The Artistic Collection of Bishop Đuro Kokša – The Seal of Faith, The Trace of Art

In the midst of war, in 1942, a young future priest manages to get travel documents to leave Croatia and go abroad: to Rome. It is this city that will shape his ambition for cultural work and it is there that he will build what is today a respectable art collection – by the last readout, it numbers over 700 works of art! This rich and significant art collection is hardly known today – Klovićevi dvori are bringing it back to life!

Ivo Dulčić, Saint George

In 2022, we mark the 100^th anniversary of Monsignor Đuro Kokša’s birth (Molve, 1922 – Zagreb, 1998), a bishop of Zagreb, theologian, philosopher, historian, canonist and collector, benefactor of the Croatian people, a long-time rector of the Pontifical Croatian College of St. Jerome in Rome and the founder of a grand art collection, now stored in Zagreb’s Kaptol (the seat of the Roman Catholic archbishop of Zagreb), where it is kept with other pieces of cultural heritage of the Zagreb archdiocese.

During his lifetime, Kokša systematically collected artworks of many Croatian and foreign artists from different art periods spanning over five centuries (16^th to late 20^th century). The collection consists of four self-standing sub-collections: The old masters art collection, the 20^th century foreign masters art collection, the 20^th century Croatian artists art collection, and the Croatian naïve art collection. In these four parts one can find the works of Italian, Dutch, French, English and other art schools from the 16^th to the 19^th century, works of modern and contemporary foreign artists from which the Italian futurist artworks stand out. The works of the very best Croatian artists like Ivan Meštrović, Jozo Kljaković, Mate Celestin Medović, Vanja Radauš, Gabrijel Jurkić and Juraj Škarpa can be found among many other, together with the works of Kokša’s fellow ‘countrymen’ (from Podravina, Croatia), the doyens of Croatian naïve art – Generalić, Rabuzin and Lacković.

Đuro Kokša

A part of his collection has already been exhibited in 1989 in the Museum space, which is today the Klovićevi dvori Gallery, where we will once again, after more than 30 years and in commemoration of the 100^th anniversary of Kokša’s birth, open an exhibition dedicated to his vast collection.

The Klovićevi dvori Gallery will present over 200 of the best artworks from the collection, bringing you the best of the four individual sub-collections, the artistic value of which we will redefine in the context of Croatian visual arts. We will also reveal the humanistic personality of bishop Kokša, as the renaissance man he was, the distinguished promoter of culture and art, and one of the most notable erudite of our times.

Ivan Lacković Croata, Winter