Great Artists’ Exhibitions Mark the Year Ahead

According to announcements from Zagreb’s museums, this year’s host of remarkable exhibitions will provide tourist agencies with plenty of opportunities to create new programs and attract even greater numbers of tourists to whom they will be able to offer a wealth of new cultural contents.

In mid-January, the Zagreb Tourist Board organized the 1st Regional Culture Tourism Forum at the Arts and Crafts Museum. It was the first in a series of similar gatherings planned to take place this year. The respectable number of attendants received a message about the importance of good cooperation between cultural institutions and the tourist industry in terms of encouraging tourist spending. In his keynote address, Dražen Hochecker, Deputy Director of the Zagreb Tourist Board and Director of the Zagreb Convention Bureau, quoted the World Tourism Organization’s data, according to which as much as 37 per cent of all current travel is linked to culture, and of that number, most is realized in Europe. According to the WTO, this share will grow by 15 per cent annually, with low budget airlines playing a major role in affecting the growth rate.

Zagreb is currently among the leading European cities in terms of the number of concerts, exhibitions, cultural events and open-air festivals it organizes every year. Thus, it is no wonder that the representatives of most of Zagreb’s museums accepted the invitation to the 1st Regional Culture Tourism Forum and presented their exhibition programs for 2008. At the exhibitions which are currently in the pipeline and those already open to visitors, art lovers will feast their eyes on the works of many famous masters, including the great Rembrandt’s drawings. The opening of that exhibition has been scheduled for the end of the year at the Arts and Crafts Museum. The exhibition will present one of the most integral collections of Rembrandt’s original graphic art from the collection of the Landesmuseum Johanneum in Graz. This will be the first time ever that the Rembrandt collection is exhibited anywhere else but in that Austrian museum. Until the end of March, two remarkable exhibitions remain open at the Klovićevi Dvori Gallery. The first features the works of the great 20th century painter, Marc Chagall. The other, Dominicans in Croatia, features the priceless treasures held by the monasteries and churches of the Dominican Order which has been present in Croatia for nearly 800 years. This is being shown in one place for the first time ever. A very interesting exhibition that marks the 100th anniversary of the Zagreb City Museum remains open until the end of February. This year, the new Modern Art Museum is scheduled to open in Zagreb. The museum’s holdings boast over six thousand works of art by domestic and foreign authors. The new building, currently the biggest investment in culture in our country, will be the largest museum ever constructed in Croatia.