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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