page_title: Ivan Meštrović
section_title: First World War and Yugoslavia
hierarchical_section_title: Ivan Meštrović / Life / First World War and Yugoslavia
caption_attribution_description: Statue of Grgur Ninski (Gregory of Nin) by Ivan Meštrović in Split, Croatia (photograph is scanned)
context_page_description: Ivan Meštrović was a Croatian sculptor, architect, and writer. He was the most prominent modern Croatian sculptor and a leading artistic personality in contemporary Zagreb. He studied at Pavle Bilinić's Stone Workshop in Split and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he was formed under the influence of the Secession. He traveled throughout Europe and studied the works of ancient and Renaissance masters, especially Michelangelo, and French sculptors Auguste Rodin, Antoine Bourdelle and Aristide Maillol. He was the initiator of the national-romantic group Medulić. During the First World War, he lived in emigration. After the war, he returned to Croatia and began a long and fruitful period of sculpture and pedagogical work. In 1942 he emigrated to Italy, in 1943 to Switzerland and in 1947 to the United States. He was a professor of sculpture at the Syracuse University and from 1955 at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.
context_section_description: At the onset of World War I, after the assassination in Sarajevo, Meštrović tried to move back to Split via Venice, but was dissuaded by threats made against him because of his political opposition to the Austro-Hungarian authorities. During the war he travelled to present exhibits in Paris, Cannes, London and in Switzerland. He was a founding member of the Yugoslav Committee.
  He was the first artist of Croatian origin to exhibit his work at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, in 1915.
  After World War I he moved back home to the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and met the second love of his life, Olga Kesterčanek, whom he married shortly thereafter. They had four children: Marta, Tvrtko, Maria and Mate, all of whom were born in Zagreb, where Ivan and Olga settled in 1922. He was a contemporary and friend of Nikola Tesla.  Meštrović and his family would later spend the winter months in their mansion in Zagreb and the summer months in a summer house he built by the end of the 1930s in Split. He became a professor and later the director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, and proceeded to build numerous internationally renowned works as well as many donated chapels and churches and grants to art students.
  By 1923 he designed the mausoleum for the Račić Family Memorial Chapel in Cavtat, also known as Our Lady of the Angels. He also created a set of statues for a never-built Yugoslav national temple that would have been erected in Kosovo to commemorate the 1389 Battle of Kosovo.
  He continued to travel to post his exhibits around the world: he displayed at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 1924, in Chicago in 1925, he even travelled to Egypt and Palestine in 1927. In 1927 he entered a design for the coins of the Irish Free State, and though his design arrived too late for consideration it was adopted in 1965 as the seal of the Central Bank of Ireland.
caption: Statue of Gregory of Nin, in Split, Croatia, 1929
exif: {}