BRANKO POPOVIĆ (1882 –1944) AND THE ART HISTORY: A NOTE FROM THE TIME OF CRISIS

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to the content of a note about the state of Art History in Serbia, composed in late 1942 for The Serbian civil/cultural plan by the architect, painter, and art critic Branko Popović, at that time the dean of the Faculty of Engineering in Belgrade. Based on the content of the document, the width and systematicity can be acknowledged in Popović’s attempt to consolidate this scholarly discipline even in times of crisis, apart from any ideological matrix. The core of this record considered the modes of professional shaping of art historians, the organization of the discipline through the founding of diverse institutions, and the ways that Art History should be advanced as the discipline, in the national as well as in universal domain. The execution of Popović, after the liberation of Belgrade in the fall of 1944, most probably significantly diminished the efforts in the attempts and reaches of the institutionalization of art-historian zeals in postwar Serbia.