General information about the ALU Library
Mission
As part of a higher education institution, the ALU Library primarily monitors the teaching needs and requirements of teachers and students, and tries to provide them with an overview of relevant topics in the field of art history. Special emphasis is placed on contemporary art production and theoretical literature, which is extremely important in today's reflection on the meaning and place of artistic practice in society.
Contemporary fine art is connected with many other artistic, humanistic and social fields, and the Library also offers a diverse range of topics and book materials. Through the exchange of publications with museums and galleries, current art events in Zagreb and Croatia are monitored.
Throughout its long history, the Library has also collected an extremely valuable and rare collection of older material, which it tries to present and popularize on its pages. Through other content on the site, it tries to stimulate interest in books and to act educationally in the field of art education.
Vision
The Library of the Academy of Fine Arts operates in a creative and dynamic environment, so it must change with new events in the art world and in the field of information distribution. Library users are focused on visual and tactile experience and still prefer live contact with books, so we hope that this will be the case in the future. However, new technologies are penetrating art and life, so the library is trying to adapt its activities and offer more and more digital content. Our goal is also to encourage students to create content on the Library's website with their contributions.
We hope that in the future we will continue to have one of the best collections of art monographs by contemporary authors. We also plan to supplement the collection of catalogs of Croatian modern art, which testifies to probably the most famous and important phenomena of our art history in the world.
Through popularization on the website, digitization and complete cataloguing of older material, this insufficiently known segment of our collection will become more accessible to the public and the scientific and artistic community, and the Library plans to present the values of its collection in small exhibitions in its premises in the future.
History of the ALU Library
The Academy of Fine Arts was founded in 1907, and from the very beginning it established the work of professional departments: holdings, archives and library. In addition to teaching, the founders and teachers of the school took on additional duties: Bela Csikos Sessia was in charge of keeping the anatomical collection, Robert Frangeš Mihanović was in charge of the collection of plaster casts, secretary Branko Šenoa was in charge of keeping the collection of students' works (which would later become the Holdings of the Academy of Fine Arts), and Menci Klement Crnčić was the first head of library affairs. Until the end of World War II, this duty was entrusted to one of the professors.
At first, the library fund was more than modest, just like everything else. In a report from 1911, it is mentioned that the library has about a hundred volumes. In the beginning, it consisted more of practically oriented books and textbooks, which is somewhat understandable, due to the need to systematically teach some skills for the first time in this type of institution in our region. Most of them were anatomical atlases of people and animals, as well as manuals on the processing of painting, sculptural and graphic materials, i.e. on technology and other manual-practical skills, but there were also reviews of art history and guides to cities and galleries. From one of the accounts of the bookseller R. Bačić from Osijek (1909) it can be seen that Maps and vignettes from Stuck and From Plant to Ornament, by Holb, were purchased. However, in 1913 several books in the field of art history and art theory were already mentioned, and it was recorded that in 1914 Burckhardt's Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien and Woermann's Geschichte der Kunst were purchased. At that time, the number of books and magazines rose to 400 copies.
Between the two world wars, Prof. Olga Höcker was in charge of the library, and she taught writing at the Academy from 1918 to 1948. Bookcases were located in a small cabinet next to a large classroom-workshop, and books could not be taken out, but could be viewed on Saturdays. "That was pleasant, because the classroom was heated," teacher Prof. Dalibor Parać later recalled, "and students came regularly."
Financial resources for the purchase of books were always insufficient, but the library was still gradually filled, mostly thanks to donations from individual societies and foreign cultural centers. The first major donor was Iso Kršnjavi, i.e. the Croatian Art Society, which he founded and which in 1915. He donated 464 titles to the Academy. Some of these books are recognizable today by the Society's trademark. It was also noted that between the two wars, a lot of books and magazines arrived from the French Institute, and occasionally these were larger donations, so the library gradually switched from the hitherto prevailing and somewhat outdated literature in German to French. This was not only important because of the expansion of the fund, but it was also a new cultural horizon. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, France became the center of artistic research, and it was important for students to get acquainted with it.
The Memorial of the Academy, which was printed in 1957, already lists the number of 2500 books and bound volumes of magazines in the library. The secretary of the Academy from 1941 until his retirement in 1954 was Dr. Dane Knežević. As Prof. O. Höcker also retired, Knežević was employed as a part-time librarian at his own suggestion, with the obligation to work three times a week for four hours. Students of that time remember him for his great love for books and remember that he took great care of the library. However, Knežević was a lawyer, not a man by profession related to books or art, and in addition, contracts with him were signed until acad. year. 1969/70, when he was already in his 80s.
After Knežević's departure, the library became a somewhat forgotten part of the academy. Part-time employees or administrators occasionally work there, and for several years a typist was in charge who worked on the transcription of documents. There is also no adequate accommodation for the material, so a lot of things were blown up, lost and damaged.
A new period in the history of the Academy's library began in 1982, when for the first time a full-time professional was employed in this position as the head of the library, archives and art holdings. After the collection of bulk material and the first complete inventory, the fund gradually began to grow. Over time, the services were separated again, and the library followed the needs of teaching, current art events and new phenomena in the fine arts. The combination of old material and contemporary monographic editions in the field of art history remains a valuable and important feature of its holdings, which today numbers more than 18,000 thousand recorded units.
History of the ALU Library
The Academy of Fine Arts was founded in 1907, and from the very beginning it established the work of professional departments: holdings, archives and library. In addition to teaching, the founders and teachers of the school took on additional duties: Bela Csikos Sessia was in charge of keeping the anatomical collection, Robert Frangeš Mihanović was in charge of the collection of plaster casts, secretary Branko Šenoa was in charge of keeping the collection of students' works (which would later become the Holdings of the Academy of Fine Arts), and Menci Klement Crnčić was the first head of library affairs. Until the end of World War II, this duty was entrusted to one of the professors.
At first, the library fund was more than modest, just like everything else. In a report from 1911, it is mentioned that the library has about a hundred volumes. In the beginning, it consisted more of practically oriented books and textbooks, which is somewhat understandable, due to the need to systematically teach some skills for the first time in this type of institution in our region. Most of them were anatomical atlases of people and animals, as well as manuals on the processing of painting, sculptural and graphic materials, i.e. on technology and other manual-practical skills, but there were also reviews of art history and guides to cities and galleries. From one of the accounts of the bookseller R. Bačić from Osijek (1909) it can be seen that Maps and vignettes from Stuck and From Plant to Ornament, by Holb, were purchased. However, in 1913 several books in the field of art history and art theory were already mentioned, and it was recorded that in 1914 Burckhardt's Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien and Woermann's Geschichte der Kunst were purchased. At that time, the number of books and magazines rose to 400 copies.
Between the two world wars, Prof. Olga Höcker was in charge of the library, and she taught writing at the Academy from 1918 to 1948. Bookcases were located in a small cabinet next to a large classroom-workshop, and books could not be taken out, but could be viewed on Saturdays. "That was pleasant, because the classroom was heated," teacher Prof. Dalibor Parać later recalled, "and students came regularly."
Financial resources for the purchase of books were always insufficient, but the library was still gradually filled, mostly thanks to donations from individual societies and foreign cultural centers. The first major donor was Iso Kršnjavi, i.e. the Croatian Art Society, which he founded and which in 1915. He donated 464 titles to the Academy. Some of these books are recognizable today by the Society's trademark. It was also noted that between the two wars, a lot of books and magazines arrived from the French Institute, and occasionally these were larger donations, so the library gradually switched from the hitherto prevailing and somewhat outdated literature in German to French. This was not only important because of the expansion of the fund, but it was also a new cultural horizon. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, France became the center of artistic research, and it was important for students to get acquainted with it.
The Memorial of the Academy, which was printed in 1957, already lists the number of 2500 books and bound volumes of magazines in the library. The secretary of the Academy from 1941 until his retirement in 1954 was Dr. Dane Knežević. As Prof. O. Höcker also retired, Knežević was employed as a part-time librarian at his own suggestion, with the obligation to work three times a week for four hours. Students of that time remember him for his great love for books and remember that he took great care of the library. However, Knežević was a lawyer, not a man by profession related to books or art, and in addition, contracts with him were signed until acad. year. 1969/70, when he was already in his 80s.
After Knežević's departure, the library became a somewhat forgotten part of the academy. Part-time employees or administrators occasionally work there, and for several years a typist was in charge who worked on the transcription of documents. There is also no adequate accommodation for the material, so a lot of things were blown up, lost and damaged.
A new period in the history of the Academy's library began in 1982, when for the first time a full-time professional was employed in this position as the head of the library, archives and art holdings. After the collection of bulk material and the first complete inventory, the fund gradually began to grow. Over time, the services were separated again, and the library followed the needs of teaching, current art events and new phenomena in the fine arts. The combination of old material and contemporary monographic editions in the field of art history remains a valuable and important feature of its holdings, which today numbers more than 18,000 thousand recorded units.