2024-07-10 10:14:17
He was a spiritual, thoughtful person, struggling with his sexuality and hanging out in a famous nightclub on Wenceslas Square. The national classic, the artist Jan Zrzavý, is represented by a new exhibition in the 8smička center in Humpolec. It will last until September 29. Curators Miloš Doležal and Martin Herold show the artist, who unjustly gained the position of a kind of “Grandma among painters”, in a new light.
On the wall of the exhibition room is a handwritten fragment from Jan Zrzavý’s text. “If I were as beautiful as Dionysus, I would go to the Alhambra on Wenceslas Square, take off my clothes, enter the rotunda, and dance the Dionysus dance,” he fantasized. The exhibition of less than fifty works is named after this slogan. But the excerpt also tells about one of the central themes of the author’s work and life.
Zrzavý, who lived from 1890 to 1977, naturally struggled with his sexuality and appearance in the environment of conservative Central Europe, according to the curators. This is reflected in the erotic charcoal drawings, the images of himself as an Assyrian king, and the motifs of female genitalia in the first part of the exhibition, characteristically colored in crimson red.
The organizers found the key to this layer of the story precisely in the Alhambra night variety show on Wenceslas Square, where the artist liked to go. “For a while, he even saw himself as an actor. For example, various jugglers performed there, which later appeared in his work. We even found out that perhaps there should still be a night club there, albeit a different one,” describes the curator Martin Herold.
Just as an artist may not have found understanding for his orientation in the society of that time, his work was not always understood either. His father did not support his direction and was strict. The fragile painter is said to have experienced domestic violence in his childhood, at the same time he felt artistic talents in himself, all of this was washing in him. He was self-taught for most of his life, for a while he visited some private studios and briefly also at Prague’s UMPRUM, but he never finished school.
“He didn’t have a stamp. Partly because the environment of academic painting was still very conservative at the turn of the millennium, he heard whether he would rather be a hairdresser or weeding flower beds, and partly for financial reasons,” explains the second curator of the exhibition, the poet Miloš Doležal.
Jan Zrzavý in his studio, 1956. | Photo: CTK
The father refused to support Zrzavý financially. Money was secretly sent to him by his mother, on whom he depended. Hoch learned mainly by studying the Renaissance masters, sitting for long hours in the Louvre in Paris, for example, to penetrate the precise technique, the curator says. He especially admired Leonardo da Vinci, which is also evident in some of the exhibited works. He also followed the actions of his close friend and another important Czech painter, Bohumil Kubišta.
In the end, he succeeded in the field, he was able to make a comfortable living by painting, even under communism. He became a national artist in the mid-1960s. “He worked with the regime, but he didn’t sell out to it. He was so popular that the state power had no choice but to respect him. His works were sold abroad and he was able to travel,” Doležal describes the work of the artist, who died in 1977 at the age of 86.
According to the curators, Zrzavý’s omnipresence under socialism caused him to acquire the position of a kind of “Grandma among painters” – everyone saw his work so intensely from childhood that it became against them. “Everybody knows him, reproductions of his paintings were in every school during communism, which made him ugly especially to the older generation,” Doležal thinks.
“The works of these canonical authors can be overlooked a lot, but it is also a challenge to grasp it in a new, different and interesting way,” adds Herold, why they tried to rehabilitate Zrzavý with the exhibition. In addition to famous paintings such as Cleopatra II or The Betrothed, they also selected lesser-known works. Next to the crimson section on identity, they included, for example, a turquoise corner about a visit to Brittany, where Zrzavý painted several pictures with the theme of the sea and from which he confessed that he “did not know anything more beautiful than water and stones”.
The couple tried to reflect his multi-layeredness, delicacy and preoccupation with the interior and exterior landscape. The intimate space of the Humpolec 8smičky is said to directly encourage such a concept. “He meditated a lot, he was solitary and he had a lot of space to deal with himself almost self-centeredly, which I don’t mean in any negative way. That’s why he painted a whole series of self-portraits that accompanied him throughout his life,” points out Doležal. In the current exhibition, we find one where Redhead styles himself in the role of an ancient Assyrian king or Christ, for whom he draws his typical cap and beard.
During the preparations, the curators found out how important the spiritual plane was for the painter. “The tension between spirituality and physicality associated with sexuality appears in his work. He was thoughtful in this regard, he was interested in religion, and at the same time questioned some of their paradigms,” says Herold. According to him, one of the paintings on display, depicting a biblical landscape with a pink sky, can be read as phallic symbols.
At the same time, the canvases in the show communicate with the works of other artists with whom Zrzavý is connected – either personally and they were close, or thematically. The curators have also included the works of some living Czech authors who follow on from their famous predecessor. “In contemporary Czech art, it is not so common that someone explicitly claims the legacy of another local painter, at most Toyen. But that is the case with Zrzavý,” points out Martin Herold.
Some works by contemporary Czech artists were even created directly for the purposes of the Humpolec exhibition. This is, for example, a large-scale fresco by Dominik Běhal, reacting to Zrzavé’s painting. In this way, the curators put classical works into fresh new contexts. They already chose a similar principle for the exhibition dedicated to Bohuslav Reynko, also prepared for 8smička the year before.
The exhibition also features Cleopatra II. One of Zrzavý’s most famous paintings dates from 1942 to 1957. | Photo: National Gallery Prague
Art between Prague and Brno
The curators themselves came up with the idea to exhibit Zrzavý. He was met with enthusiasm in the gallery. The painter was born in the village of Okrouhlice in Vysočín and is also buried in this region, so it made sense for the couple to commemorate someone who, like Reynek, is connected to the region. “But at the same time, he significantly exceeded its limits, even though he was self-taught,” recalls Miloš Doležal.
Gallery 8smička started operating six years ago as a patronage project of Bára and Zdeňko Rýzner. It was established in the former premises of one of the textile mills of the former state company Sukno, specifically in the eighth factory, which is where its name and the entrance fee of eight crowns derive from. The space wants to be accessible to the general public.
Nevertheless, Natálie Brzoňová, who is responsible for communication and secondary school programs, admits that the center mainly benefits from its convenient location between Prague and Brno, where most of the visitors come from. “However, the locals are also starting to come, with whom we had a bit of a fight at the beginning,” he adds. According to her, they arrived in large numbers for the opening of the current exhibition.
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