Page 33 - Studio International - June 1973

Czech letter (Top)
Alois Vitik
The Last Painting
1971
Jindrich Chalupecky Oil, 205 X 141 cm
(Bottom)
Jiri John
Falling Fruits 1971-2
Oil, 35 x 35 cm

I wasn't present at Alois Vitik's funeral;
I didn't find out about it until too late. We had
known each other since the beginning of his
artistic career, but what remains in one's
memory of his early works are the surrealistic
pictures with which he graduated from the
Prague School of Industrial and Fine Arts in
1933. Via afterwards left Prague, and turned
up again years later when he began to exhibit
systematically for the first time with artists who
were on the whole much younger than he, and
who later, in 196o, formed the group UB 12
(UB being the initial of the artistic society they
had just left, and 12 being the number of
members). It was these people, his friends, who
placed one of his last pictures in front of the
catafalque at his funeral in February, 1972.
Seldom has this gesture been so appropriate:
Vitik, in his loneliness, had poured his whole
life into his work.
One intention unites all his pictures — the
theme of the human figure or, more precisely,
the human body, is always more or less
obviously present. Sometimes closer to
Surrealism and at other times to Abstraction,
the painter uses these varied techniques again
and again to present the human body in
continuity with nature, making it now a rock,
now a form of animal or plant life, returning it
to the materials and forces of the cosmos.
That is also why he concentrated on the
transformation of the theme within the picture,
on the problems of shaping the picture, its
space and colour, often to the detriment of its
significance. Friends who went to Vitik's
studio after his death found a huge
unstretched canvas tacked to the wall with a
few nails, and on it a brutally executed
coloured graph. Vitik had outlined it before his
final trip to the hospital, and for a man who had
always respected the disciplines of the painter's
art, it must have been difficult to leave a
painting unfinished. But perhaps he also
realized that here, in extremis, our conventions,
and even the aristocratic conventions of art,
cease to be valid. And thus, on this last canvas,
as precisely as he knew how, he gave expression
to what he had struggled all his life to achieve.
Alois Vitik lived to the age of sixty-one.
Less than half a year later, UB 12 laid another

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