In 1949 he was made a full member of the Yugoslav Academy, and from the 1950s onwards he started making portraits, art nudes and figurative sculptures. In the years after the war he made a number of notable sculptures, such as the monuments to Josip Broz Tito in Tito's birthplace of Kumrovec (1948), politician Moša Pijade (1953), violinist Zlatko Baloković (1962), 16th century Croatian writer Marin Držić (1963) and many others. His most important sculpture in this period is "The Carrying of the Wounded" (), which evolved from a sketch made in 1944 and which he used as a recurring motif in a number of monuments he created in the following three decades, one of which can be seen in front of the Faculty of Medicine in Zagreb.