The story
Walk into the Vranyczany Palace, facing Zrinjevac park in central Zagreb, and the first room is a hexagonal hall hung with huge late-19th-century canvases by Vlaho Bukovac and Celestin Medović, two leading Croatian painters of that time. The palace, built in 1882 to designs by the Viennese architect Otto Hofer, has housed the national collection of Croatian modern art since 1934. For most of that time the institution was called the Modern Gallery, and it took its present name in 2021.
The collection goes back to 1905, when the Croatian Art Society began acquiring paintings and sculpture from its own members, helped by gifts from Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer, a leading patron of Croatian culture. It now numbers around 10,000 works, with some 700 on show, arranged through two centuries in order. Visitors pass Josip Račić and Miroslav Kraljević, young painters of the Munich circle who both died before 1914, sculpture by Ivan Meštrović, Ljubo Babić's landscapes of the 1920s and Edo Murtić's abstractions of the 1950s. One room, opened in 2009, holds relief versions of famous paintings with Braille captions, made to be explored by touch.
