One Town that Shook the World of Cartoons!
 The town of Zemun was introduced to caricatures early in the 19th century, mostly through newspapers from Vienna and Budapest.
Zemun itself produced a few papers from 1849 until the end of WWI, but none were cartoon friendly.
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When the town became part of the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians in 1918 (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) some twenty papers were published.
But again none embraced cartoonists, with the exception of the notorious magazine "Dert" (1927-29) which specialised in publishing lascivious and sometimes even pornographic jokes and caricatures.
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The real boom of Zemun caricature happened in the 50s, quite out of the blue and unconnected to the previous history outlined above.
The whole story is like a Big Bang theory for cartoonists. The Zemun cartoon phenomenon was born from a small nucleus in one Zemun high school, in fact from one class in that school. The artists from this school became known world-wide in the sphere of caricature.
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The key figure and spritual progenitor of the Zemun genre was Milan Besarabic. A sculptor rather than a draughtsman, Besarabic acheived recognition throughout the world for his caricature-based sculptures. He passed this inclination for caricatures onto his students in Zemun high school, where he himself was an art professor for years.
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A famous Zemun cartoonist recalls Besarabic's unorthodox teaching methods:
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"It is a real miracle that Zemun high school did not produce even more students than it did. Once a week, the master would take his most promising students up to an improvised atelier in the high school's attic, where they were invloved in "the night nude act".
Having the opportunity to see a nude woman's body was almost unbelievable to students in the early fifties... 
...so most of them tried to do their best in art classes. Besarabic took great care in selecting only the best, however.
The fact that almost all of them became caricaturists instead of painters is due to the fact that most of them were watching the model instead of practicing painting - in the end the only thing they could do was to become caricaturists!"
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In the first post-war generations of students, indeed in the same class, there were three exceptional caricature talents who had been shown the way by Besabaric. They were...
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In the early '50s these three beardless students started to work as caricaturists in Belgrade's newspapers and magazines. Another student in the same class who showed promising talent as a cartoonist was
but in spite of his evident gifts, he soon gave up caricatures and dedicated himself to journalism.
Rudic, Koraksic and Rumencic meanwhile founded the group Ogledalo ("Mirror"), which performed "live caricatures" and "oral newspapers".
The success achieved by this generation gave Besarabic the drive to push his next round of students into the world of cartoons. Thus two years later Zoran Jovanovic and Slobodan Milic emerged on the scene, accompanied by naturalized Zemun inhabitants Slobodan Obradovic and Ranko Guzina.
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Younger caricaturists Jovan Prokopljevic and Dusan Petricic, also Zemun high school students started to publish around this time too, as did Dejan Milic.
Besabaric was no longer the art professor of Zemun high school, but his influence carried on as every few years a new cartoon talent would appear on the scene....
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The most recent artists to have carried on the Zemun tradition are...
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In 1996 the Zemun International Salon of Caricature was established. It quickly became the most important in Yugoslavia, and within only two years, one of the most famous in the world (with 501 authors from 47 countries in 1998).
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All images are ©copyrighted by their creators. No images may be reproduced without permission from the artists.
If you would like to publish any of these images,
please contact Branko Najhold and Julijana Zivkovic at this address: trag@beotel.yu
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