Ivan Meštrović: the South Bend chapter

1883 – 1962 · Syracuse 1947 – 1955 · Notre Dame 1955 – 1962

The road to South Bend: The man is profiled at full size in the People record of this history — the Zagreb imprisonment, the Pietà conceived on butcher paper in a cell and carved in Rome, the flight from Europe. This entry is his works' record on this ground, and it begins in Syracuse. At the suggestion of the American sculptor Malvina Hoffman, who had studied briefly under him years before, Syracuse University offered Meštrović a post as sculptor in residence in 1946; Chancellor William P. Tolley made the offer, and Meštrović left Europe in January 1947 and took it up. He built Syracuse's sculpture department — the American Academy of Arts and Letters' tribute says plainly that when he came to America he started it — and in 1947 the Metropolitan Museum of Art gave him the first one-man exhibition it had ever accorded a living artist, the Pietà among the works shown. Notre Dame conferred an honorary degree on him in 1954, the year he became an American citizen, and in September 1955 he joined Notre Dame's faculty under its Distinguished Professor Program, at Father Hesburgh's invitation and with the urging of Father Anthony Lauck, the university's art chairman, who had studied under him at Syracuse. He and his wife Olga liked South Bend, and they liked that the university was Catholic; he chose it over returning to the museum world of New York, and he gave the university the Pietà itself in preference to the Museum of Modern Art. Exhibitions of his work were held at Syracuse in January 1955 and at South Bend that November, at the College of Arts and Letters' Festival of the Arts.

The studio: The university built for him the Mestrovic Sculpture Studio, constructed in 1955 beside O'Shaughnessy Hall for his use as instructor and artist in residence — the museum's own history says it was built for that purpose, and in it, across the last seven years of his life, he created the campus's public works. His door stood inside the university's old art gallery, a short walk from where the Mendoza College of Business now stands. When the Snite Museum of Art was built in 1980, its central core bridged the adjoining studio, converted into a gallery, and the O'Shaughnessy Galleries; the Ivan Meštrović papers are held there still, in what is now the Snite Research Center in the Visual Arts. The new Raclin Murphy Museum of Art keeps his name on its ground floor in Ivan's Café, and holds the Mr. and Mrs. Russell G. Ashbaugh Jr. Collection of Meštrović Sculpture and Drawings.

The works on this ground: More than twenty of his works stand on the campus; the university's own walking-tour map numbers twenty-one stops. The chief of them is the Pietà: nine feet of Carrara marble, seven tons, conceived in the Zagreb prison in 1942 and completed in Rome in 1946, exhibited at the Metropolitan from 1947, and in November 1955 trucked from New York to South Bend on an open trailer and installed in a side chapel of the Church — now Basilica — of the Sacred Heart, where it stands with the sculptor's own face in the figure of Joseph of Arimathea. Before O'Shaughnessy Hall stands the Shaheen-Mestrovic Memorial, its center the 1957 group of Christ and the Samaritan Woman at Jacob's Well, executed from a wood relief he had carved thirty years earlier for a chapel in his native Split, with St. Luke and St. John of the same year and the prophet Isaiah beside it.

In the North Dining Hall hangs The Last Supper relief. The walnut Ashbaugh Madonna, carved from a single piece of wood, and his oil self-portraits are in the museum's keeping; the bronze Return of the Prodigal Son is in the Basilica; the Head of Moses, a plaster study of 1950 for the proposed American Memorial to Six Million Jews of Europe in New York — a commission the bureaucracy let die — is in the Raclin Murphy Museum, under the Hesburgh Fund's credit line. Three crucifixes from his studio stand in campus chapels and halls, and the university, with his family's permission, has cast further copies of his 1948 crucifix to his exact specifications for chapels across the campus — one was installed in the Mendoza College of Business in 2023. His Marko Marulić of 1925, the portrait of the Croatian poet in whose face many see the sculptor's own, was purchased from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999.

The end and the succession: Meštrović sculpted and taught at Notre Dame for seven years, until his death on January 16, 1962, at St. Joseph's Hospital in South Bend, aged seventy-eight. The works' record continued through the student he had summoned from Italy to assist him, whose own entry follows.

Sources:

1. Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, "How We Started" — the 1955 arrival from Syracuse at Father Hesburgh's invitation, the construction of the Mestrovic Sculpture Studio for his use, and the Snite Museum's 1980 bridging of the studio as a gallery.
2. Karlo Mirth, "Meštrović in America," Journal of Croatian Studies XXIV (1983) — the 1946 Syracuse offer at Malvina Hoffman's suggestion, the January 1947 departure from Europe, the 1954 honorary degree, the September 1955 move under the Distinguished Professor Program, and the Syracuse and South Bend exhibitions of 1955.
3. American Academy of Arts and Letters, "Tribute to Ivan Mestrovic" (artsandletters.org) — the founding of Syracuse's sculpture department and the 1947 Metropolitan exhibition as the museum's first one-man show for a living artist.
4. University of Notre Dame, Morris Inn, "Croatian Sculptor Ivan Mestrovic Walking Tour" map — the twenty-one numbered works and their locations; the Marko Marulić note and its 1999 purchase from the Art Institute of Chicago.
5. Notre Dame Magazine / Mendoza College of Business, "Cross Purposes" (2023) — the studio door in the old gallery, the 1948 crucifix and the family's permission for castings to his specifications, and the works at the Eck Visitors' Center and the Raclin Murphy Museum.
6. Irish Rover, "Ivan Mestrovic at Notre Dame" (2018) and "Basilica of the Sacred Heart's Pietà" (2023) — the twenty-one sculptures, the Pietà's gift and its 1955 open-trailer transport, the three crucifixes, and the Shaheen-Mestrovic Memorial.
7. Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, digital collections (marble.nd.edu) — the Study for Jewish Memorial, Head of Moses (1950, plaster, accession 1986.021) and its Hesburgh Fund credit line.
8. University of Notre Dame Archives, "Saint Luke (Meštrović)" record as carried in published campus accounts — the 1957 courtyard figures before O'Shaughnessy Hall.