NATIONAL GALLERY OF BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

Founded in 1946, this gallery (Umjetnička Galerija Bosne i Hercegovine) is the largest art museum in the country. Since 1953 it has been housed in the former Simon's Store, a beautiful corner building designed in 1912 by the architect of the Sacred Heart Cathedral, Josip Vancaš. Despite a lack of budget and thefts during the last war, it has about 6,000 works, mainly paintings, drawings and photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries. Some of them are presented in a rotating manner on three levels through twelve rooms, the first floor being reserved for temporary exhibitions of contemporary art. Among the Bosnian and Yugoslav artists, theSelf-Portrait by Kosta Hakman (1899-1961), sculptures by the great Croatian master Antun Augustinčić (1900-1979) and the Bosnian-Serbian Sreten Stojanović (1898-1960), as well as paintings by the Tuzla painter Ismet Mujezinović (1907-1984), are notable. The international section includes about 50 works by contemporary French artists that were donated to the city during the siege, including a painting by Balthus (1908-2011) and an etching by Pierre Alechinsky (b. 1927). The gallery also has a collection of drawings by the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), one of the great figures of symbolism. Finally, there is the largest collection of Orthodox icons in the country: about eighty pieces from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century by Serbian, Greek and Russian artists.