The Partisan and Fragonard

The exhibition "The Partisan and Fragonard: The Collection of Paintings by Jovanka Broz" was opened on May 19 at the Gallery of the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art in Jagodina, in collaboration with the Museum of Yugoslavia and the Gallery of the Matica srpska, attracting exceptional attendance and public interest. At the opening, attendees were addressed by Ivana Bašičević Antić, PhD, the director of the MNMA; Neda Knežević, the director of the Museum of Yugoslavia; Ana Panić, the exhibition curator; and Goran Aleksić, the State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Ratko Stevanović, the mayor of Jagodina, also attended the exhibition opening.

The exhibition features 36 works of visual art by domestic and foreign authors, personal items, photographs, and several pieces of furniture from the home where Jovanka Broz lived after the death of Josip Broz Tito. The display of these works has a dual significance: on one hand, it showcases artistic items that the public has not had the opportunity to see before, and on the other, it represents an imaginary museum of memory for Jovanka Broz through which parts and details of her life can be reconstructed, creating a picture of the time in which she lived. The exhibited artworks, which adorned the space where she lived during the last thirty-three years of her life, uniquely explain the phenomenon of Jovanka Broz – her personality, sense of art, as well as the social and artistic circumstances in socialist Yugoslavia.

She was first publicly presented as the wife of the head of state on September 19, 1952, during a visit by British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. During Tito's lifetime, Jovanka Broz's special role was to create the presidential image in the public eye of Yugoslavia, its republics, and during official visits. Additionally, her rare and strictly focused public appearances were centered on the role of women in the new state, emancipation, fashion, and humanitarian work. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a significant crisis of power that ended after Tito's death in 1980, leading to the final political marginalization of Jovanka Broz from public life.

The practice of gifting to Josip Broz Tito and Jovanka Broz represented one of the foundations for strengthening social unity in socialist Yugoslavia. Individuals or collectives were clearly affirmed within both the narrower and broader community through the act of giving. A smaller portion consists of artworks that were directly gifted to Jovanka. Most of these are paintings that were given to her for the decoration of her new home after Tito's death, and this selection of items is now viewed as Jovanka Broz's collection. Paintings were transferred from the residence at Užička 15 to Jovanka's villa from the women's office on the ground floor, the bedroom on the upper floor, the salon on the upper floor, the study on the upper floor, and the hallway.

This collection was gathered without a clear order or artistic criteria and relevance. The only basis for its creation were the memories that Jovanka Broz was able to convey from the Residence at that moment, recreating the space of her former home.

Through these memories, she made an effort to reclaim the time she considered lost. Thus, we can regard her as a curator of a unique collection of memories that speaks to an artistic taste and era in the context of the history of Yugoslavia, its ideology, culture, and society. This corpus of paintings now belongs to the Museum of Yugoslavia and is preserved in the Gift Collection – visual art.

The authors of the exhibition are Ana Panić, senior curator at the Museum of Yugoslavia, and Nikola Ivanović, curator at the Gallery of the Matica srpska. This exhibition is accompanied by a display of dresses and accessories titled "Jovanka Broz in Color," authored by fashion designer Igor Todorović, with advisor and curator Mirjana Menković, and fashion designer and costume designer Maja Nedeljković Davidovac.

In the Gallery of the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art, original clothing pieces from the unique collection of Jovanka Broz are also exhibited, which were displayed in the RTS lobby in September 2021. Exclusively showcased are the outfits worn by the former First Lady on official occasions, which the public in Jagodina and the region has not had the opportunity to see until now.

The exhibition at the Gallery of the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art will be open to the public until September 10, 2023.