Iva Despić-Simonović

Biography

In June 1945 Iva Despić-Simonović was arrested in Sarajevo as a supporter of the exiled royal family. In custody she made a portrait of another prisoner, the actor Ante Franjković, known as “Dalmata”; it has survived.

She was born on 15 August 1891 in Hrastovica near Petrinja, in Croatia-Slavonia, then part of Austria-Hungary, and her maiden name was Simonović. The family was wealthy. Her father, a general in the Austro-Hungarian Army, saw her talent and paid for her education. She was taught sculpture by Robert Frangeš-Mihanović and Rudolf Valdec (also given as Waldeck); from 1907 to 1910 she studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb. Her work was first shown while she was still a student, at a solo exhibition of her contemporary, the artist Ljubo Babić. Babić was romantically interested in her and painted her portrait. She then continued her training in Munich and Paris, learning to make plaquettes and medallions, and in 1914 showed a work in Paris. Her early medals, mostly profile heads of children, follow the masters of the early Renaissance, but already “Old Woman” (before 1920) is modelled in the impressionist manner that later became characteristic of her.

Her first marriage, to Aleksandar Zarevski, was annulled. Towards the end of the First World War, in Zagreb, she met Aleksandar Despić, and in 1920 she married him and moved to his hometown, Sarajevo. The couple had a daughter and a son. Her husband’s family, prominent merchants, held patriarchal views, and Despić-Simonović felt constrained; her self-portrait bust “Constrained”, now in the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is about this. By 1931 commissions were so numerous that she built herself a summer house in Vasin Han near Sarajevo.

In 1927 she had solo exhibitions in London and Belgrade, and critics received them favourably. She took part in group exhibitions in London, Belgrade, Barcelona, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Prague, Brno and Bratislava. Her fame reached King Alexander, and in Belgrade she was given a studio at the royal court. She became court sculptor and taught modelling to Queen Maria, with whom she grew particularly close. She herself told how the young Crown Prince Peter walked into the studio and recognised the bust of General Stevan Hadžić. She portrayed the King, the Queen, generals, King Ferdinand of Romania and Prince Kiril of Bulgaria. Her other works include “Children in the Snow” and “Good Friends” (both 1923), “Bato Is Playing” (1925) and the plaque “Consolation” (1927). She often modelled children, her own among them.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina she was the first professional woman sculptor and remained the only one in the interwar period. Most women there could not read and took no part in public life, but her name was well known. In a 1937 interview she said: “I am under the impression that male artists do not value the artistic work of women.” She wanted to make a monument to mothers, along the lines of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The idea was not supported, and she claimed that it was copied and later realised in the United States.

During the Second World War she lived on her estate near Sarajevo. To feed the family she had to buy a cow; according to her daughter, the cow was hidden from soldiers in the studio, and the frightened animal damaged several sculptures.

After the war, when the Communists took power and the monarchy was abolished, she was soon released, but her former life was gone. People shunned her, commissions almost dried up, and she drew more and modelled less. Her best-known postwar works are the busts of the poets Aleksa Šantić, Svetozar Ćorović and Osman Đikić, commissioned by the authorities of Mostar.

Despić-Simonović died on 12 July 1961 in her studio in Vasin Han. A few years after her death there was talk of turning the house into an artists’ colony, but the plan was never carried out. In 2005 a new owner restored the house, and behind a hidden door in the basement a number of previously unknown plaster busts were found.