2024-04-02 01:24:06
At first, she and her husband Pavle Brázda could not exhibit for a long time, then a more famous man overshadowed her a little. Only in the new millennium did the wider public become more interested in Věra Nováková’s work. One of the most original Czech painters of the 20th century died this Saturday at the age of 96. Her granddaughter Justina Kletečková informed about the death.
Věra Nováková was born in January 1928. In 1947, she was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, two years later she was expelled from the studio during political checks. “Everything was probably prepared in advance. The members of the student committee asked us several formal questions and the next day they told us orally that we did not fit the newly built socialist establishment and that we had to leave the school,” she recalled in an interview for the Memory of the Nation.
In 1950, she married a former classmate, the painter Pavel Brázda. For about 40 years, they created together outside the official scene. From 1958, Nováková was able to devote herself to art, but neither she nor her husband were allowed to exhibit. She made a living mostly by illustrating professional, later children’s literature, in the years 1973 to 1974 as a draftsman of sherds at the Institute of Archaeology. All the time, however, she devoted herself to free creation. “I was out of commission for forty years. Climbing into the light after such a long time was like digging out of the dark catacombs to the light, with all the consequences,” she later described her situation.
Pavel Brázda first presented his works at an exhibition in 1967 at the Salon of Prague Artists. The first, and during communism, the only joint show of husband and wife took place in 1976 in the Theater in Nerudovce. In the late 1980s, Brázda became a respected figure in alternative culture, especially among the creators around the magazine Revolver Revue.
Nováková only participated in dozens of shows after 1989, she had her first major solo exhibition in her 60s. The wider public became more interested in it only in the new millennium. The last solo exhibition of Novák’s works was organized the year before last by the Dox Contemporary Art Center in Prague.
In 2006, the painter received the Revolver Revue Award. In January of this year, she published a book called Every step is a choice, in which she tells her life story against the backdrop of the major historical upheavals of the 20th and part of the 21st century.
Her works were full of dynamism, color and light. The themes of birth, life and death permeated them. She also perceived the world around her thanks to her Christian faith, which, paradoxically, was brought to her by her experience with the communists. “I understood that their promised paradise on earth was complete nonsense. I painted everything I lived,” she once said. The main motif of her work was man, his suffering, biblical subjects or the archetypal depiction of man and woman. “She kept asking questions, concrete answers didn’t seem to come. Through her paintings, she talked to herself about topics that were close to her heart. This is where her work is particularly strong,” Aktuálně.cz wrote about her.
Pavel Brázda died in 2017 at the age of 91. Novák’s fate gave her the opportunity to comment from a distance even on the time when she was not allowed to exhibit in socialist Czechoslovakia. “In the end, the bad always loses ground,” she said last year in Petra Vizina’s podcast.
Video: Věra Nováková about the exhibition Via vitae II.
In last year’s video, Věra Nováková presents her exhibition Via vitae II. in the Dox Contemporary Art Center in Prague. Photo: ČTK | Video: DOX