Mestrovic's Slavic View

...Americans are stopped in the street and asked about him...

...It is in Mestrovic that the South Slav vision of life, its tragic sense and its heroic endurance, has found its highest expression...

...Mestrovic's artistic fulfillment is intimately tied to the tremendous struggle of his generation, in the middle of a decadent Europe, in opposing the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires as out-moded institutions and in advocating national independence for Southeast Europe...

...While in this country, he has had his second period of creative activity, essentially concerned with religious art...

...The publication, the brilliant work of the Director of the Syracuse University School of Arts, Laurence Schmeckebier, contains 200 plates, among the most representative of Mestrovic's rich work...

...What Tolstoy is to the Russians, and Mickiewicz to the Poles, Mestrovic is to the Yugoslavs: He symbolizes the most impressive self-expression of the South Slav culture...

...After he was released, thanks to the intervention of Pope Pius XII, he went into exile...

...This new and last Mestrovic, profoundly religious and austere in his inspirations and compositions, goes beyond nationalism, for he feels that a thorough spiritual transformation is the only way to bring about larger personal freedom...

...weakness, because at times it forced him to sacrifice his deepest feeling for the external sensation...

...His only education had been the Bible and the folk epics and love songs he had learned from the peasants and shepherds...

...Yugoslav ships leaving New York often carry in their hold many statues of distinguished Yugoslavs to enrich the country's landscape...

...Pan-Germanism had denied the Slavs any participation in the world of culture, and that barrier Mestrovic succeeded in destroying...

...This book will now help to focus attention on this fine artist...

...America's free climate has made possible this climactic conclusion of Mestrovic's art...

...The Serbian people did not accept the defeat on the plain of Kos-sovo [the scene of a famous Turko-Serbian battle in 1339] as its final fate, but only as a punishment for coming generations, who, by their sufferings, would have to prepare the way to a new freedom, a kind of purgatory toward the final liberation...

...Mestrovic, knowing what had happened to many of his friends, not to mention the entire nation, under Tito's regime, decided to come to the United States instead of returning home...

...When I saw Mestrovic in Rome after I left Yugoslavia, I told him what his role would be in the midst of a disappointed people—a role that Gorki had played in the Soviet Union...

...In the Vienna Academy of Arts, teeming with this revolutionary modernism, Mestrovic learned his craft and found his first form...

...He was intimate with the most important Serb and Croat personalities, and often served as an unofficial peace-maker and mediator...

...and partly to Mestrovic's character—he likes to live silently, humble in his creative solitude, abhorring showiness...

...Yet during the last war, Mestrovic was one of the first persons the Croatian regime imprisoned...

...A universal evangelic panacea as an answer to the present moral and social crisis of mankind has now prevailed over the earlier concept of nationalism...

...Reviewed by Bogdan Raditsa Professor, Modern European History, Fairleigh Dickinson University Syracuse University is to be commended for publishing the most complete and comprehensive bibliographical sketch of Ivan Mestrovic in English to date...

...In pre-war Yugoslavia...

...Tito's government, aware of what Mestrovic in exile meant to the Communist regime in the eyes of the people, put pressure on him to return to Yugoslavia, and sent such prominent people as Milovan Djilas to convince him...

...It was in the mountains of this section of Croatia that Mestrovic was discovered at the beginning of this century, a young shepherd carving faces in wood and stone...

...What I sought to create," Mestrovic once wrote, "was a synthesis of the popular national ideas and their development, to express . . . the depth of the memory of our greatest moments and the most characteristic phases of our history, forming at the same time an apex for hopes in the future amidst nature and under a free sky...

...Michelangelo, and from there he went to Paris, to study under Rodin...

...The arrival of each of Mestrovic's gifts has far greater meaning to the people than the aid given by any government...

...Mestrovic is still worshipped by the people of Yugoslavia...

...Later, in Rome, Mestrovic rediscovered himself under the impact of his greatest "teacher...

...Mestrovic contributed greatly to the understanding between Croats and Serbs through his work, and has therefore been associated with the idea of the formation of Yugoslavia...

...Aware of this affection, Mestrovic has never refused any request from the smallest Yugoslav village or town for his statues...

...The origins of Ivan Mestrovic are deeply rooted in the soil and stone of his native Dalmatia...

...This is partly due to the current trend in art...

...The greatness and weakness of his art—iconoclastic, monumental and decorative—is certainly due to that influence: greatness, because it inspired him to rebel...

...In 1912, a huge exhibition of his work in Rome showed Mestrovic to be one of the major artists of the century and gained the "entrance" of his people and its culture into the civilized world...

...This great sculptor—whom Rodin recognized as his most daring student, and who is certainly the greatest Yugoslav sculptor—has not been given proper attention in this country, where he has lived for 10 years...

...When he descended from the mountains to the Dalmatian towns and saw the Medieval and Renaissance cathedrals built by native sculptors, Mestrovic barely knew how to read and write...