Original scientific paper
The derivation of classical models in modern art: The examples of monumentalism in monumental plastic art of Ivan Mestrovic
Barbara Vujanović
; Muzeji Ivana Meštrovića – Atelijer Meštrović, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
This paper discusses the contribution of Ivan Meštrović to the monumentalism of the 1920s and 1930s through both, his realised and unrealised projects. It provides an outline of previous researches, but also presents the so far unpublished and unanalysed Meštrović`s sketches, and parts of correspondence relating to particular projects. Statuomania, an overly emphasized need for putting up commemorative monuments, reached its peak in Europe and North America in the period from 1870 to 1914. The exception being war memorials and monuments to great men, sprouting after the Great War and the birth of new nation-states. In the period between the two world wars, Ivan Meštrović was commissioned to build a great number of works, furthermore he participated in domestic and international competitions. By the beginning of World war II, there were sixteen Meštrović`s public sculptures put up in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, as well as abroad. In this period, his sculptural and architectural realisations absolutely fit within the European framework of interwar Neoclassicism and monumentalism. Meštrović finds the basis for the paradigm of personal monumentalism, which in memorial projects is conveyed through formal qualities, dimensions and their setting, in classical motives, Ancient sculptoral subjects, derivations of the classical compositional designs and architectural elements. With his, for the most part, unrealised proposals for the surrounding environment of particular monuments (Bucharest, Warsaw), Meštrović comes close to contemporary tendencies of architecture and urban design of 1920s and 1930s which in Classical style acknowledge the need for social order and the ideal propaganda platform to demostrate the power of a nation and its ideology.
Keywords
Ivan Meštrović; monumentalism; Neoclassicism; Art Déco; equestrian monument; Victoria
Hrčak ID:
149989
URI
Publication date:
26.10.2015.
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