Page 42 - Studio International - June 1972
P. 42

Letter


     from Prague

     Jindrich Chalupecky






     Not long ago Zdenék Beran invited his friends
     to see his work in progress, The
     Rehabilitation Department of Dr. Dr. The
     second Dr. is the first two letters in the name of
     a well-known Prague psychiatrist, and the work
     itself is a complex sculptural environment
     which has gradually taken over the whole area
     of his studio, a workshop in the courtyard of an
     old tenement house in a Prague factory district.
     It consists of crude hospital equipment and
     expressionistically deformed human bodies,
     tortured, crippled, writhing in anguish;
     humanity driven beyond its last rampart, where
     it ceases to be human. The white shapes occupy
     the space, and when there is no more room in
     the studio for further work, Beran wants to
     close it once and for all. It is as if the artist has
     had to charm the power of his terrible world
     into those forms, overcome them, master
     them, and then forget them. It is a ritual.
       Beran, who is thirty-four, has never    official circles of the Union of Artists; and the   is above all 'a little game between "me" and
     concerned himself much with exhibiting. Some   latter choice automatically meant that they   "myself" '. Though it is not always a
     time ago he showed two or three pictures in   couldn't exhibit. It is remarkable how many   comfortable situation, it is not in the least
     Prague and he had a slightly larger group in   artists in that situation chose the second   unfavourable. The social value of art in
     the second from last Paris Biennale. But his   alternative. Later, in the years from 1964-1970,   European civilization is continually decreasing
     indifference to exhibiting is no exception in   the situation became freer and finally anything   and the greatest danger for the contemporary
     Prague. His whole generation, which began its   could be exhibited. But the stereotype in   artist has generally proved to be that he can
     work in the fifties, had to choose between   which creative work is inseparable from   offer his work only to a very limited segment of
     socialist realism and modern art. The former,   exhibiting never developed among these   society, to a 'refined public' which uses his
     in the Zhdanovian conception of the time, was   artists. Many, of course, would have been glad   work in a way channelling and obstructing its
     in fact the realism of French Salon painting of   to exhibit, but it was a secondary thing with   effectiveness as much as possible. It is better
     the 188os and today is passé even in the    them. As Marcel Duchamp said, art for them    for the artist if, in the end, he is divorced from







































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