Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade
Modernist crystal-form museum at the river confluence, holding Yugoslav and Serbian art since 1900.
The Museum of Contemporary Art stands in a riverside park at Usce, close to where the Sava meets the Danube. Ivan Antic and Ivanka Raspopovic designed the building as a cluster of six interlocking crystalline volumes topped with glass lanterns, a plan that lets daylight reach a continuous spiral of galleries arranged over split levels. Opened in 1965, it was among the first purpose-built museums of modern art in south-eastern Europe and is protected as a cultural monument of Serbia.
The collection numbers more than thirty-five thousand works and traces Yugoslav and Serbian art from around 1900 to the present, taking in painting, sculpture, photography, film, prints and new media. A long closure for reconstruction ended in 2017, when the museum reopened with restored roof lanterns and upgraded services. Two further sites are run by the museum: the Salon on Pariska Street in the old town and the Gallery-Legacy of Milica Zoric and Rodoljub Colakovic in Dedinje.
Highlights
- Crystalline 1965 building by Antic and Raspopovic
- Spiral route through split-level daylit galleries
- Over 35,000 works of Yugoslav and Serbian art
- Sculpture park and river views at Usce
