Biography
Guido Quien was born in Zagreb in 1943; his father was the well-known Croatian writer Kruno Quien. He spent his childhood and youth in Split, studying at the classics high school. He took a BA from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, art history and comparative literature. After graduating, he worked as a tourist guide for some years, and secretary of the Associations of Historians of Croatia.
He worked in the Museum of Arts and Crafts for 21 years as manager of the painting collection (1972-1994), while from 1994 to 2003 he was director of the Ivan Meštrović Foundation. His objective in this post was to restore all the premises of the Meštrović Foundation and open them to the public. After the Homeland War he renovated the Church of the Holy Redeemer, the Meštrović Family Mausoleum in Otavice, while his greatest project was the ordering and display of the Ivan Meštrović Gallery in Split, in which he created the conditions for the linkage with the building of the Gallery, which is Meštrović’s original work, take care of the details, the links among the buildings, the marble pillars, the surrounds, the works exhibited in dramatic shape, and the basic vertical axis around which the whole conception was brought to a close.
He says that Meštrović was a rarely interesting person and when the quasi-political and romantic stories of his origin are separated from his sculptures, they taken on dramatic form and a monumental, lyrical force.
Quien authored a number of books, including one on Slavko Perišic, self-taught painter. He did a monograph-exhibition on Ante Kaštelancic and the Meštrović Exhibitions in Split. He is the author to many forewords to catalogues: Young Croatian Sculptors, Velika Gorica, 1984; Bourgeois Portraits of the 19th century in Croatia, restored paintings from the holdings of the Museum of Arts and Crafts, 1998; Traces of Violence: Otavice, Church of the Holy Redeemer, Mausoleum of the Meštrović Family, Split, 1996.
While he occupied the post of director of the Meštrović Foundation, he published an e-book about Ivan Meštrović, created together with co-workers, experts from the Meštrović Foundation. This was the first such book in Croatia.
Privately he is interested in crossing and breeding birds. He plans to publish the collected works of his father, the writer Kruno Quien, and he himself has recognised literary talents, and plans to publish a book of novellas.
NB. Data taken from the questionnaire, material taken from the Personnel Archives of the MDC, and from an interview recorded on Novemebr 23, 2005.
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