Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos was born on 14 April 1921 in Šid, into a farming family. He attended elementary school in his hometown and secondary school in Sremska Mitrovica and Vukovar. He studied art history and philosophy in Vienna and Zagreb, graduating in Zagreb in 1949. Until 1960 he worked at the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts as an assistant and curator at the Modern Gallery and the Archives of Fine Arts. From 1952 he was also involved with the Gallery of Peasant Art (later the Gallery of Primitive Art), where he would become curator. He organized numerous exhibitions in Yugoslavia and abroad, and published essays and art reviews. He did much to promote abstract art: in addition to his writing, he helped organize Salon 54 in Rijeka, the first exhibition of abstract art in Yugoslavia, and in 1956 he staged a retrospective of Milan Steiner. He received his doctorate from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in 1957 with a thesis on Sava Šumanović. He contributed to the Encyclopedia of Fine Arts and wrote books on Mirko Virius (1950), Sava Šumanović (1960) and Ivan Generalić (1962). When the Gallery of Primitive Art was founded in 1960, he became its first curator. In 1964 he resigned because of the “Bosilj case” (Ilija Bosilj, the well-known naive painter, was Bašičević’s father).
He then became curator of the Benko Horvat Collection, and from 1971 he headed the newly founded Centre for Photography, Film and Television. He took part in organizing the New Tendencies and was on the editorial boards of the magazines Bit and Spot. He published essays on photography and organized several important exhibitions. His last texts dealt with the youngest generation of artists. Many of his writings remained unpublished. He retired in 1982.
Bašičević began writing while still at secondary school: poetry and short prose texts, some of which were published after the war under a pseudonym. During the war he produced his first artworks, paysages de la mort and paysages de la guerre. In the 1950s he created several series of works (tabula rasa, alphabet, paysages, nostories, graphs, negation de la peinture, pythagoras), to which he would later return obsessively. These works/texts, written in various languages and alphabets, resemble neat calligraphy on school writing tablets, although the materials vary: wooden boards, paper, exercise books, books, globes. Bašičević adopted the name Mangelos for his “private experiment, called noart”.
His poems were published in the graphic portfolio Eulalia, illustrated by Matija Skurjeni (1959). At the same time he made another portfolio, Guernica, illustrated by Ivan Generalić, which was never published.
Between 1959 and 1966 he was active in Gorgona, an informal artists’ group named after one of his poems. His project for an issue of the Gorgona magazine (conceived as an issue not to be published) was never realized. In 1964 he published several nostories in Picelj’s magazine a. He produced a considerable number of works in the 1960s, and from 1968 he took part in exhibitions of visual poetry. In the late 1960s he created a series on Picasso, which was shown at his first solo exhibition, in Novi Sad in 1972. At the Gorgona retrospective in 1977 he exhibited his early work for the first time, which marked the beginning of the public presentation of his art. Thematic solo exhibitions followed: Manifestos (1978), Shid-theory (1978), Energy (1979) and Retrospective (1981). The large retrospectives held in Belgrade and Zagreb in 1986 brought him definitive recognition.
He died on 18 December 1987, after a long illness. In 1988 the Gallery of Extended Media organized a round table on Bašičević’s work, and many of his works/texts were published for the first time (Quorum, no. 1, 1989).
Text: Darko Šimičić