Bulgarian association of artists active from 1931 to after 1944. Founded in 1931 in Sofia, its objective was to unite artists with similar aesthetic viewpoints who espoused new trends in art in keeping with movements in western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Its members enriched Bulgarian art by creating works with a sophisticated approach to style, a purity of form and a stable internal structure. From 1931 to 1937 the Society participated in all the exhibitions of the various artists’ associations in Bulgaria. In 1934 it organized exhibitions in Sofia, Ruse and Zagreb, and in 1935 exhibitions of prints and drawings in Zagreb and Ljubljana and in Varna, Bulgaria. Although its first members worked primarily in a realistic manner, around 1936—when membership had grown to 55—other Bulgarian artists who had studied and worked in Paris, Munich and Vienna joined its ranks. Artists such as Alexandar Zhendov, BENCHO OBRESHKOV, Boris Eliseev, Vera Nedkova, David Perets, Eliezer Alshekh, IVAN NENOV, Kiril Petrov and KIRIL TSONEV contributed more modernist approaches, rejecting academic art, folkloric elements and especially the ideas of Socialist Realism put into practice by the founders of the Society. After 1944 the New Artists’ Society was absorbed by the Union of Bulgarian Artists (see NATIONAL ART SOCIETY OF BULGARIA). Many of those who had been members of the Society were declared ‘bourgeois artists’ by the Communist regime and were no longer able to take part in exhibitions; several, including Alshekh, Eliseev and Perets, emigrated.

• New Artists' Society
  • Nenov, Ivan
  • Obreshkov, Bencho