Professor Galantic Honored

25 Years of Teaching Recognized

The Second World War had a major impact on the life and fortunes of Ivan Galantic--Professor of Fine Arts Emeritus, Tufts University, and Extension School instructor--who will be honored for 25 years of distinguished teaching by the Harvard Extension School Alumni Association at its annual banquet during Commencement week.

Born in Croatia and jailed as a political prisoner by Italy's fascist government because he refused to collaborate in the war effort, Galantic emerged from the concentration camps vowing to become an artist. He completed university study in Italy after the war (acquiring the equivalent of an MFA degree), stayed on in Rome, and was a modestly successful painter. He received a number of awards and prizes, exhibited in Milan and Florence, as well as in Rome, and was invited to join a prestigious art academy in Spain.

"But I took a good look in the mirror one day," Galantic recalled, "and I thought, 'Do I really want to continue on my own artistic pathway, or do I want to study, and ultimately teach others about the very greatest artists in the Western tradition--the Rembrandts, Michelangelos, and the rest?'"

Answering that question led him to emigrate to the United States where he supported himself initially as a textile designer and a contract painter of murals for churches throughout the country, and eventually as a teacher of studio art in Detroit.

He came to Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and received his PhD in Fine Arts in 1969. After teaching at Hartford and Case Western Universities, he moved to Tufts University, where he was recruited by the Extension School to teach courses in fine arts.

Although he has offered courses in nineteenth-century art, twentieth-century art, and modern art at the Extension School, Professor Galantic's major contribution to the fine arts curriculum has been his series of courses on Renaissance art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This fall he has moved on to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, examining with his students the development of major aspects of Baroque art and architecture in Italy, France, and Spain.

"It is a challenge to teach any course in the humanities to adults who study the great questions of life and the responses of artists through the centuries to those questions," Galantic remarked. "But I enjoy it so much, and I find great pleasure in my mature, adult students."