Page 34 - Studio International - June 1973

member to rest: Jiri John. He died before the special significance which her handwriting
reaching fifty, and for this reticent and has, but, once again, it is a quite unpretentious,
introverted artist it was too short a life. He was uncertain and groping handwriting. After a
Via's antitype : while Vitik was a figuratist time, the colour increased, but, in harmony
and dramatist, John was a landscapist and a with the total conception, it was colour with a
lyricist whose rejection of our civilizing world symbolic rather than a visual significance, colour
might seem to many to be unmodern. He lived as a signpost, as a signal. Thus Simotová
from his own memories, from the experiences opened her way to painting and today, in her
of a childhood and youth spent in a poor rural studio, there is a group of dazzling white
district. His pictures and graphics continually canvases with violent acrylic colour tones.
return to that early awareness of the life of The writing on these pictures, which at one
nature hidden within matter, to the secrets of point seemed to be moving towards the
fertilization, germination, growth, ripening, decorative and the calligraphic, has, in the
decay and rebirth. As so often happens in most recent canvases, become simplified so that
Bohemia, Surrealism lay behind John's work. the colour surfaces now dominate the writing,
In his case it was that strange and melodic and simple seriousness prevails over the petty
charm out of which came the most beautiful details of life. It seems as though the artist, as
works of Max Ernst and, in quite a different she develops, will have to go beyond the
way, the pictures of Josef Sima. John was a traditional form of the picture in order to
landscapist, but his chief concern was the express the new spatiality which she feels.
invisible in all things visible. For this reason, he The importance which women have
often painted his landscapes, and more often attained in Czech art in recent years is no
engraved them, either from a point of view so accident. I have already mentioned several
close that the eye as it were ceases to see, or in women in these letters - Eva Kmentová,
the form of an imaginary geological cross- Nadezda Pliskova, Jana Zelibská and
section. His last works were for the most part Zorka Ságlová, and I could write about many
dry-points and in them John achieved a close others. For the art of these women has a very
grid of gradated tones, ranging all the way special quality: it is, in the best sense of the Adriena Simotová
Man in the Rain 197
from light grey to a deep yet structured black. word, feminine; an art which flows from a Acrylic, 148 x 92 cm
It could be said that these blacks were their different bodily structure and a different
proper theme, a metaphor for that invisibility sensual experience of the world. As long as our
within the visible : chthonian blacks. civilization remained masculine, female derive their truth and their strength elsewhere.
These prints usually captured a single artists were neither necessary nor even possible, I recall the first exhibition held by UB 12 in
moment in the unseen existence of life. But in unless we discount the role of women as i962: it was in a period when the battle was
his earlier pictures, and then later, especially in performing or decorative artists. But now, still raging over the correct line for socialist art
several of his most effective graphics, John when our civilization is so clearly losing its to take, and that exhibition caused quite a
aimed at a comprehensive mise en scene of the raison d'être and its meaning, is it not self- furore in the press and especially on the radio.
natural myth. It seems that the intimate form of evident that women, precisely because of their There have always been a number of women in
the graphics was no longer sufficient and that feminine dissimilarity, should acquire a new UB 12: besides Simotová there are Janouskova,
now he needed to express himself in the place in art as well ? 'And woman shall be a Kucerová, Mrázková, and Prachatická. In that
monumental conception of a picture. But all poet, even she !' Rimbaud wrote in his famous exhibition, Vera Janousková had a group of
that remained of this in his studio were letter of 15 May, 1871, in which he declared a gesticulating idols, half sculpture and half
several small studies. In the short periods new function for art, which would 'no longer assemblage. I confess that these objects
between the increasingly acute attacks of his give rhythm to activity, but forge ahead'. pleased me mare than anything else in the
disease, he was able to accomplish no more. And Andre Breton, in his late and I think as yet exhibition. It was at a time when it seemed
Adriena Simotová, John's fellow student and underestimated work in which he reflects on the necessary to confront the public with works
later his wife, still works across from his now catastrophe threatening our civilization, devotes that were infused with a rather heavy-handed
empty studio. Their art, however, one of his most beautiful poetic essays to the intellectual content, at times social, at times
developed in quite different ways. For a long myth of Meluzina. It might be worth quoting existentialist. But these sculptures were gay,
time, Simotová devoted herself to a few lines from it here: 'This crisis is so acute even joyful. They were installed in an out-of-
architectural commissions which kept her that for my part I can see but one solution: the the-way place and they were not large, but it was
enclosed within the conventional conception of time seems to have come for the ideas of precisely these works which caused the greatest
modern art. Then she unexpectedly produced a women to become vindicated at the expense of scandal. I was genuinely surprised, and so was
group of very unusual graphics. They were those of men, whose bankruptcy today is Vera Janousková. Could the scandal have been
essentially pages from a diary recording the culminating in rather wide-spread confusion. because the works were so simple, ordinary and
trivia of life itself - dressing, walking up and It is up to the artist in particular, if only as a human ?
down stairs, relaxing in the sun. But they protest against this scandalous state of things, to Nowadays, it is as if history were repeating
represented reality as lived rather than as seen, give the maximum precedence to everything itself. Once again, much of what we have
more the experience of the body than of the eye, belonging to the feminine system of the world become accustomed to call modern art is
a gesture rather than a view of something. as opposed to the masculine.' under attack, and as a cardinal and unforgivable
For this reason too, a rather peculiar space Perhaps it is all very simple. Women are most example, an environment by Zorka Ságlová in
began to appear in them—a fragmentary, likely to achieve that `ecart absolu', to use the exhibition Somewhere, Something, held in
uncoordinated, temporary space; not the kind Breton's phrase, that 'absolute distancing' from the Spála Gallery in August 1969, is often
which exists to define things, but which is the insoluble problems and falsely cited. Her part of the show was entitled simply
continually being created anew by the body, its formulated questions which are causing our 'Hay/Straw', which described the contents
movements, its position in and dealings with civilization to break down. They may even exactly. In the basement area of the gallery
the world around it. This too is the source of ignore this unhappy masculine world and there was nothing but small stacks of hay with
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