In Memoriam: Antun Bauer
Barry Marjanovich
Antun Bauer
Anthea Brook
Saturday May 13, 2000
Perhaps the greatest achievement of the
great collector Antun Bauer, who has died
aged 88, was the founding of the museum
documentation centre in Zagreb in 1955,
where the contents of Croatia's museums
were recorded. The value of this was
proved in the past decade when so many
of the country's museums were bombed
and had to assess their losses.
Bauer was the founder of modern
museology in Croatia. The museums he
founded, and sometimes furnished
through gifts from his own collections, are
now his memorial. His fields included
numismatics and the ethnography of his
native country, but his most important
treasures, the "Bauer Collections" of more
than 1,300 works of 19th and 20th century
Croatian artists, were donated to the town
museum of Vukovar in 1941. During the
Balkans conflict these, and the building's
other contents, were carried off by the
Yugoslav army to Belgrade where, despite
interventions from the United Nations's
cultural body Unesco, and the Council of
Europe, they remain.
Bauer was born in Vukovar, and after a
degree in the history of art and
archaeology, took a doctorate at Zagreb
University. He entered the museum world
in 1931 and rose to be the founder/director
of Zagreb's Gipsoteka (the museum of
casts of works of sculpture and
architecture). He also became director of
the Croatian school museum, and of his
museum documentation centre (1955-78).
He founded a postgraduate museology
course at Zagreb University, developed the
artists archive register and the civic art
gallery of Osijek, and helped organise the
Croatian academy of arts and sciences'
archives.
The professor took part in many
archaeological explorations, especially
around Osijek, Vukovar and llok, and was
responsible for the discovery of the
prehistoric "Vucedol Dove", a vessel in the
emblematic form of a dove, found at
Vucedol (Vukovar). He contributed to
Croatian and international journals and
lectured regularly at European
universities.
Bauer will also be remembered with
gratitude in Croatia for an act of personal
heroism, the rescue and preservation of
the Austrian sculptor Anton Dominik
Fernkorn's 19th century bronze equestrian
portrait statue of Ban Josip Jelacic.
The monument, installed in Zagreb's main
square in 1866, was dismantled by the
new communist regime in 1947, but under
cover of night Bauer took the parts away
and concealed them in the Gipsoteka. In
1990, on the brink of Croatia's declaration
of independence, the equestrian group
was restored to its original site.
• Antun Bauer, museologist and collector,
born April 18 1911; died April 9 2000
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