Tag: Ivan Meštrović

Ivan Meštrović, Portrait of Karmen Matić, 1914

Ivan Meštrović
(1883 – 1962)
Portrait of Karmen Matić, 1914
bronze
54.5 x 35 x 30.5 cm
MG-6505

Ivan Meštrović is the most prominent Croatian sculptor of the first half of the 20th century who has, during his lifetime, achieved worldwide fame and acclaim. He studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1901 to 1905, and during his formative years he was influenced by the prevailing atmosphere of the Vienna Secession, having himself become its typical representative in the medium of sculpture. Between 1923 and 1942, he served as the rector of Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts. His artistic, professional and public work exerted significant influence on his coevals, the younger generation of sculptors and the birth of Modernism in Croatia.
Since the beginning of his distinguished career, Meštrović had been recognised as a remarkable talent and master artist of a distinctive skill at shaping sculptural forms. Using his exceptional talent, he executed monumental, religious and intimate motifs of universal value.
Meštrović’s entire oeuvre is steeped in portrait sculptures and unique female characters featuring harmonious elegance and refined stylisation. Together with his wife Ruža Meštrović, he often portrayed his contemporaries and friends. Carmen de Spalatin was a woman of exceptional beauty and a close friend of Ruža Meštrović, who inspired her close friend Ivan Meštrović. The portrait bust of a young woman is modelled with her head slightly turned left and wrapped in a smooth scarf, which is tied at the back of the neck and highlights the curve of her head. Bangs and strands of her short hair peek out from under the scarf framing her serious face. The standout features are her physiognomic details, such as the eyebrows and drawn eyelids. The lips are pressed together and the chin is rounded. The volume is closed, and the surfaces are smooth and fluid, while in the profile view, the sides of the bust are cut flatly. The sculptor balances the decorative aspect of the style with the model’s character, without falling into the trap of excessive beautification and attractive visual representation.

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

Ivan Meštrović, Mother and Child, 1915

Ivan Meštrović
(1883 – 1962)
Mother and Child, 1915
casting, bronze
67.5 x 27.5 x 18.5 cm
MG-2831

Ivan Meštrović is Croatia’s preeminent modern sculptor, who was educated in the atmosphere of the Vienna Secession and is its most prominent representative in the medium of sculpture. The artistic value of Meštrović’s monumental, religious and intimate works is universal.
Meštrović’s spiritual maturation and interest in universal themes with religious postulates followed after the grandiose Secession phase and after he moved away from the national mythological cycle. This conceptual change was also accompanied with a stylistic change by synthesising Gothic elements and departing slightly from Art Nouveau. Re-examining his own national illusion, he resorted to religious expressive motifs and elongated figures, such as the universal representation of motherhood in the iconic work Mother and Child placed on a high throne, with elongated proportions and restrained gesture. A seated figure of a woman and a nude child in her lap are positioned frontally. The contours of the young woman’s body are outlined under a thin tunic, and she is wearing a scarf around her long face with a tender expression, while her long neck and head are tilted to the left. Both mother and child have their hands raised in a gesture resembling the depictions of the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus in icons. A nude child with a plump body is resting his head and back against the mother’s front and is supported by the woman’s crossed left leg. The elegance and sensuality of the long crossed legs point to a secular representation of a mother and child.

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

Ivan Meštrović, Don Frane Bulić, 1929

Ivan Meštrović
Don Frane Bulić, 1929
bronze / casting
53 x 43.5 x 31 cm
MG-808

Born in the Dalmatian hinterland, and after a period of self-taught work and apprenticeship in the stonemasonry workshop of Pavle Bilinić in Split, Ivan Meštrović (1883-1962) went to Vienna for further education, where he studied under renowned architect Otto Wagner, among others. His sculptural work is characterized by the influences of the Vienna Secession (at whose exhibition in 1903 he exhibited his works publicly for the first time), Auguste Rodin, and a fascination with ancient Egyptian and Assyrian sculpture. As part of Meštrović’s strong political engagement, his time in the Medulić Association of Croatian Artists, where he acted as an ideologist and initiator of this national-romantic artistic group, holds significant importance. On the eve of World War I, he turned his attention to religious themes, which increasingly gained significance in his life and work. He was one of the few Croatian sculptors to receive international recognition during his lifetime, notably, his public sculptures of the Indians (The Bowman and The Spearman) which were installed in Chicago in 1928. He also engaged in teaching work in the United States, in Syracuse and South Bend.
The Bust of Don Frane Bulić from 1929 was created during Meštrović’s artistically prolific period when he returned to his homeland after World War I and served as the rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb from 1923 to 1942. The 1920s were a decade when Meštrović turned more strongly towards the classical component in his artistic expression. Through the realistically depicted portrait of this Catholic intellectual, Meštrović pays tribute to the pioneer of Croatian archaeological science, particularly notable for his studies of early Christian and early Croatian history on Dalmatian soil.

Text: Ph.D. Ivana Rončević Elezović, 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

Ivan Meštrović, Girl with a Lute, 1918

Ivan Meštrović
(1883 – 1962)
Girl with a Lute, 1918
casting, bronze
45.5 x 27 x 19.5 cm
MG-2952

Ivan Meštrović is Croatia’s preeminent modern sculptor, who was educated in the atmosphere of the Vienna Secession and is its most prominent representative in the medium of sculpture. The artistic value of Meštrović’s monumental, religious and intimate works is universal. His continuous Secession morphology has developed and become increasingly more subtle and refined at the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, when, in addition to religious subject-matter, he developed musical themes translated into melodic forms of reduced anatomy and subtle linearity, such as the elegant curved figures of women with stringed instruments, which he increasingly minimised, almost reducing them to a disembodied mass with elegantly entwined hands picking at non-existing instruments.
With its musical theme shaped in the style of Art Nouveau, the stylised portrait of a Girl with a Lute belongs to this series of sculptures. The elegant figure of a girl is depicted with her head bowed, engrossed in music, her eyes downcast, while her arm is bent clinging to her elongated neck and her long fingers are touching the strings of the lute. The separated thumb and forefinger indicate the movement used to pluck the strings of a supposed musical instrument. In this sense, we can speak of an artistically abstract concept and an embodiment of music that is inherently esoteric and invisible. Accordingly, the sculptural representation with a thin, shallow base is executed in half volume in the form of a mould with a hollow reverse side.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023

Ivan Meštrović, Caryatid, 1908, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, 1916

Ivan Meštrović
(1883 – 1962)
Caryatid, 1908
wood
74 x 19 x 13 cm
MG-813

Jesus and Mary Magdalene, 1916
wood
176 x 133.8 cm
MG-815

Ivan Meštrović, one of our greatest sculptors, was formed in the early 20th century, in the spirit of his time and Secession as a stylistic trend. In line with the postulates of Modern art, he made use of the archaic form and wood as the material in which he shaped the Caryatid with “constructive architectonics”, depicted as a standing female nude with the pronounced vertical of the linear drapery slung over the forearm of her left arm, which is raised and bent, and her oval head is bowed. Her right arm hangs loosely alongside the body and is crooked backwards at waist height. The stylized lines soften the compact composition. The wood has a polished texture, the contour lines flow fluidly while light delicately accentuates the surface extrusions.

After Ivan Meštrović finished working on his national cycle, the sculptor increasingly turned to universal religious motifs. The series of Christological wooden reliefs includes the scene of Jesus and Mary Magdalene executed in shallow relief with expressive flatness and linearity of Gothic figures and an emphasis on the elongated arms of the main protagonists of the scene. The central scene of the seated Christ and the kneeling Mary Magdalene is punctuated by the horizontal figural composition in the background. The artistry and expressiveness of the composition carved onto a wooden panel was achieved with flawless linear stylisation.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, Museum advisor 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

 

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