Arts and Letters

It was in 1883, in a small village on the Croatian coast, that Ivan Mestrovic was born. His parents were poor and of primitive peasant stock. His mother was a religious woman who had faith in her young son, and his father encouraged the boy to carve any wood or stone he could find while he watched over a flock of sheep in the wild country around their home.

His fervent patriotism was based on hearing the legends of Kossovo, the epic ballads of his people. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to a stone carver at Split. He continued to work and study with passionate concentration. A patron who recognized his talent arranged to have Mestrovic admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

In 1910 I remember hearing Rodin say in serious prophetic words: "Keep your eyes and ears alert for you will hear great things about a young sculptor who has exhibited his marble carvings and many bronzes at the Paris Salon. His name is Mestrovic."

It was not until after the First World War that Mestrovic came to America with his first great exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. The impact on the American public of this collection of one hundred heroic marbles and bronzes was impressive.

Mestrovic was a great student of the Bible and comparative religions. He had an integrity that was unshakeable. When interviewed a few weeks before his death in January, 1962, he was asked how he had dared to refuse Hitler's invitation to come to Berlin at the start of World War II. His reply was: "I am a little man in a little studio, but I do not have to shake hands with a murderer!"

During the war he was imprisoned and condemned to death; only through the intervention of the Vatican was his life spared at the last moment and he was allowed to leave his country. He worked in Rome, where he carved the great marble group of figures "Pietà," which with many other pieces was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in 1947 under the auspices of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. This was the first time that the Metropolitan Museum accorded a one-man show to a living artist. When Mestrovic came to America he started the Department of Sculpture at the University of Syracuse.

Separated from his beloved country and all his friends he realized with sorrow that the condition of confusion in the world was a threat to intellectual progress and especially in the arts. The decline of craftsmanship and lack of any real desire of the students to work hard made him very unhappy. "The young people of today," he said, "do not wish to study, so they will not learn anatomy or carving. They bend and solder wire—it is an easier method, but they are wrong. Money is what they want, and freedom, but they do not prepare themselves for either. They feel no reverence for art, so their work will not endure."

After about eight years in Syracuse Mestrovic was invited to the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and there he conducted small classes in sculpture and executed many important commissions, heroic groups and wood carvings. He never took holidays or wished for anything but strength to work ceaselessly. His philosophy gave him serenity in the midst of chaos and his spirit remained aloof from the distractions of a troubled life.

Sculptor, teacher, and scholar, Mestrovic will go down in history as one of the giants in art.