CLEVELAND, Ohio — It’s been a long and mysterious journey for the 17-inch tall bronze bust of Nikola Tesla. In 2014, the statue created by Matthew Louis Rebrovic was stolen from its base at the Serbian Cultural Garden in Cleveland.
“My dad died a couple months before it was stolen and the joke was he took it with him,” said the artist’s son, Louis Rebrovic, though he figured the bust met a more sensible fate.
“Probably somebody stole it and they had it melted down and they sold the bronze.”
The younger Rebrovic lives an hour outside of Dayton now where he displays a photo of his father with the Tesla statue. It was taken in 2008 when he donated the bronze bust to the Serbian Cultural Garden in time for the garden’s dedication.
“He was really proud of that,” Rebrovic said of his father’s creation.
The elder Rebrovic was an engineer by trade but had a self-taught knack for drawing and sculpting. His son recalls him fascinated by Nikola Tesla, who pioneered the use of alternating electrical current. The Serbian-American inventor’s accomplishments inspired the bronze bust Rebrovic sculpted and donated to the cultural garden.
“The guy, he was a genius,” Rebrovic said of Tesla. “There’s no question about it.”
There were certainly questions when Tesla’s likeness disappeared in August 2014. But the mystery of where the bust is now was answered when the artist’s son typed his last name into an online search engine recently.
He recalled, “I put in Rebrovic and here was an auction house. It said, ‘bronze bust of a man by M.L. Rebrovic.’ And I thought, ‘That’s my dad’s statue.’ I recognized it right away.”
The bronze bust was listed on the website LiveAuctioneers by an auction house located in Geauga County.
News 5 visited Premier Auction Galleries Thursday to see the Tesla sculpture in person. Owner Jesse Mathews said it arrived in the Chesterland shop last summer from an estate in Nashville, Tennessee.
“We get bronzes every sale, almost every house will have bronzes. So it’s pretty common, but not to find [this]. What made this one kind of strange is that [when] you research the artist and nothing else popped up,” Mathews said.
The auction house collects a commission on items it lists and sells online. Mathews explained he often doesn’t know an item’s history when it comes into his possession.
“I just didn’t know who he was,” he said of the Tesla bust. “I thought it was Walt Disney and then I did a Google Lens search on it and Mark Twain came up.”
Mathews was also unfamiliar with the story of the stolen bust until someone from the Serbian Cultural Garden reached out on behalf of Rebrovic.
He unlisted the statue shortly before it was set for auction. It was the second time the bust could have been lost again. It was nearly sold and shipped to an out-of-state buyer months earlier.
“The card was declined, didn’t sell, buyer never reached out to us. We emailed and reached out to the buyer,” Mathews said. “So it ended up staying here. I think it’s just meant to go back to where it’s supposed to be.”
Mathews said he’s eager to return the Tesla bust to its rightful place but is waiting for clearance from the Cleveland Police. A detective there is still investigating the theft.
A different bronze bust of Nikola Tesla has since replaced the one stolen in 2014. A representative of the Serbian Cultural Garden told News 5 it plans to display the original statue in another location.
It’s what Rebrovic’s family also wishes.
“It’s for everybody,” Louis Rebrovic said. “My sister, my brother and me, all of us, agree we’d like to see it back there in Cleveland, back in the park, in a museum or somewhere else. That’s what my dad would want.”
