Head of a Girl (Božena Begović)

With his outstanding talent and his rich oeuvre of almost a thousand sculptures, Ivan Meštrović is undoubtedly the leading Croatian sculptor of the 20th century; a sculptor who worked hard to establish the tradition of Croatian sculpting in the modern age, and one of the few artists of the country whose work was recognised internationally in his own time. The wellsprings of and promptings for Meštrović’s creative idiom and the heterogeneous stylistic determinants that characterise his creative work are to be found in the trends in the art of the early twentieth century, particularly in the Viennese Secession, or Art Nouveau, as well as in antique and Renaissance sculpture, and the sculpting of the medieval craftsmen of Dalmatia.