From Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism and Russian Constructivism, collage and photomontage were keenly used techniques not only as a new expressive device of the avant–garde, but also in designing aggressive advertising and political propaganda messages.73 Surrealists in France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy, as well as many others throughout the world, practiced them as a form of anti–artistic and revolutionary expression. Collage is by definition heterogeneous in terms of media. It combines the verbal and the pictorial in communicating a message, and, to be understood, must be both read and seen. Incorporation of ready photographs in the collage structure produces a photomontage or a photocollage. With Surrealism and its faith in dream images and a disinterested play of thoughts, in addition to film and photography, collage and photomontage came to have a crucial role in new visual explorations. Breton was in fact of the opinion that Surrealism should be followed as of 1920, from Max Ernst’s collages, because they had established “a quite original visual structure corresponding to Lautréamont’s and Rimbaud’s poetic strivings.” 74 In 1921, Breton also used Duchamp’s notion of the “readymade”, writing the foreword for the catalogue of the exhibition of these collages by Ernst, and said, inter alia, that they had been made as “readymade pictures of objects.”75 These collages elicited deep admiration from the moment they had arrived in Paris, and their influence constantly grew with the years. In particular the cycle Le femme 100 téte (1929), constructed of cut out 19th century illustrations, which demonstrated freedom of thought and an arbitrary juxtapositioning of totally different readymade visual units, was impressive and encouragingly stimulating to many Serbian Surrealists. Indeed, Max Ernst played a decisive role in the introduction of the collage and of combined techniques generally in Serbian Surrealism: from Marko Ristic and Vane Bor to Radojica Zivanovic Noe, Dusan Matic, Aleksandar and Lula Vuco. He was also a cult figure on Marko Ristic’s Surrealist Wall, and the once established contact with him and his artistic opus was never discontinued. 76

On their honeymoon in Paris, from November 1926 to March 1927, Seva and Marko Ristic bought Ernst’s painting The Owl (Bird in a Cage) which was the basis of their famous future Surrealist Wall.77 To the work of Max Ernst were soon added drawings of Yves Tanguy and André Masson, which directly brought the French Surrealist model into the Serbian cultural context. About 1930, African masks and fetishes, the collage The Impossible, photocollages, photographs and movie stills were added to the wall, and it was finally finished in the 60’s with a primitive sculpture of Bogosav Zivkovic and a tempera by Bogdanka Poznanovic. Marko Ristic made his Surrealist Wall inspired by the deep impression his first visit to Breton’s Parisian flat had left on him, about which he wrote enthusiastically many years later: “I was at his place in the evening of December 23 (1926), I found him alone in his strange atelier, on the top floor of this tall huge house in the Montmartre, at the corner of Rue Fontaine and Place Blanche, into which he had moved some four or five years earlier and in which he would spend his entire life, in this impossible blockhouse which would over the decades become an ever richer, an ever more fabulous museum of marvels. Amid these pictures by Picasso, de Chirico, Max Ernst, these Oceanic masks and fetishes, these unusual objects which seemed to have directly materialized out of the blue, to have surfaced from the thick depths of sleep...”78 While Breton and Ristic parted over their political differences, their positions on art were almost identical. Apart from Ernst, Ristic also thought highly of Picasso (in 1937 he published an in–depth essay on him), and de Chirico was a model that he, like Breton, encouraged his collaborators to emulate. Breton’s Parisian flat thus became the prototype of Ristic’s Belgrade Surrealist Wall, the first installation in the history of 20th century art in the Yugoslav lands.79

Paris, not Belgrade, was in effect the city in which the first works of Serbian Surrealism were created that same year, 1926: Marko Ristic’s collages and Nikola Vuco’s photographs. Inspired by a verse from a poem in French by Vane Zivadinovic Bor, La vie mobile, under the title Revolution in Cyrillic script, in November 1926 Ristic started a series of eleven collages and two drawings under the same name, which was finally completed in Paris.80 It is important to know that the collages were created precisely in Paris, because this was a city Ristic knew much about, but dreamed about even more, as if of some “secret garden”, which he later revisited many times. “When was I really in Paris? Really, if that means anything at all, if thoughts and chimeras dreamt in waking life and dreams are not just as real,” he wrote in the diary of his recollections many years later.81 Still, that year, 1926, had been special and a defining moment of his entire life – it brought him love and marriage to Seva (Jelica) Zivadinovic, and immediately after that also his first encounter with Paris, and that led to a personal first acquaintance with Breton and Surrealism. Direct contact with the new, urban, environment and the revolutionary stances of the French Surrealists, reminded him also of the ideas of his favorite poet, Apollinaire, who had said: “Mosaic painters painted with stones or wooden blocks. A certain Italian painter allegedly used faeces. At the time of the French revolution, some painted with blood. You can paint with anything, pipes, postage stamps, postcards, playing cards, pieces of wax cloth, necklaces, colored paper, newspapers...”82

Ristic painted his stay in Paris as if precisely following these instructions: with fragments of maps, newspapers, postcards, photographs, stamped letters from Belgrade, with colored paper, playing cards, invitations, newspaper ads and other souvenirs passionately collected around his favorite city. He appropriated all these fragments of readymade pictures and inscriptions which bombarded his optic nerve through a new collage structure which left him ample space for his own interplay of associations and synthesized impressions.

The title, La vie mobile, extracted from the context of Bor’s poem, was visually and typographically shaped on the basis of Parisian newspaper headlines. Proceeding from the idea of the readymade, Ristic’s collages regroup ready pictorial and textual matrices according to the rules of free associative syntax. Everything that he collected, cut out and pasted, bears the hallmark of personal choice, i.e., objective chance, as the Surrealists would say. In the new structure of the collage, picture and text were of equal importance. However, we should not forget that both picture and text were only fragments, of different origin, so that they could not function as autonomous elements in their own right, nor could they establish logical interlinks. That is why Marko Ristic’s photocollages are primarily registered as visual wholes, but in which the former principle of harmony has been substituted by the principle of discontinuity. In fact, they do not aspire after establishing closed and unambiguous semantic structures either on a single paper or within a cycle, disregarding as they do the conventional narrative and illustrative order in representing reality.83

As regards the material used, it is hard to say with precision what principle of selection the author was guided by in articulating the entire series. The visual structure of the photocollage comprises completely different matrices: sometimes they are entire newspaper articles, like in La vie mobile (2) and sometimes scraps of colored paper, labels, playing cards, La vie mobile (13). The freely flowing associations, the decomposed picture and text, result in a dynamic visual structure which does not convey a precisely formulated thought. On the contrary, it counts on shock and aggressiveness to rivet the spectator’s attention. Such a resolutely and boldly executed alogicality and discontinuity of fragments, by the use of readymade pictures, as typical of Marko Ristic’s collages, partially draws on the visual experiences of Dada, but with the potential for exploring personal mythologies in his case being far more important than political engagement.

The spectator’s eye has difficulty discarding the habit of conventional recognition of the aesthetic in the La vie mobile cycle of collages, in particular since some of them counted on coloristic effects, with green and red accents, for instance, placed on a transparent blue paper background. But that would be the wrong way to perceive a pictorial whole which, in principle, does not deal with pictorial qualities – on the contrary, it rejects them in a quest for the principles of meta–reality and anti–aesthetics. Thus, in La vie mobile, an amphitheater can look like a flying saucer hovering above the city, and huge termites may feature in a poster advertising a Surrealist gallery. The collages, above all, insist on eliminating the fulcrum and on perceptual confusion. Some textual clippings can be associated with picture fragments, as for instance in the case of Triple désert, accompanied by a piece of a camel, but, on the whole, neither the textual nor the pictorial fragments can be combined into a sensical message. All these “readymade pictures of objects” build up a whole that is not only alogical but also anti–painting. Discarded are, first and foremost, the traditional materials: paint, oil, canvas, and then, even though collages use pictures, which are technical and mass produced, their authors, as well as their original setting, are of no consequence. They are found and readymade pictures of objects, as Breton calls them, secondarily used in these collages, with their original functions and previous history forgotten. Pauses, blank intervals, necessarily occur between the cut–out photographs as well as between words, giving the collages from the La vie mobile cycle the appearance of linguistic structures. The well–known observation that it was poets, rather than photographers and painters, that were interested in the technique of collage, also applies in the context of Serbian Surrealist art.84 Namely, collage allows for a compilation of picture and text, but the principles of either medium can be avoided in it, making understandable Breton’s praise of collage, because that technique can lead to the creation of a Surrealist work, as “Pure psychic automatism, by which we propose to express, verbally, in writing, or by any other means, the real process of thought.”

There is no doubt that the collage possesses elements of linguistic systems, but it can also be viewed as a cinematographic structure, as static film, as already the Dadaists called it. If the artificial order in the La vie mobile cycle of collages was not consciously projected at the start of the La vie mobile artistic experiment, at the end of the experiment it could be read from the different time determinants. By accident or deliberately, the passage of time is conspicuously accentuated. Thus, already on the first sheet appears the “historic” year in Serbian Surrealism and in the life of Marko Ristic – 1926. It is in the spot normally reserved for the author’s signature. The other collages also list date after date, from the one cut out from the papers (13 novembre 1926), to the postal stamp (13 XI 1926), and the hand–written one at the bottom of the drawing (31 12 1926).85 La vie mobile, thus, uses a multimedia language to convey a sense of passing time. The series of collages from this cycle, can, therefore, be seen as a story in pictures, but also as a film about Ristic’s first stay in the capital of Surrealism.

Marko Ristic continued his artistic activity started in Paris in 1926 in Belgrade and Vrnjacka Banja, with some interruptions, up until the 1939 collages\assemblages.86 In the summer of 1929, he and Vane Zivadinovic Bor, made M’VRAUA, a book in a single copy, which was later lost, but one collage from it was published in the almanac Nemoguce–Læimpossible, in 1930. That is Budilnik (The Alarm Clock), which features simultaneously a definition of the alarm clock from the Petit Larousse dictionary and different drawings from a primer, in order to parody the adage that “School is sacred to the pupils!” Wittily, it evokes childhood traumas associated with waking up early and the fear of being late for school. The humor of the textual narration relegated to secondary importance the discomfort experienced in perceiving the organizational confusion of the picture. The absence of traditional linear perspective is, in a way, expected of illustrations in a primer, diminishing as it does the gap between a child’s perception of pictures, on the one hand, and the professional expertise of the illustrators, on the other. Apart from rejecting traditional perspective, Ristic and Bor insist on an obvious discontinuity of space and dislocation of objects. Thus, for example, the bed with the sleeping pupil is placed in front of the teacher and the blackboard, and the boy with a sling is in the forefront as is a tree which does not even belong in the school context, but to nature and play. Apart from that, the bunching of a number of different images in The Alarm Clock, also disregards the laws of natural proportion, with the pupil in the bed almost twice the size of the teacher. The dislocation of objects and disrespect for their realistic proportions, abolished the mimetic model of representation of the world in the illustration of The Alarm Clock. Again, the unconscious was at work – although this primarily concerns a visual structure, here it can be likened to a quip. According to psychoanalysis, laughter, jokes and witticisms ease the effort of suppressing unpleasant traumas, in this instance ones associated with school.

Just how serious Marko Ristic’s visual explorations were, is also demonstrated by a series of twelve collages named Crustaceans on the Chest. It is well–known that the visual material used in the collages was from a manual for amateur magicians, La physique amusante, as well as that Ristic used it in two ways: “in the first, the pictures remained intact, as taken from the book, and in the second, certain new elements were added to them to highlight their grotesqueness and irrationality.”87 Crustaceans on the Chest was published in the almanac The Impossible in 1930, with a film script by Aleksandar Vuco by the same name. This can account for the markedly cinematographic atmosphere of these collages, in which unexpected and strange events succeed one another as in a film. Crustaceans on the Chest is, basically, a shooting script for a Surrealist movie. Both the shooting script images and the text of the scenario observe this discontinuity in narration. Only occasionally do the collages refer to the text (as those on pages 69 and 72), but that, as a rule, was not their aim, as, just like the script, they do not follow the logical course of the plot.

This series of Ristic’s collages, like the one of Vane Zivadinovic Bor from the same year, 1930, is visually the closest to Ernst cycle La femme 100 téte (1929), not only because they use the same materials, printed illustrations from old books, but also because the process of creation of the work is the same. In the earliest cycle of Ristic’s collages, in La vie mobile, certain building blocks, parts of picture and text were clearly delineated, divided by white blanks of paper. The seams between them were conspicuous, and the entire process of cutting, pasting, drawing in, etc. could be followed step by step. As on an X–ray, the observer could see all the stages of the building up of the picture, which, eventually, articulated the final visual structure of the La vie mobile cycle. Combining heterogeneous materials, Ristic did not wish to either hide or at least retouch ever so slightly, and thus soften, the sharp seams and differences between the readymade pictures and readymade texts. He let the gash and the clash of different realities hit the eye of the viewer with all their might. In contrast to this open aggressiveness in toppling the coherent and harmonious visual structure in the collages of La vie mobile, in the cycle Crustaceans on the Chest, Ristic constructed an illusion of a parallel world in which everything was in accord, but only apparently so. If we were to compare these two concepts, then we should say that both are equally revolutionary relative to the representational model of art: one brings down the entire system of relations according to which things and phenomena function in representing reality, and in the other, instead of the observable reality, a suprareality is mounted in which some other laws of gravity apply.

The 1930 almanac Nemoguce–L’impossible also featured collages by Vane Zivadinovic Bor and Djordje Jovanovic composed, also, of gravures and illustrations from old books. Already this points to Max Ernst, whose oeuvre was decisive for the reception of Surrealism in the visual arts sphere. An indication of the impressiveness of Ernst’s works exhibited in Paris in 1927 was given in Vane Bor’s later notes: “Ernst’s painting confounds with its prose atmosphere. I had but one wish: to enter the contest as soon as possible, to follow that direction.” 88 The new visual structure of the Surrealist opus inspired not only Bor but many other Serbian Surrealist authors as well, Ristic, Matic, Noe, Aleksandar and Lula Vuco, to themselves embark on experimenting with collage and montage techniques. Vane Bor, for example, used wrinkled canvas or pasted pieces of crumpled paper onto his paintings (papier froissée, toile defroissée), which he later alleged was his own invention in the wide array of techniques employed by the Surrealists.89 Of such collage methods in the traditional medium of painting, begun in Paris and continued in Vrnjacka Banja, nothing has been preserved, however. Only one painting from that period is known, Kugla sa algama na prividnom horizontu (The Ball with Algae on the Apparent Horizon) (1928), but there are no traces of the mentioned techniques on it. Two other works: Edip u prostoru (Oedipus in Space) and Na trzistu nemih pesama (On the Market of Silent Poems) are known of only on the basis of their reproductions in the almanac.

The prose atmosphere, which Bor emphasized in connection with Ernst’s works, was also the crucial element of his collages Pocetak svakog fanatizma (The Beginning of Any Fanaticism) and Pejzaz (Landscape), from the almanac, as well as of later ones executed by 1932. He, naturally, takes fragments from old books, but then does not place these plucked out parts into an alogical relationship, like Ristic, but assembles them into a new narrative –visual composition. Sometimes, as in the collage La priere du soir, he seeks to make the cuts between the constituent parts, i.e., between the different realities in which the taken inserts originate, as inconspicuous as possible in order to render, in this way also, the resulting image as convincing as possible. A good example in this sense is the Landscape, where separate realities are only apparently a logical combination. The precision of old illustrations was a sufficiently solid basis upon which the new and bold associations based their own “precision”, such as is in fact required of illustrations in anatomy atlases. Surprised as he may be by the totally unexpected landscape inside the stomach, the viewer can find it acceptable to a certain extent because it is represented by known means. Speaking a succinct visual language, Bor concocted a quip employing a minimum of means, but counting on a maximum of contradictory meanings. As compared to this collage, Djordje Jovanovic’s Self–Portrait, published on the opposite page in the almanac, seems like a school exercise or trying out a collage recipe.

In contrast to Jovanovic’s work, the opus of Vane Bor is an example of a sparing selection of existing matrices, not only for collages but also for photomontages. While capable of finding hidden and ambiguous meanings in them, he was not overly interested in systematically exploring specific ideas, positions or techniques, and engaged in different aspects of analyzing the unconscious from work to work. By this breadth and boldness in experimenting, Vane Bor was the closest to Ristic, whose activity was also heterogeneous indeed. Like numerous other Surrealists, writing philosophical –theoretical texts and poetry did not prevent them from exploring collage, photocollage, assemblage, photogram and film. In a way, Bor saw any field of scientific or artistic endeavor as the beginning of a new game, which he indulged in with enthusiasm. The multimedia projects he pursued over the years bear the hallmark of a passionate and alternative artist on the margins of art. His activity was, for a long time, outside the institutional system, atypical as it was in the context of Serbian art between the two World Wars, which does not mean that it could not be re–evaluated as the historic harbinger of different forms of artistic behavior typical of the end of the 20th century.

Bor, a student of law in Paris, did not need much preparation to make several collages in 1927, and several photomontages some time later. Employing the technique of montage, readymade pictures of objects and events are transformed into a new structure which is not the same as the simple sum or a sequence of individual photographs. Indeed, Teige remarked long ago that photomontage “is actually closer to film than to photography. Film is a stroboscopic photomontage, in continuity, which develops in time. Photomontage is a simultaneous –optical synthesis on a plate. It is, if one can say so, static film.“90

In his photomontages, like in his collages, Vane Bor dramatically reduced materials in order to produce, with admirable simplicity, a work charged with tension which can be read in different ways. In that sense he can be said to have constructed his own language, primarily characterized by an acute feeling for film effects. Memorija, (Memory), Ilustracija za vaspitanje dece, (An Illustration for Upbringing Children), Erinnern Sie H Noch and Kolaz (Collage) belong to the group of photomontages which, together with a series of photograms, came into being as a result of Bor’s interest in avant–garde film. In a cinematographic way he organized, first of all, the set behind the embracing couple in Memory, as well as the yawning black gap in the 1932 Collage, for had it not been precisely the “cinema that invented empty space”91. It is in that context that all the other optical effects should be viewed: the fusing of images and the shifting of the angle of observation, the frustrating proportions and ratio of sizes among objects, the blurred relations between man and machine, man and the environment, etc. All these are just some of the devices Bor employs to promote the “static” film event in his photomontages. Above all, he is a master of attraction, of creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and tension. With fragments of photographs pasted on a dark paper background, Vane Bor suggests an experience of cinematographic suspense. Thus, without narration, as in silent movies, in the works Collage (1932) or Portret (Mrtvacka glava), Portrait (The Skull)) (1927), for example, photograph fragments are assembled into an exciting frame. In that context it is very important to draw attention to the 1932 photomontages, among which An Illustration for Upbringing Children, Erinnern Sie H Noch and the mentioned Collage are true examples of building non–narrative tension, where the picture is just the trigger to stimulate the viewer mentally and emotionally to recognize “the horror of it all”. The articulation of suspense in a single frame shows how artfully Bor used the expressive devices of photomontage. If it is true that montage is a principle common to the theater, film and collage, then photomontage would primarily be film, if for Eisenstein... “film was primarily montage”. 92

Mutan lov u bistroj vodi (Murky Fishing in Clear Waters) is a photomontage by Dusan Matic, first published in 1930 in the almanac and then in Le surréalisme au service de la révolution (1933). It accompanies Matic’s poem bearing the same name and establishes continuity in Surrealist poetic–artistic practice with Dedinac’s The Public Bird.93 Murky Fishing in Clear Waters proceeds from the conciseness of folk sayings, and that type of simplicity is then translated also to the plane of visual\graphic language. The free associations of Surrealists in visual as well as poetic language have been seen to lend themselves readily to molding according to fundamental linguistic models. Fragmented pictures form a new whole, one not totally anarchic and chaotic in meaning but readable and understandable, which, nevertheless, observes the basic principles of the picture, that is of art. What would be the answer to the question – what is real in a photocollage or photomontage? Could it be a photograph of a man with a gun in his hand? If the viewer were, even for a moment, to think that that was real, Matic disillusions him at once, because the man has a turf of grass for a head. It is, namely, a picture as a pure creation of the spirit, although it seems possible to find a basis in reality for some of its elements.

As a new medium using technically reproduced pictures, photomontage sets traps for natural perception. At first glance it seems that, thanks to the documentary values of photography it is possible to find anew the lost thread of mimetic representation of the real world, but it is from there that the numerous manipulative processes employed by the art of Surrealism proceed. In his collage Murky Fishing in Clear Waters, Dusan Matic uses the documentary nature and precision of photography to obtain a new artistic synthesis representing surreality. Varying dark and light surfaces, he puts the viewer into an embarrassing position, because the picture hovers between dream and reality.

Earlier examples have shown us that the heterogeneity observed at the level of materials, contents, forms, expressions, ideas, etc. is crucial in the structure of montage.94. Radojica Zivanovic Noe and Rade Stojanovic used the technique of montage even when drawing. Samoubica ili sanjar (Suicide or Dreamer), Resérvée, as well as some other Noe’s drawings show unreal, composite figures in which human bodies blend into animal forms. With a simple line Rade Stojanovic develops a man into a woman, like two bodies in one. Although Noe’s photomontages published in the first issue of the magazine Surrealism Here and Now (1931) have not been preserved in the original, we can conclude that technically they were similar to Ernst’s “painted collages”. Namely, they are works which do not adhere to set medium frameworks in terms of either picture or montage, but are freely formed by combining different painting\collage methods, i.e., by montage. Basically, his montages are multimedia works sustaining the negation of painting he expressed publicly a year earlier in the almanac The Impossible. Once again Radojica Zivanovic Noe reexamined the portrait as a traditional motif of art and painting, but this time offering an interpretation in a new key – employing procedures of montage, doubling and dislocating photographs of eyes, smiles, hands, lace and machine parts, superimposing it all with painting interventions. Using the technique of montage, he once used the mentioned material to make the portrait of a bearded man on the cover page of the NDIO magazine, and, another time, the portrait of a woman in the work Crko konj (The Horse Croaked). Noe interpreted Breton’s idea of convulsive beauty as an anthropomorphically organized set of symbols juxtaposed to bear out his newly acquired conviction in the absurdity of the realistic approach in art.

Dusan Matic and Aleksandar Vuco used almost the same montage methods, and they observed the principle of heterogeneity also with regard to authorship. Namely, in 1930, the two of them made the montages Rognissol, Rekom kucujem zid (With the River I House the Wall) and L’, exploring the possibilities of collective creative work with joint action taking precedence over individual authorship ambitions. The mentioned works were created in an atmosphere of close collaboration among the Serbian Surrealists surrounding the publishing of the almanac, which is also attested to by the use of the same graphic and typographic elements. The capital L’ in the name of the almanac, together with the anatomical drawing of a human hand and painted segments, form the alogical and multimedia structure of a painted collage.95 Matic and Vuco continued to collaborate, producing several Surrealist objects, i.e., assemblages, and later also the book Podvizi druzine “Pet petlica” (The Exploits of the “Five Cockerels” Gang) (1933). Aleksandar Vuco wrote this book for children and Dusan Matic made the unconventional pictures with “drawing scissors”. “What is the use of a book without pictures”, says Alice in Wonderland, quoted by Matic in the foreword to the book where he explains the photomontage i.e., the “paste picture”: “When, having looked at them a hundred times, the pictures start to bore you, let your scissors graze on them. Scissors are faster than a kangaroo. Cut out the girl’s little legs and stick them on the door... Cut out the ravens from the snow and glue them onto a balloon... This is how you get a paste picture. A picture of chance. A picture of emotion. This is how, from immobile, tombstone pictures you get a live picture, a life picture. This is the way to unite forever disunited pictures and obtain the kind of pictures you want – desire pictures“.96

While this fine and correct statement about photomontage requires no additional explanation, we should say that Matic accurately describes the concept of Surrealist photomontage, i.e., of “paste pictures”. He emphasizes its rhetoric, but even more importantly, he reveals its closeness to projections of the unconscious as it is a “desire picture”. In addition, we should not forget that it is not only montage among the visual arts that relies on the recycling of the same material, e.g., the use of readymade photographs of five boys.97 Literature, poetry and film all employ this method, but in different ways: alliteration, rhyme, refrain, cuts, etc. The techniques of recycling the same material are, in a sense, similar to dreams, because, like dream imagery, they provide pleasure because of the easy release of bottled up energy.98

Concluding this analysis of collage\montage in Serbian Surrealism, let us note that a number of the published works have not been signed, and can thus be considered to have resulted from joint activity. Avant–garde ideas stressing the advantages of new, collective, as opposed to traditional, individual art, are well–known but insufficiently emphasized in Surrealism. In 1930, two photomontages were published on the advertising pages of the almanac announcing that “Saopstenja (Statements), a Surrealist bulletin, would be ’coming out shortly after the publishing of L’ impossible”. 99 They are, actually, striking works with a male figure in uniform covered with screws and a female seminude covered with matchsticks. Both photomontages were forgotten and later lost as they did not fit into the ideological realignment which transpired in the circle of the Belgrade Surrealists after Breton’s Second Manifesto (1929) and after the almanac Nemoguce–L’ impossible (1930).

It was probably only the following year (1931) that part of the material collected for the bulletin Statements was included in the magazine Surrealism Here and Now, in which the same group of artists collaborated, with Djordje Jovanovic as editor. In addition to Noe’s drawings and photomontages which we already spoke about, the first issue of the new bulletin carried the photomontage: Strana Ibrovac (The Ibrovac Page) – a photograph of a female nude with the caption – Some people’s turn will never come whether young or gray–haired – surrounded by a visual simulation of the multiple identity of Professor Miodrag Ibrovac.100 It was a well–known Surrealist visual narration in the form of static film, presented already in the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste. In the Belgrade bulletin it also contained irony at the expense of the institution of the bourgeois intellectual, as, according to Djordje Jovanovic, Serbian Surrealism, at the time, was primarily “a state of revolt”.101 Due to strong marxist positions and “differences, discord and uneaseÆ to which the Surrealists referred then, neither the montages from the announcement for Statements nor the bulletin itself ever appeared. Surrealist magazines were expected to be clearly ideologically committed, such as the commitment openly expressed at the time both by collages and photomontages on the cover pages of the leftist publications of Nolit (New Literature) which had begun coming out in 1928. The link between Nolit’s books and collages\montages was so firm and functional that some contemporaries believed that Nolit should be credited with using the new visual language first. Dedinac’s experience with photomontage and collage was limited by the small circulation of The Public Bird, and only the circles associated with the group of Surrealists knew of Ristic’s and Bor’s 1926 and 1927 works.102 Surrealist collages and photomontages, however revolutionary in technical and visual terms, were never in the service of the mass propaganda of social revolution, so that even then the bourgeois left claimed that Surrealists were primarily interested in keeping up the L’art pour L’art practice. Nevertheless, we should recall that in his essay on Surrealism, Benjamin drew attention to the fact that this very accusation had been leveled at art repeatedly in its history, but that it should never “be taken literally, for it was almost always a flag under which goods which cannot be declared sail because they are still nameless.”103