Robert Jean – Ivanović
(1889 – 1968)
Portrait of the Painter Karlo Mijić, 1939
bronze
35 cm x 22 cm x 25.5 cm
MG–944

Croatian sculptor, medal-maker and secondary school teacher, studied sculpture at the academies in Zagreb (1908 – 1909, 1911, 1914) and Munich (1909 -1910), as well as the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1915 -1916.
The focal point of his artistic preoccupation is the human figure and the portrait. Initially, they were studies of the male body and the dynamically broken male figure engaged in hard physical labour that he consolidated in the series Labour (1915 – 1928). He softly modelled intimate and poetic female portraits and nudes, as sculptures in the round and reliefs in bronze and stone. He created several public and funeral monuments.
Throughout his sculptural activity he modelled realistic male portraits in relief and sculpture in the round, with good psychological characterization and summarily executed physical features. The portrait of Karlo Mijić, the sculptor’s colleague and friend from Sarajevo, is rendered as a shallow bust with a dynamically executed head of this striking painter.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb