avant-garde ideas. Women’s art became the object of sharp critique or was
ignored by the critics and completely marginalized. Feminists strove to fix
the imbalance in practices of subject production, to establish institutions
and models of life in which the existence of ones did not entail the
suppression of all others. Despite their significant opus, certain Serbian
female artists are only now the subject of monographs. In the late 20th
century, only M. Pavlović Barili got respect, and even that was posthumous.
The ork of Nadežda Petrović, Zora Petrović and Kosa Bokšan was also valued
later, most often with the presence of other (male) authors, which confirms
that the patriarchy always values men, while the role of women was to be
unnoticeable and meaningless, always outside the focus. In this paper the
focus is on the art of Nadežda Petrović, and its reception indicates not only
the individual path of the artist, but the problem of female expression
through painting. By establishing the value of art in the spirit of
contemporary strivings, Nadežda Petrović comes up against the outcry of
painter colleagues who label her art as “naive” and “primitive”, neglecting
and refusing to acknowledge her artistic individuality. As an illustration of
the feminist engagement of Nadežda Petrović in her artistic expression, three
paintings from different phases of her career were chosen: Woman with child,
Portrait of Kosara Cvetković and Xenia. Nadežda Petrović radically oversteps
the conventional way of looking at women from the viewpoint of men. Visual
expression represses and destroys the traditional framework of seeing (in
which man is the subject and woman the object), pointing to the projected
viewer outside the painting and the woman’s gaze which prepares the
establishing of dialogue. Creating in the time of establishment of new
sociocultural relations on the ladder of male/female determinations, Nadežda
Petrović did not want to run from problems, but heralds and “insists” in an
open and direct way, flaunting her cosmopolitanism, desire for independence
and aversion toward universal ideologies. The art of Nadežda Petrović maps
the mosaic of incorporated fragmented positions of women in former as well as
in contemporary society. By deconstructing and questioning the dominant
presumption about creativity, as well as the meaning of the term artist,
artists such as Nadežda Petrović directly pointed to the unspoken idea that
the language of art is created by men, uncovering the relationship between
language, art and ideology, thanks to them, women’s art becomes noticed and
valued, which kickstarts the process of constituting an equal art, outside
the categories of “male” and “female”. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike
Srbije, br. 47016: Interdisciplinarno istraživanje kulturnog i jezičkog
nasleđa Srbije. Izrada multimedijalnog internet portala "Pojmovnik srpske
kulture"]
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