12.12.2025 / Darko Šimičić
Artists’ books or books as art are artistic works that emerged in the avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, and conceptual art movements, realized in the medium of the book – the book as an object. Artists’ books are a means of shaping, communicating, and embodying the ideas of artists who abandoned the creation of traditional works (painting, printmaking, sculpture). The first artists’ books appeared in the early 20th century within movements such as futurism, cubo-futurism, dada, constructivism, suprematism, zenitism, and surrealism. The concept was defined in the late 1960s to describe the works of Neo-Dada, Fluxus, concrete poetry, visual poetry, process art, and conceptual art.
Artists’ books are a unique medium that combines text and visual elements to create a complex and multimedia artistic piece. Although the term “artist’s book” was popularized during the 1960s, owing to critic Germano Celant, the interest in this medium dates back to early avant-garde movements. Initial examples include Stéphane Mallarmé’s book “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (1897), F.T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto,” published in Paris’s Figaro (1909), and Aleksei Kruchenykh’s “Zaum Book” (1915) with illustrations by Olga Rozanova.
Now there is a leap in time from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1950s and 1960s. In Zagreb, during the second half of the 20th century, the development of experimental books was particularly intense, with works by artists exploring the boundaries of the book as a medium. The artist’s book is defined as an independent artistic work that uses the book’s modality to communicate the artist’s ideas, attitudes, beliefs, research, or provocations. It can include various techniques, from traditional printing to experimenting with materials and different presentation formats. This medium gained significance with the development of the neo-avant-garde, Fluxus, visual poetry, and conceptual art, focusing on the creation process and idea rather than just the final artistic or aesthetic product.
In Zagreb, pioneers of experimental work with the book medium can include poets and artists such as poet Josip Stošić, poet Bora Pavlović, and painter, filmmaker, and writer Vlado Kristl. Their works explored the boundaries of language and image, highlighting the potential of the artist’s book to become a space for artistic experiments, explorations, transgressions, and innovations.
Josip Stošić, Boro Pavlović, and Vlado Kristl heralded a new era in artistic expression in Zagreb through their innovative approaches to artist’s books. Stošić published the book “Đerdan” in 1951. Pavlović published “Novina” as an experimental publication in 1954. As poets, they used language as their primary creative tool, while Kristl developed his styles through interaction with text and visual design, reflecting an anti-artistic gesture. Their works inspired many other artists to explore creations that transcend the classic boundaries of literature and artistic disciplines.
Vlado Kristl, for example, combines illustrations and text in a form that deeply explores philosophical themes and personal narratives of anti-aesthetic, anti-poetry, anti-prose, and anti-painting. He is one of the pioneers of monochrome painting in Croatia. His books are a unique blend of textual and visual craftsmanship in the realm of absurdity. An outstanding example is the book “Pet bijelih stepenica” (Five White Steps) from 1961.
The experimental practice provided artists with a paradoxical and provocative dialogue with the audience, where the book becomes an instrument not only for the distribution of meaning but also for acquiring new sensory experiences. Particularly important is the edition launched by painter Ivan Picelj between 1962 and 1964, publishing works by Picelj, Victor Vasarely, Vjenceslav Richter, Mangelos, and Getulio Alviani.
Dimitrije Bašićević Mangelos introduced a new impulse into the world of artists’ books. His painted books are the result of synergy between the visual, literary, and philosophical. He often uses symbolism and abstract forms that disrupt and challenge conventional understanding of the book. Through his work, the book becomes a kind of diary of concepts, anthropological insights, and philosophical visions. Each element carries its own meaning and contributes to the overall expression. Mangelos pointed out that a book can be not only an object for reading but also a combination of contemplative and sensory experience. His work on painted books demonstrates how visual effects and signs combined with text are capable of creating complex narratives that evolve through the physical medium and appearance of the book. Mangelos translinguistically navigated different languages and modalities of visual negation while also stimulating experience, knowledge, and skeptical aestheticization.
Gorgona was a mysterious artistic group that operated in the context of art after Art Informel, Klein’s new realism, Fluxus, and Neo-Dada from 1959 to 1966. Gorgona was not a traditional art group promoting its concepts, poetics, politics, artistic production, or aesthetics but rather a kind of “semi-secret society” that connected artistic production (creation of works), conversations, and the lives of its members with a Gorgonian spirit. Gorgona fully developed the relativizing relationship between private and public, literal and mystified, individual and collective. The artists and theorists of Gorgona critically and lucidly addressed the relationship between the individual and the manifestation of the collective. Painters Marijan Jevšovar, Julije Knifer, Đuro Seder, and Josip Vaništa, sculptor Ivan Kožarić, architect Miljenko Horvat, art historians Dimitrije Bašićević and Radoslav Putar, art theorist Matko Meštrović, and Ivo Štajner and Slobodan Vuličević collaborated and associated within Gorgona.
Certainly, one of the key elements in the development of artist’s books is the magazine or anti-magazine Gorgona, launched by Josip Vaništa. Gorgona was not merely a magazine; it was a platform for dialogue between artists and the public, bringing together the works of different artists in book format. This publication facilitated the creation of a community of artists who shared similar interests, aesthetics, and philosophy. The Gorgona magazine exemplifies a magazine as a work of art or anti-magazine, rather than a communicator of information about artwork, the art world, and art history. Eleven issues of the Gorgona magazine were published from 1961 to 1966. Josip Vaništa edited the first issue, repeating a photograph with a cold, drab motif of a neglected shop window on all nine pages. The second issue was created by Julije Knifer as an infinite meander by joining the sheets of the publication with graphic elements of the meander in a circular sequence. Other issues were produced by: Josip Vaništa (No. 3), Victor Vasarely (No. 4), Ivan Kožarić (No. 5), Josip Vaništa (No. 6), Miljenko Horvat (No. 7), Harold Pinter (No. 8), Dieter Roth (No. 9), and Josip Vaništa (No. 10, No. 11). Piero Manzoni devised three projects for realizing an issue of Gorgona with fingerprint prints under the common title Certificates, which was not realized. Josip Vaništa published the Postgorgona magazine during the 1980s.
In the tradition of Gorgona, artists of conceptual art emerged. Goran Trbuljak created books and notebooks in which he tested critical attitudes towards the institutions of the art world and the institutionalization of the artist. He explored the contextualization and de-contextualization of the artist’s status. The conscious use of mass media in the artistic practices of Sanja Iveković and Ivana Keser is also significant. Sanja Iveković is a politically engaged, feminist-oriented artist. Through the medium of the artist’s book, for example: “Double Life” or “The Tragedy of One Venus” (1976), she examined the power of representation of mass media between the private and public, emotional and political spheres. Her books often address themes of gender equality and marginal social norms, prompting the audience to reconsider conventional representations of women in society. Ivana Keser created printed newspaper concepts responding to models of mass information industry and apparatuses that construct individual and social reality. In media politics, she found her potential definitions of the conditions for subjectivization, experiencing herself as an active agent in communication networks.
Mladen Stilinović, Vlado Martek, Boris Demur, and Željko Jerman developed unique, often handmade books. For them, different hybrid models of individual and collective book-making were important. They also explored alternative communication models, such as the low-print run handmade magazine “Maj 75” (1975-1990). Stilinović treated the book as a medium through which he executes, subverts, or inverts ideas about the artist, everyday life, exhibition practice, and the world of his poetic-political deconstruction of contemporaneity. He worked with the book as an object but also with books containing photographs or minimal interventions within the fields of visuality and textuality. Vlado Martek developed the genre of samizdat. These are handmade, self-published books that belong to his pre-poetic performances, blending visual art, philosophy, poetry, autoreferential writing, and the search for new experiences. Stilinović and Martek collectively and individually connected the phenomenon of the artist’s book with the performative behavior of artists in various realms ranging from the everyday to gallery, museum, and festival spaces.
The artist’s book in Zagreb between 1951 and 2001 marked a rich and diverse experimental scene that encompassed innovations in artistic expression, cultural identification, and social activism. Therefore, various artistic strategies and approaches are highlighted, which shaped the development of this medium, prompting further exploration of the conditions and contexts, the materialization and dematerialization of artistic communication, democratization, and hybridization of the medium.
Creative Europe Project
Anthologies of Cooperation: Encounters in/through Artist’s Book and Experimental Poetry (AbeX), 2025-2026
Partners
Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), Vienna, kultura natura pARTicip (KNP), Oradea, National Museum of Contemporary Arts (MNAC), Bucharest, and Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade