The Art of Ivan Meštrović

The Continuation of an Appreciation of the Serbian Sculptor and His Work

CHRISTIAN BRINTON

The first installment of Mr. Brinton's paper appeared in the December number of this magazine.

IT is unnecessary to enlarge upon the artistic apprenticeship of Ivan Meštrović. He is in no sense a product of academic training. Befriended by a wealthy and discriminating Jew. he was enabled to continue his career at the Vienna Kunstakademie, where he remained some five years, first studying sculpture under Hellmer and afterward architecture with Ohmann. Vapid echoes of the Viennese baroque style or the self-conscious pretence of l'Art nouveau did not interest him. His conception of his life's task was already maturing, and his most fruitful hours were those spent when working alone on his own compositions in a modest studio situated just off the Prater.

While the winters were passed in Vienna, he returned each summer to his humble peasant home in order to refresh himself at the fountainhead of native life and scene. Sunny days on stony hill pasture and starlit nights in front of the cottage, where he would gaze at the silent mountains raising their crests 'toward infinity, were his true vigil, the prelude to the unfolding of his genius. Meštrović, like Segantini, Einar Jónsson, and other solitary, selftaught spirits passed through a period of unconscious germination. Though his professional preparation was in a measure desultory, yet when he visited Paris in 1907 he was conceded by such masters as Rodin and Emile Bourdelle to be a finished craftsman. From the outset he possessed the faculty of seeing, and of rendering what he saw and felt, in true plastic terms.

WHILE he had exhibited with success at the Vienna Secession and the Salon d'Automne and the Societe Nationale in Paris, it was at Zagreb, the Croatian capital, where Ivan Mestrovie first revealed the full measure of his power. A fervid patriot, he here gathered about him a brilliant assembly of Southern Slav artists—Serbs, Croats, Dalmatians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Montenegrians, and Macedonians. Naming their organization after the Venetian master Il Schiavone, who was in reality the Serb, Andrija Medulic, the Izlozba Medulica, as the society is called, held its first collective exhibition in the Lmjetnieki Pviljon at Zagreb during September and October, 1910. Prominent among the sculptors were Rosandic, Brodrozic, and Dujan Penir, while among the painters may be cited Raeki, Krizman, and Uprka. Forty artists in all were included in the group, and rarely has an exhibition displayed such unity oi aim and purpose, such passionate striving for a typically racial aesthetic expression, as was manifest in the work of these ardent Jugoslavs. Their leader was amply represented, and the affair as a whole proved an auspicious foretaste ol that greater glory which awaited him and his associates the following year in Rome.

"I am," avows Ivan Mestrovie, "first, lást, and always a nationalist in art. I hold in absolute contempt that sterile, emasculated cosmopolitanism which characterizes so much contemporary work alike in architecture, sculpture, and painting. The art which fails to express the native spirit and aspirations of the artist and his country is to me utterly unworthy and futile." Pronounced with his accustomed intensitv of conviction, and on more than one occasion, the foregoing statement may be said to constitute the artistic credo ot Ivan Mestrovie, and must be accepted as the keynote ot his entire creative achievement.

THE Mestrovie hero cycle displays distinct ethnic as well as aesthetic unity. I he primitive figures, daemonic in their passionate tury, of Milos Oblié. Marko Kraljevié, The Frowning Serge, and Strahinic Ban, The Glorious, and these dolorous widows and ministering maidens, belong to the permanent spiritual heritage of a martyred though by no means humbled people. They constitute the imperishable birthright of every Serb, which has here been translated in terms at once national and universal. Possessing no consecutive artistic tradition to which he might turn for guidance, the plastic vision of Mestrovic is frankly eclectic. You will meet in this Panslavie Procession, which in many regards suggests the immortal Panathenaic Procession, echtxxs of the art ot Egypt, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, and the Renaissance. Vet whether pre-Phidian. or even Ninivan in its outward form, the inner content of this work expresses the collective soul of a single race and a single country. Boldly simplified, and revealing an instinctive svnthcsis which is characteristic ot all truly monumental sculpture, the art ot Mestrovie is abstract, not concrete, in appeal. 'I hese types are freely generalized. 1 hey have passed out of the realm of actuality into that domain of ideal aspiration which endures forever. Attic Herakles, Hebrew Samson, Siegfried, or mighty Marko, the Strong Man of human fancy endeavors throughout the ages to deliver us from the oppressor.

The most characteristic and significant mental picture I have of Ivan Mestrovic was on the occasion of my farewell party in Rome. I had hoped to pass a portion of the summer with him at his mountain home near Drnis, in Dalmatia, but a change of plans led me instead by way of Turin, Munich, Paris. Spain and London, to the heart of Worcestershire lx'side the smiling Severn. After dinner we all, including the Mestrovic, the Picas, the Innocenti, Anglada, and the rest, drove out to view the Colosseum by moonlight. And as he stood there bareheaded in the pallid lunar radiance, still clad in his long-skirted black coat, he seemed at last revealed to me in true perspective. Like his country, ancient Slavonia, Ivan Mestrovic is a product of diverse influences. Horn midwav between Greece and Rome, he partakes of both cultural currents. In him meet and fuse the two major forces in the historv of humanity. He is at once a pagan fashioner of heroic figures from the '1'wilight of the Gods, and a profound Christian mystic.

During the war Mestrovic wandered restlessly about from place to place, an involuntary exile from his stricken land. He has resided by turns in Switzerland, in Paris, and in London. Deciding finally to settle in England, where he has been so generously received, he at present occupies a studio in London. And here he is ardently working upon a series of compositions in low relief, mostly religious themes, which represent the latest phase of his artistic development and are also in a sense spiritual memories of the early Slavic ikotti with which he was familiar as a child. His work, a striking example of which is reproduced herewith, is now mainly in storage, awaiting transport to America, where it will unquestionable be accorded an enthusiastic welcome.