engleski

The Musealization of Artworks in Croatia in the Aftermath of the Second World War

Through various musealization processes, an abundance of artistic material that was excluded from former privately-owned art collections entered Croatian museums in the first couple of years after the end of the Second World War. What was known as the state-organized theft of private property, including artworks belonging to Jews and other victims of persecution under the Ustasha regime during the Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945), was by the end of the war replaced by the newly introduced measures of the new socialist state. These measures included legal mechanisms which enabled the sequestration of previously dispossessed private property (together with artworks and other object of cultural significance), and confiscation, expropriation, and nationalization, which targeted so-called national enemies of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia – former fascist and Nazi collaborators, noble and rich families, and other personae non gratae. Based on these newly implemented legal measures, an array of committees and state bodies were introduced, whose task was to deal with the musealization of the artworks in the immediate postwar period. The aim of this paper is to show how the new socialist state developed cultural policies through these state bodies and other legal mechanisms, which finally led to the distribution of artworks from former private ownership into state-owned museums and other public institutions. Also, it will be shown how the redistribution processes resulted in the dispersion and fragmentation of previously integrated private art collections, and

artworks, musealization, World War 2, KOMZA

The work of the PhD student is funded from the „Project of the career development of young researchers – education of new PhD students” of the Croatian Science Foundation finance by the EU from the European Social Fund The work has been fully supported by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project IP-2020-02-1356 Provenance Research on Artwork in Zagreb Collections (ZagArtColl_ProResearch).