Following the death of Ivan Mestrovic in 1962 his papers remained with his widow Olga until her death in when they became the property of his son Matthew. Following the death of Olga Mestrovic the papers were stored at the Snite Museum of Art at Notre Dame where they had been transferred along with artworks purchased by the Snite from the Mestrovic heirs. In 1988 the papers were deeded to the Notre Dame Archives by Matthew Mestrovic.
Collections of photographs and published articles were assembled largely by the Snite Museum of Art at Notre Dame and came to the Archives of the University of Notre Dame with the Mestrovic Papers and the Snite Museum's records.
Restricted by contract; family correspondence is closed.
Ivan Mestrovic Papers (MST), University of Notre Dame Archives (UNDA), Notre Dame, IN 46556
Correspondence and photocopies of correspondence with other artists, museums and galleries, admirers of his work, Yugoslav emigrants, clients who have commissioned work, and friends and family; contracts, reports, and architectural plans relating to his commissions; his unpublished manuscripts of poetry, a novel, a play, and two books on Michelangelo; articles on and interviews with Mestrovic; and contracts and inventories relating to the disposition of his homes, artwork, and other possessions left in Yugoslavia when he and his family fled the country during World War II.
Correspondence deals with his approach to art; arrangements for exhibits, publications, and castings of his sculpture; the commissioning and sale of his work; the history and politics of Croatia, Serbia, and other Yugoslav republics; the events and aftermath of World War II; and the plight of friends who remained behind in Yugoslavia after the war.
Correspondents include Ljubo Babic, Milan Curcin, Cvito Fiskovic, Josip Hamm, Fedor Kabalin, Vladko Macek, Dominik Mandic OFM, Pavle Ostovic, Aloysius Cardinal Stepinac, Josip Broz Tito, Ante Trumbic, Maurice Lavanoux, Nikola Tesla, Milan Marjanovic, Malvina Hoffman, and John Foster Dulles.
Also an extensive collection of photographs of Mestrovic's work, his studios, his family, and his friends; and a collection of published articles on his art and relevant art history, his exhibits and publications, and Yugoslav history and politics.
In English, Croatian, German, Italian, French, Russian, and other languages.
by his daughter Maria Mestrovic
Ivan Mestrovic was born in 1883 and died in 1962. He lived at a time of unexpected changes. He continued to develop as a sculptor through the time of the Russian Revolution, the Balkan War, World War One and World War Two. During his life he participated in over 150 exhibitions. Political events not only marked his artistic expression, but actively involved him as a man who served individual freedom and national independence.
Mestrovic spent his childhood in the grim and forbidding mountainous country of Dalmatia, close to the luxuriant coast of the Adriatic and at the same time removed from it. The destiny of the Croatian people played a strong role in the formation of his personality. By tradition his father's ancestors had been hadjuks, outlaws who defended the people from the harsh rule of their Turkish masters.
As a child Mestrovic tended sheep while listening to orally transmitted epics, folk songs, and historical ballads. Before he ever had the opportunity to see an accomplished three- dimensional work of art, epic heroes and their heroic deeds inspired him to carve in wood and stone. During the long winter evenings his mother would recite Gospel parables from memory. Matthew, his father, farmer and mason, was the only literate man in his home village of Otavice. At age twelve Mestrovic taught himself to read and write by comparing the written text of the Bible (one of the two books in his father's library) with passages he had committed to memory. In 1899 the attention of a stone-cutter named Pavle Bilinic was drawn to Mestrovic's unusual talent, and the boy went to live in his workshop in Split.
The apprenticeship assured Mestrovic one meal a day. Split is a town rich with vestiges of Greek and Roman culture, and Mestrovic spent his spare time copying ancient works of art. Bilinic's wife, a high-school teacher, helped Mestrovic to continue his education, though he attended no formal classes. Nine months later, a mine owner from Vienna became sufficiently interested in him to consent to pay for his trip to Vienna and schooling at the Art Academy. Neither his new patron nor his benefactors in Dalmatia took into account that Mestrovic had never had formal school training. He did not speak a word of German. To make things worse, the mine owner