FAMOUS CROATS 2008 - 125TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF IVAN MEŠTROVIĆ (C)

Motif: Photo of Ivan Meštorović by Nickolas Muray, © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, and Meštrović sculpture “History of Croatia”, 1932, bronze, in front of the Faculty of Law of the University of Zagreb. IVAN MEŠTROVIĆ (1883 – 1962) One of the most eminent Croatian sculptors of the 20th century and one of the greatest contemporary world artists of versatile creative power, builder, sculptor, painter and writer, Ivan Meštrović was born on August 15, 1883 in Vrpolje near Županja. He spent his youth in Otavice near Drniš in Dalmatinska Zagora, in the atmosphere of a live tradition of folk songs. In his biography we can find data about the modest beginning of his involvement in sculpturing. As a matter of fact, he created his first works when he carved figures in wood and soft stone while looking after the sheep grazing on the mountain slopes of Zagorje. At the age of barely 17 he went to Split where he helped stonemason Pavao Bilinić in the restoration of animal figures on the Split belfry. This is where his talent was recognized by many and consequently he was dubbed “the wonder of the hinterland”. Supported by the scholarship that a number of wealthy Split citizens secured for him, admiring the talented young man, he went to Vienna where he enrolled the Academy of Arts. At the time of Secession in full swing, the young Meštrović first exhibited his works in the year 1903, soon achieving recognition as an exceptionally talented and singular artist. At that time he was tutored by the prominent architect O. Wagner, and he was also introduced to the works of the contemporary sculptors A. Bourdelle and A. Rodin, simultaneously showing great interest in Egyptian and Assyrian sculpture. These influences, together with his enthusiasm for European classical, medieval and Renaissance sculptors, particularly Michelangelo, created the syncretism of ideas and the stylistic parti-coloured features as recognizable determinants of Meštrović’s modelling. In his opus that was being created in the course of some sixty years, there are noticeable changes of ideological backgrounds: from the Rodin-like realistic symbolism and the Viennese Secession that imbued his works of his youthful era, all through the classical, inspired by the world of the ancient time and the Renaissance, and finally to the Expressionism, obvious from the agitated surfaces of his later works, like for instance, Job (1946). Among Meštrović’s early works we find the Well of Life, a veritable masterpiece founded on the symbolic idea of thirsting for life of a multitude of human figures crammed round the well, opened by the agitated surface. The Well was bought off by I. Kršnjavi in 1905, and nowadays it is positioned in front of the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb. In the year 1908 Meštrović rented an atelier in Paris, and his thematic preoccupation that had emerged there was the national myth; within the so called Kosovo Cycle he produced the sculptures Remembrance, Prince Marko, Miloš Obilić and others that are considered his most outstanding works. Among them Remembrance (1908) is particularly prominent, a wondrous sculpture that keeps changing if watched from different points of vision, associatively connected to the suffering of numerous widows who lived through the bloody history even in our folk songs. Meštrović exhibited the Kosovo Cycle at the exhibitions in Vienna and Zagreb (1910) and in 1911 he exhibited in Rome with his friends from the Croatian Association “Medulić” and attracted great interest for his works there. The mythologized portrait My mother, created in the year 1909, has a particular significance: it features a folklore frame realized by the patriarchal pathos of the Dinara mountain region that was to remain recorded in our collective awareness as a symbol of the nation. In the whirl of those modern sculptural ponderings about form through the mythological themes of distant, lapsed cultures, the young Meštrović was an exception because he created works from his recollections that were given to him by his own people. He worked firmly rooted in the Croatian climate and modelled what he found close to him. Or, as it was recently mentioned: Bourdelle modelled Apollo, Archer and Pomona, and our Meštrović the heroes of the national epic and the face of his mother. However, Meštrović’s sculptures have overcome the national-historical frame and have become universally human, everlasting. Thus the Indians, created in 1928 and raised in the Central Grand Part in Chicago, became the symbol of resistance, not of a distant and foreign people but of the whole of humankind. On the eve of the First World War Meštrović emigrated and turned to religious themes which is proved by the cycle of reliefs from the life of Jesus Christ, like Moses, Annunciation, Lamentation and others, created in wood in combination with the Archaic, Gothic, Secessionist and Expressionist styles. Nowadays they are preserved in the Holy Cross Chapel in Kaštelet in Split. In the last years of the war some more cheerful frames of mind emerged and the sculptor created variations of female figures in combination with music instruments. Distant chords, the female body with an instrument, has been completely turned into an accord, a unique manifestation in European sculpture. The figure is positioned in the park of the Meštrović Gallery in Split, featuring an exceptionally refined workmanship and a cheerfulness of life emerging from it, thus incorporating all the beauty of Meštrović’s feeling for harmony. After the triumphant circulation across the main European centres, he came back to his native country in the twenties and started a long and productive period of sculpturing activity. From 1923 to 1942 he performed the duty of rector of the Zagreb Academy of Visual Arts. He also created many public monuments (the best known among them the ones of Marko Marulić and Bishop Gregory of Nin in Split, to Andrija Kačić-Miošić and Josip Juraj Strossmayer in Zagreb), and the architectural edifices (Mausoleum of the Račić family in Cavtat and the Mausoleum of the Meštrović family in Otavice). In the year 1938 he also realized the project of building the Croatian Artists House in Zagreb, a circular edifice that is an unsurpassable work of the Croatian modern architecture. What he has produced are the most original and best public monuments within the whole period of the civil society sculpture. In the thirties he also had the representative family palace built in Split where nowadays there is the residence of the Ivan Meštrović Gallery, with the permanent display of his works and the sculpture park that all together make up a thematic whole. In May 1942 Meštrović left for Rome and then went to Switzerland in 1943; finally, in 1947 he went to the United States of America where he dedicated himself to pedagogical work at the Syracuse University (State of New York) and then at the University South Bend (State of Indiana). At this time Biblical themes and motifs were prevailing in his work, so that is when he created the Roman Pieta, then the emphasized expressionistically modelled Job, followed by Atlantis and Persephone. In the year 1952 Meštrovic gave to the Croatian people a deed of gift of the Gallery and Kaštelet in Split, the Meštrović Atelier in Zagreb and the family vault in Otavice, and then in 1954 he completed the cycle of wooden reliefs about the life of Jesus Christ, begun almost forty years before and gave them as a present to be displayed in the Holy Cross Chapel in Split. Ivan Meštrović was also involved in literary work. He published treatises, diaries and memoirs, but he will definitely be permanently remembered for his architectonic-sculptural opus. Recognized in the world, wherever he had the opportunity to show his art, he is one of the few artists whose work has been appreciated and recognized in his lifetime. Owing to his exceptional creative power in modelling plastic masses and the capability of envisioning of public monuments in their interaction with the space where they were positioned, he realized one of the most important sculptural-constructional opuses of the twentieth century. Meštrović died in South Bend in the United States of America on January 16, 1962, with the wish to be buried after death in his native country, in the small village of Otavice, the region where he used to tend sheep, killing time by carving wood, not even anticipating that he, with his exceptional, unique creative nature, would leave a permanent mark in the Croatian and world culture.