Grove Koger
Maggie and I enjoyed several days in Split in 2015 (see my 7/17/19 post), but our most rewarding experience was a visit to the Ivan Meštrović Gallery in the suburban neighborhood of Meje.
Meštrović’s life was a convoluted one. He was born in what was then the autonomous Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, which itself was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When he was 13, he was apprenticed to a stonemason in Split, and went on to study at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Later years found him in Paris (where his work won the praise of Auguste Rodin, no less), Rome, Cannes and London.
The end of World War I brought major political changes to Central Europe and the Balkans, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (from 1929 the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) was carved out of what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Meštrović settled in the new kingdom’s capital of Zagreb, where he directed the city’s Art Institute, in 1922, and built a summer home and studio in Split in the 1930s. By then he was world-famous, but with the approach of World War II, his outspoken political views made him suspect and he was briefly imprisoned.
Meštrović managed to make his way to Italy and then Switzerland, but with the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the war, he refused to return. He settled instead in the United States, where he became a professor at Syracuse University. Despite his antipathy to Josip Tito’s atheistic regime, the deeply religious sculptor donated his residence in Split to Yugoslavia in 1952. And despite his earlier stance, he did revisit his homeland—once—but did not remain.
The Ivan Meštrović Gallery is housed in the neoclassic summer residence that the sculptor had built, and is a showcase for a number of his monumental works, pieces that are at once sensual, spiritual and deeply humanistic.
World Enough 