TRAVELLER

The Traveller group consisted of Dragutin Herjanić, B. Kranjčević, Zvonimir Megler, Vlado Pilar, Josip Seissel, Miloš Somborski, Miho Schon, Čedomil Plavšić and Dušan Plavšić. The group named themselves after the English word traveller. The group was formed in 1922 after performing a play at the 2^nd Public General Education High School in Zagreb. The play is important for expressing Seissel’s admiration and association with Zenitism, and pointing to his later Surrealist oeuvre. In fact, judging by the choice of texts and the director’s decisions, as well as the aesthetics of the production which was completely based on collage, the play derived from the Dadaist principles and early knowledge of Constructivism.

Group members were the young educated progeny of wealthy bourgeois Zagreb families, aware of the changes that occurred in the period after World War II, and thus were critical to the bourgeois values. They performed daily in public which they named action art, thus identifying their lives with art, and anticipating the essential elements of artistic practice that will appear fifty years later. The group was active for a dozen years and afterwards, its members continued their professional careers in medicine, architecture and law, with remarkable results.

Traveller’s interests were mass culture, especially American movies, photography, modern music, mostly jazz, fashion, comics and visual communication. They were attracted to the anarchic ideas of the art movements of the moment such as Dadaism, Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism and Surrealism. They were further influenced by international avant-garde magazines, such as Expressionist’s Der Blaue Reiter and Constructivist’s Mir. Their recently discovered legacy shows how the local avant-garde survived divisions among Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism, police repression and petty-bourgeois conservatism. They created through multimedia and performance events work much earlier than the mid-sixties of the 20^th century, when the advent of such work is assumed to have begun.