Ivan Mestrovic is renowned as possibly the greatest sculptor of religious subject matter since the Renaissance. He was the first living person ever to have a one man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York city.
Ivan was born on August 15, 1883, in the small town of Vrpolje in Dalmatia, Austro-Hungary. At the age of 15 he was apprenticed to a master stone cutter and latter went on, through much persistence, to be admitted to the art institute in Vienna. His artistic influences include four years spent studying archaic Greek sculpture in Rome just before World War I. It is said that Mestrovic read Serb epic poetry while he tended sheep as a teen. The theme of the Battle of Kosovo was said to have particularly moved him and one of his first great works was the Paris Kosovo Monument. Mestrovic came out on the international stage at the 1911 Rome International Exhibition, with his work on the Serbian Pavilion.
Briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo in World War II, he was latter exiled from Marshall Tito's Yugoslavia and came to the United States. President Eisenhower personally presided over a ceremony granting Mestrovic his American Citizenship in 1954.
He went on to be a professor at Syracuse University and the University of Notre Dame.
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