FAMOUS CROATS 2010 - GRGO GAMULIN

GRGO GAMULIN Through his reach literary work and fruitful teaching activity, his exceptional social initiatives and persistent insisting on highly professional level and genuine humanistic values, the art historian and university teacher Grgo Gamulin das left deep traces in several areas of artistic creation and in several exceptional chapters in recent Croatian culture. As concerns the quantity and value of his published work and the diversity of his engagement one could think that he had a stable professional career, peaceful cabinet and lecturing work; however, his life was full of obstacles and oscilations, polemics and interruption, even paradoxes and contradictions, which also makes him amblematic for our region in the time of many turbulent years in the 20th century. Grgo Gamulin was born in Jelsa, on the island of Hvar, on 21 August 1910. He attended secondary schools in Drvaru and Sarajevo, and passed his final exam in 1930 at the gymnasium in Split. He took his degree in 1935 at the Facullty of Philosophy in Zagreb (history of art, archeology and French language), and in 1938/39 attended one-year specialisation school in Paris. Known as distinguished leftist and organiser of students he was in custody already in 1934, and spent almost all the time of the Second World War in ustascha camps from where he managed to escape threatened by liquidation shortly before the end of the war. After a short period of activity in the Ministry of Education, in 1947 he organises teaching and the study of the new age art history at the Faculty of Philosophy, where he works till 1972 when he is forcefully retired as distinguished prisoner of the so called „Croatian Spring“ , a highly positioned employee of the (at that time forbidden) Matica hrvatska (Croatian Cultural Foundation) and important organiser of a variety of national cultural institutions, especially Institute for the History of Art. After retiring he dedicated himself even more devotedly to scientific, professional and creative work and to a high extend completed his work on many projects. To wider public he is best known after his voluminous and systematic books on Croatian art in the 19th and 20th century and after his representative monographies on many authors: Plančić, Tartaglij, Postružnik, Job, Ivančić, Šohaj, Herman, Vulas, Petlevski, Kokot, Račić, Meštrović and many more and after a complete panorama of the Hlebine School. In no way less important is his contribution to attributions and interpretations of middle-age, renaissance and baroque painting by international masters (in several hundred specialised studies) because in our region he was the person who recognised and evaluated a relevant share in universal stylistic flows. He proved his literary talent and orientation toward high European criteria at first in inspired revisions of poetry translations in Croatian (from Dante and Baudelaire to Malalrme and Pascoli), and then also in his excellently written itineraries, short stories and novels. A part of his dramatic life experience he also transformed in theatre texts, movie scripts and memoirs, so that his heritage builds a corpus of an entire dense library. Tonko Maroević