Museums and galleries in Croatia
The tradition of collecting and preserving cultural heritage among the Croats is very old; it began with the development of ecclesiastical treasuries and private collections, while the first public museum collection was established in 1750 in Split. In the 19th century, institutions were founded to collect and exhibit works of art and items of various types of heritage – the national museums in Zadar (1832), Dubrovnik (1872), Osijek (1877) and Zagreb (1866), within whose collections archaeology, natural history, ethnography and history departments were organised, some of which have since grown into separate institutions in their own right.
Specialist museums were founded from the late 19th century onwards, mostly in Zagreb: the Museum of Arts and Crafts (1880), the Old Masters Gallery (1884, based on a donated collection from Bishop Strossmayer), the Modern Gallery (1905) and the City Museum (1907). The Museum of Croatian Antiquity was founded in Knin in 1893, but was moved after the Second World War to Split, where it was renamed the Museum of Croatian Archaeological Monuments. In 1925, the year in which one thousand years of the Kingdom of Croatia was celebrated, museums were founded in Požega, Varaždin and Šibenik. After the Second World War, many civic museums appeared, some of which specialised in preserving regional heritage, for example in Rijeka, Gospić, Poreč, Čakovec and Kutina. New institutions continued the tradition of art galleries in Dubrovnik (1945), Rijeka (1949), Osijek (1954), and Vukovar (1959).
In 1954, the Gallery of Contemporary Art opened in Zagreb, today the Museum of Contemporary Art, housed in a new, appropriate building since 2009. Among memorial museums, one of the most prominent is the Meštrović Gallery in Split, founded in 1954 with a donation of works by the artist himself. The most important ecclesiastical collections are the Permanent Exhibition of Church Art (1976) in Zadar, the cathedral treasuries in Zagreb, Split and Dubrovnik, and the collections of individual monastic orders. Newer institutions include the Klovićevi Dvori Gallery in Zagreb (1982), which does not have its own permanent collection, but hosts exhibitions of world and national heritage, the Narona Archaeological Museum (2007) in Vid, near Metković, the Museum of Antique Glass (2009) in Zadar, the Krapina Neanderthal Museum (2010) in Krapina, on the site of the former Museum of Evolution, and the innovative Museum of Broken Relationships (2011) in Zagreb.