Biographies

Ivan Mestrovic (1883 – 1962) He spent his childhood in Otavice, a poor village of Dalmatinska Zagora, in what is now Croatia. He also spent a year (1900) as an apprentice in Harald Bilinic’s stonemason’s workshop in Split and then went to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1901-1906), just as the secession movement was reaching its peak. He began exhibiting his work with the Vienna Secession in 1903. He was a sculptor, an architect, and a writer. He settled in Paris in 1908, moving back to Zagreb after the war.