T HE exhibition of M. Ivan Mestrovic's sculptures at the South
Kensington Museum (where M. Rodin's statues which he had presented to the nation were recently on view) is a high honour to the Serbian sculptor, who is now only in his thirty-third year ; but the authorities doubtless considered that the national art museum might well be the place for such a rare manifestation as a national idea presented in sculpture, while there could be no question of the importance to students of art of a representative collection of the works of a sculptor of such acknowledged genius and skill. Since the appearance in the Rome Exhibition. of 1911 of his " Fragments of the Temple of Kosovo " in the Serbian Pavilion, M. Mestrovic has aroused the highest admiration and curiosity among European art lovers ; but the assembly in London of a collection of his work, including the model of his Temple, which he hopes one day to see erected on the plains of Kosovo, is an unexpected event. The exhibition comes at a time when our national mood is attuned to the heroic presence of these strange and tragic figures. To art lovers of the older school, with its complacent standards, many of these works make demands on the imagination and mental experience which are hard at first to meet, while to the new advanced groups of artists the whole series may seem "
literary" and lacking interest in pure form. But we believe that the single-mindedness and flaming national sentiment of Mestrovic's work, once its strangeness has faded, will open a world of imagination to a wide public which now looks on art as a pastime of make-believe, while students of art will see in Mestrovic a sculptor not only of high imagina- tion and extraordinary technical equipment, but one of the rare sculptors whose art is so firmly set in a basic sense of form Unit, like the giants of the Renaissance, he moves as freely in architecture as in sculpture.
It is expressive of Mestrovic's history that the earliest work in the exhibition should be "The Blind Gusla-Player " (No. 57), a wandering Sorbian singer of folk-songs. It was from these singers that he learned the ballads of his nation, a ballad-lore which compares in its tragic intensity, richness, and beauty with any in Europe. It was all that survived of ancient Serbia through the four hundred years of her sub- jection. When yet a shepherd-boy he began to carve in wood some of the images that had grown from the ballads in his mind. His father taught him the use of the tools. At the age of eighteen he was apprenticed to a marble-worker at Spalato. There he won a scholarship which took him to Vienna at the time when that city was epidemic with l'art nouveau. But he passed almost unaffected through its febrile toils. He returned to Dalmatia, and then went to Paris for a year, where he worked with M. Rodin, of whom he has given a curious racy impression (No. 38), salt and vigorous, and yet finessed, like one of M. Anatole Prance's literary gargoyles. The vision splendid of his boyhood had endured. while his skill grew stronger as he attained manhood, and his receptive mind had gathered what he wanted from the techniques of the East and West. He did nothing to blur his dream; we see his caryatides of the women of Serbia (the nobles, the townsfolk, the peasants) standing upright and enduring, supporting the terrible strain of centuries of captivity ; the widows of Serbia mourning, and barren as their devastated land, or beholding their children with hopeless eyes; the heroes, Marco Kraljevie on his great horse, and Milos Obilio, whose deeds are like those of William Wallace in the Scottish legends, swinging round terribly as he slays legions of Turks. It is all a dream, the Temple of Kosovo and the legendary figures that inhabit it, and this tragio dream atmosphere pervades it all: in the tender lines of the draperies round his taut figures of the women caryatides, in the tranced faces and gestures of the widows, in the tall Milos without arms (he appears only fitfully in the ballads, a sudden glimpse of terrible beauty, and he is gone before the artist can image him all), in the beautiful torso of Strahinie Ban (No. 26), of whom the ballads only tell that he was beautiful in body, in the head of " Serge " (No. 23), whose face seems the symbol of the stony soil of the Dalmatian highlands. The ballads are not continuous, and Mestrovic has sought to give only the image that was born in his mind and nothing more. There is no question here of a middle-aged artist turning in desperation for a subject to the half-forgotten impressions of his youth. Rather it is a youth intolerably oppressed by the memories and aspirations of his country, dedicating his genius to endow them with a monumental expression. Conceive a nation which until yesterday was at the feet of the Turks, and the effect on the mind of a sensitive youth of the stories of massacre and horror brought by kinsmen fleeing from over the border, and one understands the burning completeness of the national message which Mestrovic delivers. The subject is no less than the death and resurrection of the Serbian nation.
The Temple of Kosovo, of which a wooden model stands in the Central Hall, is designed to be the Pantheon of the Southern Slay. It is to contain the legendary heroes of the ancient Serbian Empire, and is to express the history of Serbia—the battle of Kosovo in 1389 and the fall of the ancient Serbian Empire, the four hundred years of subjection to the Turks, the resurrection of Serbia as a kingdom, her victories over the Turks at Kumanovo, her recent terrible test. and her deliverance from the Austrian invasion. Every epoch is to be represented in this wonderful Temple. Its exterior is to be decorated by the symbols in the ballads. The imagery of the Temple would be known to every Serbian. Like his sculpture, the building shows a large imaginative seizure from the art of other periods and traditions of what be found necessary to his conception. The great outside loggia, like that of the Pantheon, runs round his halls and galleries, rows of Assyrian lions emphasize his entrance features, stepped octagonal domes rising from a plain octagonal drum give a Byzantine weight and dominance. Then the tall tower, formed by five stages of caryatides, crowned by a square block of marble, flames over the severity of it all, like a sudden chorus of triumph. The oaryatides there are winged figures, the apotheosis of the suffering souls of Serbia, white and triumphant, singing that Serbia is free.
No one who examines this model can fail to be struck by its monumental conception, the noble simplicity of the plan, and the sureness and fine proportion of the detail. Like Mestrovic's sculpture, there is nothing in it either common or mean. He has possessed his idea so intensely that everything but the design has been fused away. Criticism will be mainly directed to the size of the cornice on the main dome, which decreases its scale, and to his angel tower, which is at odds with the severity of the building. Also the sphinx, at the end of the avenue of mourning caryatides, all human save the wings, and naturalistic in the limbs, has not been
thought out in its completeness. Will this Temple of Kosovo ever arise to add a new wonder to the world, or will it always be a dream, a temple not of hands P After the war even Russia could hardly erect a building on this scale.
Possibly the whole conception of the Temple arose in this way. Every real sculptor when he has designed a figure thinks where it should be placed and examines its relation to its setting. Unhappily in the conditions of modern life sculptors have little to say in the disposition of their works, and it is common, even with small statues, for an architect to be called in to design the base, just as a stone-carver is called in to carve the stone. Once Mestrovio had designed this world of legendary heroes and mourning widows and Turkish oppressors and strange angels and sphinxes, he had to go on and devise a place fitted for their presence. It was impossible to think of any existing building that they might inhabit. In this way, one surmises, the Temple of Kosovo was designed ; and as the sculptor found the idea. growing with the effort to express it in the new medium, the balance between the sculpture and the architecture probably became a consider- able problem. The question that he leaves in our mind, at any rate, is whether his gigantic figure of the terrible Milos, his incarnation of Serbian strength and vengeance at the instant of destroying the Turks, is the appropriate figure for this Valhalla to be set up in the twentieth century. And, moreover, one cannot help feeling that this figure, perhaps the best expression in sculpture of his architectonic sense, does not contain enough of sculptural significance for the centre of his dream, while his angel tower, with its outpour- ing of white triumphant figures, lacks the constructional conviction for a dominant architectural feature of his building. It is an expression of entranced ecstasy that seems to have no relation to the structure of a tower.
Iliestrovio's Christian reliefs and "Crucifixion," although they breathe much of the same spirit of swift and terrible exalta- tion, come somewhat curiously after these sagas. They are a later development, and suggest that after the dreams of Slavonic unity with which the Balkan conflict began, only to end in the fratricidal strife of the second Balkan War—some- thing of this is hinted in the " Study of a Crouching Woman" (No. 65), with her gesture of frustration and madness, and in other figures in this case—the sculptor's thoughts turned to religion as to something permanent in this world of dreams and catastrophe. " The Deposition from the Cross " (No. 44) —a return to wood-carving, with which his art began—is alive with the pangs of anguish and pitifulness. The expression of all the faces is not of resignation and devotion, but of " Why should this be P" The plaster reliefs, which have been carved directly on the plaster, suggest the technique of wood-carving. Again the message is, above all, swift and momentous. " The Annunciation " (No. 41) especially has a wild beauty of surprise. The invention of the gesture of the messenger's hand pressed against his cheek and ear, as though shutting out everything in the world but this momentous thing he bad to say, and the holy sign of the two fingers, come into the design as part of the flickering shapes that play through it all
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