WHAT'S ON BRITSKÉ LISTY

Czech Art between 1945-1957 in exhibition

15. 7. 2010 / Jan Čulík

First of all, we can realize, from the exhibition, that it is not true, as so often many commentators (especially from the West) claim, that oppression can be a motivation for great artistic achievements. That's not the way it is at all. In this exhibition we can see the work of traumatized artists, isolated from the external world and from the international artistic discourse, who suffer from narrow mindedness and solitude, and who produce second rate, not original work. Czech artists desperately tried to aggregate in groupings (and I will never understand how an artist can produce something original and unique, when they declare themselves as part of a school, together with some others, all of whom in the end basically the same way as each other...)

They were trying desperately to mimic the Art development in the West (there are so many paintings in this exhibition that remind us of Paul Klee or Marc Chagall!), as if they wanted to show that even they were part of that development in the world of painting -- thus imitating already existing ways of painting.

I really don't like the pictures from Mikuláš Medek. The photographs by Emily Medková are much more interesting, even though the pieces she exhibits here show a Medková almost mechanically fascinated by the eye, which can be found everywhere and fall into the stereotype.

I have the feeling that Jan Zrzavý and Emil Filla should simply not draw. It is sad when a Czech artist just repeats on his canvas something that has already been done in the painting world long before.

Much more interesting than paintings are in this exhibition are sometimes photographs. The best among them are able to catch the atmosphere of the era's moments much more accurately and intensive than any of that pseudo-diletante painting masturbation... A wonderful photographer, who is much more interesting than the paintings in that exhibition and surpasses them in light years, is Josef Sudek.

But it is very well possible that Czech artists needed to go through that 12 year period of anguish and worries and dilettantism to be able to mature. The last room of the exhibition signalizes that in the second part of the 1950s, around 1957, a new era emerged. And in that last room we finally can see signs that the Czech artistic production takes a really original and creative road. The paintings in that last room are a presage of what was to come during the effervescent cultural period of the 1960s. Unfortunately the exhibition ends there, so we don't find out what came afterwards.

Just when the exhibition gives us the appetite for more, when we want to see what came next, because that is just when the whole thing started to become interesting... we are already out.

Also, the text translated into English, used to guide foreigners about what they are seeing, was a disaster. They are simply written in a way that English is not used. It is snobbish, excessive in words and impossible to understand by a native speaker. Sentences in English cannot go on through many lines; in English the sentences have to be clear, for it is not an inflectional language -- understanding of certain aspects come from the position of the words.

Couldn't the exhibition's organizers at least allow some native English speaker to take a look at the text and fix it before making it available to the public? Once again, wasted money...

Vytisknout