MESTROVIC, IVAN (1883– ), Yugoslav sculptor, was born at Vrpolje in Slavonia, the son of Croatian peasants. The rudiments of his art were taught him by his father and at the age of 13 he was apprenticed to a marble cutter at Split (Spalato), and three years later entered the Vienna Academy where he studied under Hellmer until 1904. He exhibited at the Vienna Secession, at the Austrian exhibition at Earl's Court, London (1906), at Munich, Venice and Paris—where he attracted the notice of Rodin. He was largely responsible for a nationalist artistic movement which included the sculptors Rosandie and Dujan Penie, the painter Rand and the architect Pleinik, and which culminated in the exhibition at Zagreb in 1910 and the Rome international exhibition of 191i.
MegtroviC also made a large number of religious reliefs and figures in walnut, of which two Pieta reliefs, one in the National Gallery of British Art and one in private possession, are typical of his bold cutting and great powers of design. His portraits in
clude those of his mother (1908), Madame Banac (1913 and 1915), his wife (1915), Sir Thomas Beecham (1915, in the National Gallery of British Art), Lady Cunard (1915) and Miss St. George (1915). Among his later works the most important are the richly decorated RaCiC memorial chapel at Cavtat, near Dubrovnik (Ragusa), Dalmatia (192o-22), the designs for the projected mausoleum of Bishop Petar PetroviC Njega, the Montenegrin poet, to be erected on the summit of Mount LovCen (1924), and figures of St. Francis of Assisi and "The Artist's Mother in Prayer" (1925). In 1924 exhibitions of his work were held at the Fine Art Society in London and the Brooklyn Museum.
See M. Curan, Ivan MeStrovie, a Monograph, with bibliography and list of works (1919). For details of the Ra& Chapel, see Deutsche Kunst and Dekoration, LII. (1923).