Greetings and Global Context
Welcome to the Museum of Arts and Crafts, and the exhibition the Sixties in Croatia – Myth and Reality. The Sixties are regarded as a milestone period in the recent world history. On the one hand is the post-war world of consolidation, reconstruction and construction, and on the other is the conquest of new spaces, expansion of liberites and collapse of social conventions. It was the time of sudden expansion of consumerist society and the consumer culture. The decade was marked by turbulent events on the political and social scene such as the peak of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assasination of J.F. Kennedy and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Student revolts and movements spread from the United States to Europe, in which the reformist aspirations of 1968 received the tragic epilogue with the fall of the Prague Spring and the occupation of Czechoslovakia.
Introduction – Croatia in the 1960s
The loosening of the Party’s hold in Croatia and throughout Yugoslavia resulted in manifestation of creative energy in many areas: economic, social, political, but also cultural and artistic. After long post-war period of post-Stalinist regime, the opening of borders resulted in a feeling of greater freedom and optimism, the onset of tourism and the opening of the domestic market to the unimaginable goods of the Western world. Development of mass entertainment takes place, as well as world-leading avant-garde artistic movements. Topics that had long been considered as taboo are discussed, such as the question of the position of Croats in the SFRY, which led to the Croatian Spring in the late 1960s and finally its break in 1971 and traumatic Croatian silence in the following period.