engleski

Kosta Angeli Radovani. From London to Zagreb.

Two important twentieth-century Croatian sculptor medallists successfully sought their fortunes abroad: Ivan Meštrović (1883-1964), who was to die in South Bend, Indiana, and Oscar Nemon (1906-85), who died in Oxford, England. However, only one made the opposite journey. Kosta Angeli Radovani (1916-2001) was born in London, but went on to make his career in Croatia and died many years later in Zagreb. Radovani was descended from an ancient Byzantine family. His father, Frano Branko Angeli Radovani (1878-1962), was a painter and engraver, well- known for his many caricatures and posters, as well as a writer, poet and translator. He had studied in Venice from 1899 to 1901 and in Vienna from 1904 to 1908. He was also a political dissident, and it was on account of this that he had to leave the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the years before the First World War, travelling first to Milan, where in 1908 he met Anna Wiess (Weyss) Sturzenegger, the Swiss woman who became his wife, and then in 1915 to London. The couple returned to Croatia in January 1920, once travelling again became possible in devastated war-torn Europe. By this time the couple had three children: Kosta, just a small boy, and his brother and sister. Arriving in Zagreb, they stayed for a while at the Royal Hotel in the city's main thoroughfare. Finally, in spite of the great demand for housing in those difficult post-war years, they found a flat in the somewhat insalubrious Jukić Street, which follows the main railway track and forms the boundary line between Zagreb's lower town and the suburbs. Kosta Radovani, having imbibed the intellectual and cultural athmosphere of his home and his father's studio, was predestined to take a similar path. Having matriculated from Zagreb's Second Classical Grammar School, where his teachers included (for Croatian language) the novelist Milan Begović and (for German) Zdenko Škreb, subsequently a university professor, in 1934 he went to Milan, where he stayed with his aunt Augusta and began to study culpture at the renowned Brera Academy, notably with the sculptor Francesco Messina (1900-95). By 1936 he was making headlines in Zagreb: «The success of a young artist from Zagreb in Milan. Kosta Angeli Radovani, who excelled at grammar school exhibitions a one of the most talented pupils, has been accepted at the Milan art academy Academia (sic!) della Brera. There are only 14 young sculptors there. He has passed all exams with excellent marks.» Two years later Zdenka Munk, an eminent Croatian historian of art and later the most celebrated director of the Zagreb Museum of Arts and Crafts, also praised Radovani in a Zagreb periodical. In Milan he became acquainted with contemporary Italian art, with the oeuvres of Giacomo Manzù, Arturo Martini and Marino Marini, and indirectly with those of the French sculptors Charles Despiau, Aristide Maillol (whose sculpture, seen in reproduction, had already made a great impression on him as a schoolboy) and others. Some of the works he created in Milan - most probably now lost forever - show the influence of both symbolist art and realism. After four years he returned to Zagreb, where in 1939 he began to study art history in the Faculty of Philosophy. Although he was there for four terms only, this enabled him later to write several well-received essays, including those on Manzù, Marini, Alexander Calder and Henry Moore, all of whom he held in high esteem. He made his first medal in 1940, and in one of his papers he wrote about his medallic work, explaining his beliefs in a series of thoughts written down in short passages, sometimes consisting of one sentence only: «My sculptor's language is not only my own. I am - [an]other hundred modern culptors. This language is no personal addition of mine - it is the particularity of the times.» Some of his unpublished manuscripts, which comprise more than 150 essays and many thousands of pages of diaries, were published in four volumes between 2006 in 2009. In 1941 Radovani began to specialise in sculpture with Frano Kršinić at the Zagreb Academy of Scuptural Arts, and in 1945 he took up engraving under Tomislav Krizman. For some time he also studied with Ivo Kerdić. ln 1945 he applied for a French scholarship, but he wa not selected because, although he was a leftist, the new regime did not entirely trust him and suspected that he might not have returned from Paris. However, many year later, in 1962, he was able to visit the United States, which gave him an opportunity to become acquainted with contemporary American art and artists. He was particularly attracted to the work of Calder and Robert Mallary, and also to African and pre-Columbian American art. Between 1950 and 1955 he taught sculpture at the Academy of Applied Arts in Zagreb, after which he became a free-lance artist. ln 1978 he was invited to teach sculpture at the Sarajevo Faculty of Figural Arts, where he remained until 1987. After his return to Croatia in 1938, Radovani made many portrait drawings, lithographs, medal and - especially - sculptures. From his earliest works his principal aim was to express the character of the person who sat to him, and this gift he retained until the end. After the Second World War he began to receive commissions for full-length sculptures, particularly public scu1pture . ln 1946 he was given part of a spacious wooden studio at Josipovac in Zagreb, which had once been used by Meštrović and was where Meštrović had created his two monumental Indians on horseback for Chicago. This studio burned down in January 1956, and around two hundred works by Radovani were consumed in the fire, as well as pieces by his co- tenants Velibor Mačukatin, Rudolf Ivanković, Frano Baće and Vojin Bakić, some of whom were also medallits. From 1959 on, his second studio was smaller, in a more modern house at 50 Nazor (formerly Mošinsky) Street, not far from the first studio. Radovani began to exhibit his work in 1940. In 1950 he showed at the Venice Biennale, but his first important solo exhibition took place in Zagreb in 1952. After this his works could often be seen in one-man and group exhibitions both at home and abroad, and the awards and decoration he continued to receive until the end of his life were numerous. The list of articles about his work in newspapers and periodicals and the number of interviews he gave to journalists are also impressive. He also gave many television interviews, and in all eight television documentaries were made about him. Handsome, well- educated, sophisticated, he could often be seen at concerts and the opera. When he died, the many obituaries praised him a one of the most significanl Croatian sculptors of the second half of the twentieth century. The various articles on the artist and his oeuvre that continue to appear each year suggest that he will not soon be forgotten. Like his watercolours, gouaches and other drawings, Radovanis sculptures have a robust quality, which is full of strength. Hi female nudes (male nudes appear only in his student days) tend to massiveness, with strong legs and substantial buttocks, and have a distinct erotic charge. Details are invariably absent and outlines generalised, with the form sometimes built up from facetted planes. Many sculptures have polished surface. His success in depicting the human figure in movement was due at least in part to his frequent visits to the ballet sudio of Ana Maletić. He generally avoided the socialist realism demanded in those decades by the authorities. Later in his life he produced sculptures with cubist characteristics, but his style always remained individual and easily recognisable. This same style can be seen in Radovani's medals, which formed a considerable percentage of his oeuvre. lt has been estimated that he made more than four hundred portrait medals, as well as eight hundred small sculptures. Although his earliest medals date from 1940, it was only from 1963 when he was talked into more serious medal- making by Antun Bauer, archaeologist, museologist and founder of the South Slavic Academy of Science and Arts Glyptotheque, that he began to concentrate more fully in this field. Some larger portrait medallions can be seen on memorials in Zagreb's central cemetery of Mirogoj, whilst many other are in private hand and various museums. Most of his medal are of cast bronze, but some occur in pewter, terracotta or plaster. Others were executed in ivory and ebony. Sometimes a model would be reduced and a struck medal produced. He usually made his models around 210 to 220 millimetres in diameter, and these could then be reduced if necessary. Most frequently the subject is depicted facing, but there are alo many portraits in profile or three-quarter profile. He igned his work KAR. When Zagreb University celebrated its tercentenary in I969, Radovani was commissioned by Marshal Tito to create a new ceremoniaI chain for the rector. It is a heavy chain of solid silver, •neither light nor practical to wear. Some rectors would tie its back to their belts and hide the string attachment under their jacket, for until 1999 rectors wore no ceremonial gowns. Radovani's chain was made at the School of Applied Arts in Zagreb and engraved and finished by Teodor Krivak. It was first worn by rector Ivan Supek on 18 December 1969 at the honorary doctors degree ceremony, when eleven people were honoured, among them the Italian linguist Giacomo Devoto, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, the British chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, the composer Ernest Bloch, the philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs, the art historian Nikolaus Pevsner, and Marshal Tito. The rector' chain consists of twenty-five elements. The principal element (fig. 13) is a circular medal, with on the obverse a portrait of bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer (1835-1905), who initiated the university's second founding in 1874, and on the reverse three poets: Marko Marulić (1450-1524), Ivan Gundulić (1589-1638) and Ivan Mažuranić (1814-90). The element above this is almost square and carries an inscription. Above this another fourteen squarish elements each contain a circular medallic portrait of a Croatian scholar or scientist: Mathia Flacius Illyricus (Matija Vlačić ; 1520-75). Protestant theologian, church historian and professor of Hebrew ; Franciscus Patricius (Frano Petrić or Petriš ; 1529-97), philosophy professor and astronomer ; Faustus Verantius (Faust Vrančić ; 1551-1617), philospher, lexicographer and inventor ; Marcus Antonius de Dominis (1560-1624), bishop of Senj, archbishop of Split, philosopher and mathernatician: Marinus de Ghetaldi (Marin Getaldić ; 1568-1626), writer and scientist ; Joannes Lucius (Ivan Lučić ; 1604-79), historian ; Pavao Ritter Vitezović (1652-1713), historian and linguist ; Rogerius Josephus Boscovich (Ruđer Josip Bošković ; 1711-87), mathematician, physicist, astronomer and philosopher ; Franjo Rački (1828- 94), priest and historian ; Vatroslav Jagić (1838- 1923), professor of comparative linguistics and Slavonic studies ; Don Frane Bulić (1846-1934 archaeologist ; Dragutin Gorjanović Kramberger (1856-1936), palaeontologist ; Andrija Mohorovičić (1857-1936), geophysicist and seidsmologist ; and Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), inventor. These portraits were also made as independent medals. Radovani alo made a medal for a Gallery of Peace chain in 1980. This massive silver chain bearing portrait of well- known Nobel Prize winners was commissioned by Vladimir Paleček, an engineer and agronomisst, who in 1972 had founded the International Science and Peace Mission in Zagreb. The chain consisted of portrait medals of Mother Teresa of Calcutta by Stipe Sikirica, Albert Einstein by Kruno Bošnjak, Linus Pauling by Zdravko Brkić, Dag Hamarskjold by Želimir Janeš, Albert John Luthuli by Maja Krstić- Lukač, Ivo Andrić by Marija Ujević Galetović, Marie Curie Sklodowska by Damir Mataušić, Alexander Fleming by Ante Despot, Henri Dunant by Radovani, and Martin Luther King by Stanko Jančić. A globe on a central medaIlion was executed by Vladimir Mataušić. The chain had its first public showing on 2 February 1981 in the studio of Želimir Janeš in the Academy of Sculptural Arts in Zagreb. Present on this occasion were its initiator Vladimir Paleček and most of the artists who had contributed, a well as the medal patrons and collectors Berislav Kopač, his wife Anica Kopač and his father Viktor Kopač, and the culptors Ante Orlić and Branko Ružić. Two sets of essays in bronze and tombak, the punches and some documentation concerning this commision are now housed in the Zagreb Archaeological Museums numismatic collection. Radovani's portrait of Dunant (1828-1910), whose work led to the foundation of the International Red Cross and to the Geneva Convention of 1864, is represented by a silver medal and a punch. However, the present location of the chain remains unknown. Exhibition of Radovani's work have continued since his death. The most important posthumous exhibition of his medals and busts took place in 2003 at the Croatian Academy of Science and Arts. This consisted of his bequest of some forty portraits of members of the Croatian Academy of Science and Arts, both living and dead. The Zagreb Archaeological Museum numismatic collection holds twenty six medals by the artist, which together serve as a representative group of his work. Some of these were included in an exhibition devoted to the Kopač bequest, and others in an exhibition of gifts to the museum made between 1990 and 2010. Radovani's accomplished and singular style will certainly ensure that his medals continue to attract the interest of art historians and numismatists for years to come.

Kosta Angeli Radovani; medals; plaquettes

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