Art for Good - New Life for Exhibitions

Jiří Kobr

5. 8. 1974

I am a woodcarver. Woodcarving gives me pleasure. It sustains me. It is my joy.
And I am a sculptor. I am learning sculpture. Through sculpture I become aware, I try to understand something. And for me it is a unique opportunity to treat the world as it is — with real dimensions, genuine space, actual material.

I want to place my knowledge of the world (it is mine — because I am responsible for it through my experiences, just as I am responsible for my knowledge of faith) into the real world in the hope that it can hold up. So that the object that has come into being can become a part of it and have some effect upon it.

Despite this searching for harmony, I am attracted by the exploration of borders, of seeking out boundaries and transcending them. But perhaps this is precisely the point: to achieve serenity despite errors and deviations, a harmony that is not a place of the chosen ones, but rather the result of experience. What interests me is the reason, that is, the essence, that is, things that are valid in general, that is, the “ordinary”. For me it is a matter of recognizing the original, the plausible, the intimately familiar.

Most often during my endeavours I end up at Christian subjects and motifs. I explore and inquire into Christianity. For me it is not a matter of creating ecclesiastical objects or liturgical aids…

This art was a component of the environment in which I grew up. This manifestation of human life was part of my own sphere. And just as I was interested in what lives and grows, I was also interested in why and whom were depicted in the depictions of Calvary in the village, on the crosses in the fields, on the tombstones in cemeteries and church altars. And along with the other aspects of reality, I accepted these too as my own.

For me art is a means — a means, not an end. A means to elation, to repeated amazement at the world. I value the ability to be enchanted by form, by combinations of colours. I am grateful for the preoccupation, the longing to have some impact.

After all, this must be … healthy?
Jiří Kobr, Hostim 18 May 2017


Jiří Kobr was born in Dvůr Králové nad Labem in 1974. He studied woodcarving at the High school and College of Applied Arts in Prague (1988–1997). From 1997 to 2003 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Petr Siegl, Jindřich Zeithamml; for his thesis “Cross” he received the Chancellor’s Prize). In 2001 an independent exhibition of his work took place at the Municipal Gallery of Trutnov. His work has been displayed at exhibitions in Reinraum, Düsseldorf, 2002, MECCA, Terezín, 2003; Nothing For Show…?, the Kateřinská Garden in Prague, 2004; Statue 2, Felix Jenewein Gallery in Kutná Hora, 2006; and Statue 3, Wortner House at the Aleš South Bohemian Gallery in Česká Budějovice, 2007. He taught wood carving and sculpture from 2002 to 2005 at the High school of Applied Arts in Prague. He currently lives and works in Hostim u Berouna.

 

Exhibitions

• Titillating Sculpture
• An Artist in the Acceptance of Conditions Jiří Kobr “Lo and Behold...”

Publications

• Stations of the Cross (concertina book), Jiří Kobr

Stanislav Kolíbal

11. 12. 1925

★ 1925 Orlová

1938

After Těšínská joins Poland, the family moves to Ostrava. He studies at the Real Gymnasium in Ostrava-Přívoz.

1943

As a guest he exhibits at the member exhibition of the Moravian-Silesian Association of Fine Artists in the House of Arts in Ostrava.

1944

Sent to forced labor mines in Ostrava. Passes the exams for the School of Applied Arts in Prague. However, the school is closed this year. Creates illustrations for books by Edgar Allen Poe, František Halas and Boris Pilňak. First meeting with Václav Boštík at the Vyšehrad publishing house.

1945

Publishes his article “Response and Manifesto” in the periodical Nástup as a defense of modern art against ideological reproaches. Goes to Prague to study at the studio of applied graphics of prof. Antonín Strnadel. At the School of Applied Arts he meets students of prof. Kaplický - Jiří John, Adriena Simotová, Jiří Mrázek, Jiří Šindler. Starts working as a book graphic designer.

1948

Creates a cycle of seven wood engravings for Václav Pour’s publishing house. Makes his first filmmaking experiment in an abandoned village in the border area. His sculptures of stones originate in the river bed of Bečva near Vsetín, which prefigures his later sculptural work in a fundamental way.

1950

Graduates from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. Illustrates Mickiewicz’s Ballads and Romances for the Vyšehrad publishing house (forbidden to be published). Begins to study stage design at the Theater Faculty under prof. František Tröster.

1952

Admitted to the Czechoslovak Union of Graphic Artists. At the II. Regional Center in the loft of Umělecká beseda he meets Václav Bartovský and other future members of the UB12 Group. Works on theatre productions in Ostrava, Opava and for the National Theater in Prague.

1953

Acquired a studio on Nad Královskou oborou 23 near the studios of Boštík, John and Bartovský. Marries the sculptor Vlasta Prachatická. Completes his studies in scenography. Remains at the Theater Faculty (until 1959) as a part-time stage teacher. He begins to occupy himself with sculpture seriously and systematically. Birth of daughter Markéta.

1956

Birth of son Paul.

1957

Participates in the Exhibition of Five Artists in the Aleš Hall of Umělecká beseda (Burant, John, Kolíbal, Prachatická, Šimotová). Trip to Greece. At the National Museum in Athens he encounters ancient Greek art and is especially impressed by statues from the Cyclades Islands. Illustrations to a fairy tale collection (this book becomes important for the development of Czech book illustration). Illustrations for books by Torquato Tasso and A. P. Chekov.

1958

Co-organizer of and participant in the Art Exhibition of Young Artists of Czechoslovakia in the House of Arts in Brno. Co-founder of the Bloc of Creative Groups. Visits the world exhibition in Brussels. Discovers a monograph by Isam Noguchi and a book about Alexander Calder (becoming acquainted with the work of these two artists will change his current view of sculpture).

1959

Trip to Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

1964

Creates sculptures for the Great Moravia exhibition at Prague Castle. Designs a solution for the supporting walls of the Nusle Bridge and a relief wall for the Czech Airlines office in Sofia. Trip to Italy. Attends the Venice Biennale. Attends an exhibition of Lucio Fontana in Milan. Elected to the management of the MSGR section (painters, sculptors and graphic designers).

1965

Graphically prepares the monthly journal Fine Art until its demise in 1970 (together with Jiří Schmidt). Participates in the preparation of the Paris-Prague exhibition and installs the exhibition in Paris. His statue “Table” is selected by the Guggenheim Museum in New York for the Sculpture of Twenty Nations exhibition. Creates his first abstract sculptures.

1966

In Paris he installs an exhibition of Czech cubism in the Musée National d’Art Modeme. Moves to a studio on Rooseveltova Street in Prague 6. Creates a roof garden for the Czechoslovak Pavilion at the World Exhibition in Montreal.

1967

Installs an exhibition of Contemporary Czechoslovak Art in Turin as well as exhibits. Meets Lucio Fontana. First solo exhibition of sculptures in the New Hall in Prague. Receives an award in Bologna for illustrations to the book Crystal Sisters as well as an anniversary award from Albatros in Prague.

1968

Participates in the organization of the exhibition New Sensitivity in Brno. Creates an 18m wall for the Czechoslovak Embassy in London. Study stay in Vence (southern France) in the studio of the Karoly Foundation. Attends a symposium in Korcula (Vela Luka), where he becomes friends with Achille Perilli.

1969

Works on a sculpture for the Czechoslovak Pavilion in Osaka called Homage to Japan. Receives a six-month Ford Foundation scholarship, but the political situation does not allow him to travel.

1970

Solo exhibition at Špála Gallery in Prague. Participates in the exhibition Between Man and Matter in Tokyo (a selection of the Japanese critic Yusuke Nakahara).
With the advent of Normalization, the group UB 12 began to dissolve and was officially banned in 1970.


Based on biographical data of the members of UB12 up to 1970 in: SLAVICKÁ Milena. UB 12 - Studies, interviews, documents. Prague: Gallery in cooperation with Gema Art a o.s. OSVU, 2006, pp. 306-311

Exhibitions

• Titillating Sculpture

Selected artworks

• The studios of the members of the group UB 12 and their portraits

Věra Nováková

17. 1. 1928

Věra Nováková was born in Prague on 17 January 1928. During the war she studied at a classical gymnasium and in 1947 was accepted at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1949 after the Communist putsch, she was expelled from her studies in her fourth semester during political screenings. In 1950 she was accepted into the third year at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design. Beginning in 1958, she was given official permission to support herself through her artistic work, but she was not allowed to exhibit. She never applied to the Union of Czechoslovak Artists. She did illustrations for technical publications and later for children’s books and also copied fragments at the Institute of Archeology. At the same time, she continued, and continues, to devote herself to her own, independent work.

The motifs of Věra Nováková’s paintings and statues find their origin in classical literature, the biblical canon, as well as in the polemics between the two — similar to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Her conversion or awakening to traditional themes has, from the beginning, been accompanied by a polemic against mankind’s delusions of grandeur. Beginning with the wartime and postwar horrors of Věra’s youth, through the period of Normalization, and up to the post-Communist years, the artist has been constantly posing the question: Who is the genuine human being, the Son of Man or the Superman?
David Bartoň
 

Exhibitions

• Titillating Sculpture
• Věra Nováková Whence come you, and whither are you going?

Publications

• Věra Nováková / Whence come you, and whither are you going?

Links

• Věra Nováková v Paměti národa

Vlasta Prachatická

27. 11. 1929

★ 1929 Staré Smrkovice near Hořice

1945

Attended the Secondary School of Stone Sculpture in Hořice, where she worked under the guidance of prof. Jaroslav Plichta (student of J. V. Myslbek). She passes the exams (at the age of 16) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the studio of prof. Otakar Španiel. Her classmates are Marie Uchytilová-Kučová, Milan Knobloch, Jan Mathé, Jan Kulich. Lives in Prague with her aunt, wife of cellist prof. K. P. Sádla.

1951

Completes her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. Meets Stanislav Kolibal through whom she becomes acquainted with Jiří John, Adriena Šimotová, Jiří Mrázek, Vladimír Janoušek, Věra Havlová-Janoušková. The National Gallery in Prague purchases her sculptural portrait Mother.

1952

Begins work in the studio at Nad Královskou oborou 23 (until 1962).

1953

Marries Stanislav Kolibal. Birth of daughter Markéta.

1956

Birth of son Paul.

1957

Takes part in the Exhibition of Five Artists in the Aleš Hall of Umělecká beseda in Prague.

1967

Takes part in the Exhibition of Five Sculptors in the Václav Špála Gallery (Kmentová, Pacík, Prachatická, Vinopalová, Zoubek). Exhibits at the Sculpture Biennale in Middelheim (Belgium).

1969

Wins the competition for a portrait of Jan Masaryk for the entrance hall of the Czernin Palace of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czechoslovak Republic. However, due to the change in political conditions, the bust is never displayed. Works on a portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven for the Castle Hradec nad Moravicí.

1970

Creates a commemorative plaque for the composer J. B. Foerster for his house in Vienna.
With the advent of Normalization, the group UB 12 began to dissolve and was officially banned in 1970.


Based on biographical data of the members of UB12 up to 1970 in: SLAVICKÁ Milena. UB 12 - Studies, interviews, documents. Prague: Gallery in cooperation with Gema Art a o.s. OSVU, 2006, pp. 306-311

Exhibitions

• Titillating Sculpture

Selected artworks

• The studios of the members of the group UB 12 and their portraits

Tomáš Smetana

23. 12. 1960

He was born on the day before Christmas Eve, 1960 in Prague. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of Arnošt Paderlík. After the completion of his studies in 1985, he earned a living as a cemetery headstone engraver and a night watchman at the National Gallery in the Anežský Monastery (together with Václav Stratil). In 1990 he left for a residency in Paris. After returning he taught for many years—first as an evening drawing class instructor, at the Žižkov Elementary Arts School, in the department of architecture at the Institute of Drawing and Modeling in Brno and finally at the Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region in Kutná Hora. He lives and works in Prague. Representation in Collections: City Gallery of Prague and Museum Montanelli. 
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I moved into the apartment at 8 Sněmovní Street in Prag in 1982. Originally an early Baroque building, rebuilt in the Classical style by architect Josef Fanta, it boasts the largest balcony in the Lesser Town. My room was so large that the son of the previous tenant, Mr. Jandus, used to ride his bicycle in it; with the adjoining balcony, it felt like a 19th-century salon to me, a salon artist who made a living doing portraits of royalty drawn to order from live models. The mysterious atmosphere of the Lesser Town permeated my paintings, drawn entirely in micro pencil and black and white.

In 1997 I was forced to move out by the new owner of the house. I lost part of my identity. Then began my pilgrimage through the apartments I used as a studio. My wife Klára and I moved to Nové Město na Moravě, where we changed 3 addresses, then to Kutná Hora, where we moved "only" twice. In Prague, I started living in a 2-bedroom apartment on the 11th floor of a prefabricated flat in Bohnice.

After I left Sněmovní Street I started drawing not only at home, but also in the apartments of my friends and acquaintances. After a while I drained the space energetically, let's say burned it down, and I had to go elsewhere. Again and again I looked for new objects, their stories and connections. It was easier in Moravia because there were friends and acquaintances who allowed me to draw in their apartment during the day when they were at work. In anonymous Prague it is much harder - trust is less common.
ts
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Mikkel B. Tin

Tomáš Smetana’s drawings

A personal tradition

An artist who is true to himself becomes the carrier of a personal tradition. From work to work, from day to day, from movement to movement of his hand, a continuity develops that will define his style. In that sense, tradition is a certain skill acquired over time and embodied as habits. But tradition also widens our access to the outer world: as a tacit competence it facilitates our present and future encounters with the world.

In his philosophy of the body, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty defines the acquisition of a habit as an “extension of existence” (2010:176), and the habit as a tradition in the body. Bodily traditions provide a framework but their life depends on their proving relevant in still new settings.

According to Merleau-Ponty, bodily traditions are essential in artistic creation – and Tomáš Smetana’s work provides a remarkable example. The following text is based on two interviews with Smetana in 2010, one in Paris and another in Žďár nad Sázavou – as well as on passages from Merleau-Ponty’s writings.

Tomáš Smetana
One may justly say that the artist Tomáš Smetana, in his drawings, creates his own tradition. One could also say, however, that it is his tradition that creates the artist Tomáš Smetana. It no doubt is for personal reasons that some people feel a stronger need than others to perceive themselves in continuity and tradition. A personal tradition provides the artist with a continuity that makes his work both unique and recognizable. As for Smetana’s tradition, it involves a technical mastery based on many years of practice and embodied habits, skills that now allow the artist to create with that special blend of concentration and absent-mindedness that characterizes habits. “The work flows all by itself. I don’t need to concentrate, I can leave myself and move about in space. What’s important is to keep on for a while, give yourself time. A drawing can’t be finished in a single day. I don’t draw in order to make a drawing, I draw in order to feel the time passing. The main thing is to fill the day with some kind of activity and avoid bothering one’s family.” (Smetana 7.10.2010)

Duration, thus, is important for Smetana; both when it comes to the techniques and the motifs he elects.

Technique
The method by which Smetana draws is very slow indeed. “It is a certain kind of very slow method of reconciling myself with my own thoughts. To me, it’s not so much about the drawing, it’s more about contemplation, a certain way of being present. The experience of spending hour after hour in the same place. This puts its mark on the drawing. The slowness, the process of maturation and the process of thinking are important.” (Smetana 30.7.2010) Smetana emphasizes his work being handicraft. “It is nothing other than graphic handicraft. A craft I have taught myself. Thanks to the hundreds of drawings I have crosshatched.” (Smetana 30.7.2010)

In all truth we can say that drawing for Smetana has become a habit, that he has drawing in his fingers. He has been “crosshatching”, as he puts it, since the start of the 1990s. He no longer needs to be fully consciously present in order for his hand to work and find the solutions he needs. Even the largest formats he patiently crosshatches with minute lines. True, his crosshatching has been more or less dense, yet recently he has been thickening many surfaces so long that they acquire a dark, almost velvety depth. Using the micro-pencil and the thinnest leads he can find. He is convinced that the energy he invests in his work process accumulates as energy in the picture. “I deliberately restrict myself to pencil and fill the entire surface. I thicken the drawing with energy.” (Smetana 30.7.2010) But he does this also in order that the small, rhythmical movements of his hand, required to crosshatch the paper and now part of his motor skills, will have time enough to put him into this meditative state in which the hand works while the mind travels. At such moments he feels most creative.

Then, shortly after 2000, he began to use crayons, though these have a different function. “When I draw using crayons, I draw harshly, I work off.” (Smetana 30.7.2010) The surfaces then almost begin to glow, intensely satiated. Other times he may colour part of a pencil-drawing in Indian ink: “This is about emphasis. Indian ink is transparent and the volumes continue to be visible. As in old photos.” (Smetana 30.7.2010) While crayons produce impermeable surfaces, Indian ink creates transparent space.

He may outline architectural elements using a ruler, otherwise he builds up his drawings with these tiny lines, one alongside another, tens of thousands of them. Smetana’s drawings may at times be extremely detailed, but never punctilious, perhaps exactly because his hand is not overruled by his mind. Hand and mind hold each other in check. He monitors his work with that distracted attention which is Merleau-Ponty’s definition of habits, which are „neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action”: but “knowledge in the hands” (Merleau-Ponty 2010:166). He has no image ready from the outset, only an unclear idea that his hand gradually clarifies to him. “I don’t decide about the future. I proceed in such a way that I make my decisions one after another, each on the basis of the previous one.” (Smetana 30.7.2010) “You sometimes have a feeling that the drawing is becoming interesting.” (Smetana 7.10.2010) “I never make any rash step. I put down something on the paper and then the next thing occurs to me, and this continues until I have the whole drawing.” (Smetana in Černá 2009:46) It is of course Smetana who draws his drawings. But what he experiences is that the drawing appears, that it is thanks to his tiny pencil strokes that the drawing comes into being.

Motifs
The drawings are clearly figurative, though not directly naturalistic. They represent people or objects or both together. “To begin with I stylised. Now I approach realism.” (Smetana 30.7.2010) Perhaps a kind of “fantastic or magical realism” (Smetana in Uhlář 2010). The people he draws are friends and acquaintances or members of his family, and the objects are such that are at hand: furniture, toys, shoes, wallpaper, carpets; still, the shining, often also translucent surface of glass, plastic film, mirrors, pots and pans occupy a special position. “Still life is a reflection of the past.” (Smetana 7.10.2010) A reflection which is not a simple reproduction of the past: Smetana’s still lifes take up the life we lead in the present and which we can decide to ignore or make our own. His work is a constant process of re-collection in which the items of the everyday are revisited, scrutinized, taken up into or left out from the personal tradition he is forming through his art.

“I carry a suitcase and put things inside it that, after all, are pretty random: my father’s ashtray, my mother’s shoe. I’m not completely serious about it, it may be that it isn’t my mum’s shoe. It becomes a kind of legend, I create my own personal mythology.” (Smetana 30.7.2010) The high-heeled shoe that perhaps belonged to his mother and perhaps did not and in which, Smetana says, she went dancing, already features in some of his earliest drawings. He has taken it up and incorporated it into his “personal mythology”. Even if it were fictive, it is nevertheless real, because it has the ability to make the dead person present in Smetana’s tradition.

This relates not only to his mother but to an entire world of the past. “I have a number of objects that appear again and again in my drawings: a First Republic rug, a cubist writing table that belonged to Aunt Vlasta, a hatstand, a chair, a pouffe – things I have a certain relationship with. They are souvenirs, relics from a time when there existed entrance halls, salons and bedrooms, an era with certain aesthetic and human values, an epoch with a certain sophistication. In those days, also good workmanship was appreciated.” (Smetana 7.10.2010) Items from the past played a different role under communism than they do nowadays. Now their value has fallen, Smetana says, now we find them in coffee bars and restaurants as decorative props that mean nothing. But back then, in the communist era, they were rare and full of significance. The few items that his grandma still possessed were not only fragments that reflected the world the communists scattered, they were not only relics from a world that Smetana had never known; they were affordances in his own life. When he visited his grandma as a boy, she would tell him stories about her father who had been physician-in-ordinary to the Bulgarian Tsar, and about her husband, Smetana’s grandfather, bishop in the Evangelic Church in Czechoslovakia. Those were colours and sound very different from the ones Smetana encountered in the block of flats where he grew up, colours and sounds he could choose to either take up into or leave out of his own tradition.

It is not out of nostalgia that Smetana draws his aunt’s desk. He does not need the property that the communists expropriated. He needs no more than a shoe, which in reality does not even have to have belonged to his mother in order to make her present. In any case, it brings her close to him. Tradition is not a museum. It is, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “the power to forget origins and to give to the past not a survival, which is the hypocritical form of forgetfulness, but a new life, which is the noble form of memory” (Merleau-Ponty 1964:59). The tradition Smetana establishes is no return to the past but an expansion of the present and an opening onto the future. “Sometimes an object has a past and can tell a story. I collect stories that relate to my drawings.” (Semtana 7.10.2010) What happens is that the insignificant acquires new significance when Smetana chooses to take it up in his drawings, and quite particularly when he takes it up again and again, and insists on these objects as links in a personal tradition.

Neither would it be correct to say that Smetana is subject to the circumstances in which he creates or the people he misses. It is he who, taking them up into his work, appropriates them and, including them in his universe, ensures for them a new life.

In his description of the creation of an artwork Merleau-Ponty criticizes both the biographical approach taken by art history when it perceives artworks as reflections of the external life of the artist, and the psychoanalytical approach which perceives the works as reflections of the artist’s inner world. Both perspectives are reductionist to the extent that their deterministic explanations overlook the creative transformation of the circumstances of an artist’s life, which is what distinguishes the artist as artist. “If we take the painter’s point of view in order to be present at that decisive moment when what has been given to him to live as corporeal destiny, personal adventures or historical events crystallizes into the ‘motive’, we will recognize that his work, which is never an effect, is always a response to these data, and that the body, the life, the landscapes, the schools, the mistresses, the creditors, the police, and the revolutions which might suffocate painting are also the bread his work consecrates. To live in painting is still to breathe the air of this world – above all for the man who sees something in the world to paint. And there is a little of him in every man.” (Merleau-Ponty 1964:64)

Smetana speaks of “A mental process consisting of learning to perceive a meaning and an aesthetic value in every object” (Smetana 30.7.2010). When he takes the objects, and people, up into his drawings, this is more than simple reproduction of people and things in his surroundings. It is a special form of re-cognition. “The ‘known’, says the hermenutist Hans-Georg Gadamer, enters into its true being and manifests itself as what it is only when it is recognized. As recognized, it is grasped in its essence, detached from its accidental aspects.” (Gadamer 2006:114) The definition Gadamer here gives of the term “recognition” comes very close to Merleau-Ponty’s term “reprise”, the act of taking up again something from the past and including it in a present tradition.

Composition

In the process of recognizing and taking up again things from the past, we organize what first meets us as a chaos. To organize is to master, and taking up lived experience means to shape it, to fit it into a composition. “I rearrange things until I find the ideal composition. Aesthetic pleasure is essential, I have to like it. I exert myself to create order in the composition, in the distribution of planes. I work from the whole to the details, to the particulars, and then back again to the whole. I create unreal spaces, abstract compositions. I try out various formats. But I’m still only at the start. I concentrate on keeping the surface clean. Clean as velvet. Certain moments are complicated, certain surfaces tedious. On must alternate between tedium and concentration. The entire body is involved, the tension keeps growing towards the end, towards the decisive moment.” (Smetana 30.7.2010)

The body and our view of the world
We all have a body and it is our body that determines the angle from which we view the world. Without the body and a viewpoint we would see no world at all. On the other hand, the world we see is always deformed by our angle of view. Nobody will ever see the world as it is “objectively”. It is this deformation that makes the world our world and allows us to perceive the world as meaningful, as a life-world. However, our experience of this meaning depends on an important condition. “There is signification when we submit the data of the world to a ‘coherent deformation’,” writes Merleau-Ponty (1964:54) with a quotation from the author and art historian André Malraux. While deformation is a necessary consequence of our embodiment, coherence depends on our creative abilities and will. To perceive meaning is first of all to create meaning.

The body influences not only our view of things but also our creative abilities. “Our handwriting is recognized whether we trace letters on paper with three fingers of our hand or in chalk on the blackboard at arm’s length.” Since, Merleau-Ponty continues, “it is not a purely mechanical movement of our body which is tied to certain muscles and destined to accomplish certain materially defined movements, but a general motor power of formulation capable of the transpositions which constitute the constancy of style” (Merleau-Ponty 1964:65).

Style
We all have a body, but if our eyes and hands deform our impressions, they also have the power to form our expressions coherently, in other words to impart style to them. This is the special task of the artist and his style is nothing but the coherent deformation that he inflicts upon the world he paints. “For each painter, style is the system of equivalences that he makes for himself for the work which manifests the world he sees. It is the universal index of the ‘coherent deformation’ by which he concentrates the still scattered meaning of his perception and makes it exist expressly.” (Merleau-Ponty 1964:54-55) Coherence means connection, and we understand that coherence is decisive not only for the painter’s style but for the painter to find a meaning in what he sees around him, and in order for him to express this meaning meaningfully in what he paints. After all, coherence is just another word for the tradition that he makes exist for himself and for others when he decides to take it up.

Smetana is a master of drawing the objects he selects as his motifs. He depicts them clearly and distinctly, even when they are complicated and full of details, such as a wallpaper with Japanese ornamentation. He is proud of what he calls the academism of his work, i.e. the masterly depiction of a well-organized composition or a model from life. There nevertheless is something odd in his drawings that is not at all in keeping with academism and of which he is even more proud. A kind of awkwardness in the way he draws, a certain ubiquitous stylisation; and his perspectives. As in the case of Cézanne – and far more spectacularly in M. C. Escher of course, Smetana’s model – certain objects are seen from one point, while others from a different point. Often this point is so high that the vanishing point lies beyond the surface of the picture.

Classical central perspective is based on geometrical laws. In that sense, central perspective is an attempt to reconcile the subjective viewpoint with an objective presentation of reality. But Smetana is obviously not interested in any objective presentation of reality. In order to be objective, representation would first of all have to exclude artistic freedom, and it ceases to be objective as soon as the artist imprints his style on it and makes it artistic. However, Smetana is not interested in objective reality either, since such reality is devoid of meaning. It may possess properties, but one can speak of meaning only within a concrete lived situation. What Smetana brings about is a certain unreality, and his peculiar perspectives make it clear that it is not objective validity he aims at; if anything, it is an artificial space, i.e. the special space of art. That is where he can find himself and where we can find him. The objects Smetana uses to fill up the space are not interesting by virtue of their objective properties. They only become interesting in that light, that perspective, in which he decides to see them, subjecting them to that specific coherent deformation which becomes his style.  That happens when he rescues objects and people from the past and allows them to exist in the present. When he loads them with meaning and makes them part of the tradition he creates.

Tradition begins with our angle of view, “and this is what I mean when I say that I perceive with my body or my senses, since my body and my senses are precisely that familiarity with the world, born of habit, that implicit or sedimentary body of knowledge,” writes Merleau-Ponty (2010:277). This is not only about sensory perceptions and motor skills that we acquire through practice and that settle in our body. It is also about an intimacy with the world acquired through interaction with it. On the other hand, tradition presupposes choice too. That is why, according to Merleau-Ponty, we must decide to take up this implicit knowledge in order that the tradition exists for us. Tradition is not fate, it is a choice, and a choice we must confirm again and again. And each time it is ourselves we choose.

Tradition, in other words, imposes a set of rules that we must respect if we are to become bearers of tradition. Without rules there is no coherence, and without coherent deformation there is no style. Smetana sometimes creates large drawings, sometimes small ones. Some are coloured, many are black-and-white, some are both coloured and black-and-white. Some are still lifes, others portraits. Even so, his style abides by strict rules and is unmistakable. This has to do with the technique that he has practiced, developed and acquired. It guides his hand while his mind roams free. And he can be absent-minded only because he has the rules in his body: clearly articulated volumes, completely flat planes, no shadows or only hints of shadows, and a depth almost always limited by a back wall. Items without organic cohesion but often with surfaces that reflect each other in complex interplays. Balanced arrangements, static, completely motionless, without the slightest movement even where they continue beyond the boundaries of the drawing. An even crosshatching, freer or denser or completely compact, often such that an ornament or a contour is the chink left white in between surrounding surfaces drawn black.

The rules of the game operate as a frame around the drawing while at the same time opening up a space for the game, a space that Smetana masterfully exploits when drawing. Each new sheet may be seen as a chess board, and Smetana moves the objects of his tradition as a chess player moves the pieces of the game. The game is repetitive and yet always new: reprise and project as in any tradition according to Merleau-Ponty. This explains the pleasure of the game experienced by Smetana when drawing, while the rules he abides by keep challenging his inventiveness. Sometimes he wins, other times he loses, but with every new drawing he stands out more distinctly. Tradition is essential to a person who wishes to see himself clearly, and Smetana is clear to others too.

References:
Černá, Kateřina (2009) “Dělám si dobře”. In Art + antiques. Prague January.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg (2004) Truth and method. Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London and New York: Continuum.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2010) Phenomenology of perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge Classics.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964) Signs. Translated by Richard C. McCleary. Northwestern University Press.
Smetana, Tomáš (30.7.2010) Personal conversation with Mikkel B. Tin in Paris.
Smetana, Tomáš (7.10.2010) Personal conversation with Mikkel B. Tin in Žďár nad Sázavou.
Uhlář, Břetislav (2020) “Pozoruhodné obrazy Tomáše Smetany kreslené mikrotužkou HB 0.3 mm”. In Moravskoslezský Deník, Ostrava 12.1.

A Norwegian version of this text, including 14 reproductions, was printed as a catalogue on the occasion of Tomáš Smetana‘s exhibition in Oslo in 2011. Originally the text was written for Mikkel B. Tin‘s book Spilleregler og spillerom. Tradisjonens estetikk („Rules and leeway: the aesthetics of tradition“), published in 2011 by Novus Press, also in Norwegian though with an English summary. The book features a number of artistic expressions apt to illustrate various aspects of  Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics, which is the main topic of the book.
(Translated from the Norwegian original by Mikkel B. Tin.)

Exhibitions

• Titillating Sculpture

Selected artworks

• Tomáš Smetana Collages
• Tomáš Smetana Stories of Things
• Tomáš Smetana Friends

Autoři sochy/Authors of Sculptures

“Beauty is a symbol of truth. He who does not search for truth and pursues lesser things will not create art.” Andrei TarkovskyI kept this criterion in mind, which is so old that even Plato considered it ancient, during the selection of the works for display. Two things were important here:
1. the displayed object must contain a substantive message for the viewer, and 2. in its form it is, in the original sense, a thing created out of solid matter by an intelligent mind and a skillful artist.

What is titillating about a sculpture?
In the middle of Plato’s dialogue on the soul and beauty, Phaedrus writes:
Every soul fell to the earth, whence they will never take off except upon wings that can grow only with the power of Érōs.
Only through the senses can one experience beauty. Only Erós – love for a beautiful face, image or sculpture awakens a certain tickling and irritation in a person’s soul.
As if it had sprouted wings.
The soul that does not grow wings while alive will never take off after death.
Our life has no real meaning other than cultivating the wings of the soul by lying with the beauty that is present in everything.
A paraphrase (D.B.) of part of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, on the soul and beauty (246a–252c).

In other words, titillation is supposed to connect the beauty in the portrait with the beauty in the soul of the viewer. The divine soul resembles the human soul, and Erós mediates between the two. The poet Vladimír Holan speaks of Erós as the heavenly vault. Erós is the might of growing wings. It is in the work when someone who recalls beauty glimpses this beauty on a beautiful face or thing – a sculpture, a picture. At the instant when buds burgeon on his soul and from the buds begin to emerge wings, the viewer senses a certain itching, titillation and pain all at the same time. The sculpture is titillating because it causes this titillation. It causes the most important thing that can take place in the fate of a soul because either the soul dies in the body as in a mussel or it grows wings and prepares to take off. This life has no other purpose than the care of the soul, and beauty is the only thing visibly to the senses (wisdom or the good, for example, cannot be seen). Only beauty via the senses can cause the soul to grow. This exhibition is supposed to be full of titillation, which causes this transformation to take place in the viewer.

Selection Criteria
Over the course of two months I selected the work of 30 artists created between the years 1943 and 2019. Half of the artists are from the Association of Sculptors of the Czech Republic, a quarter of them are women, and one fifth of them are the works of deceased artists. Below you will find a list of exhibitors arranged by year of birth. I have added the place of birth and training, including the names of the heads of the respective ateliers. Ideally the student learns the fundamentals from his teacher and then adds something uniquely his own. Several artists (primarily those who studied during the period of Normalization) rarely acknowledge their professors at the Academy (Petr Císařovský and Tomáš Smetana), or they cannot acknowledge them because they saw them only a few times during their studies (Michal Blažek). The comrades did now allow Věra Nováková to finish her studies, not for reasons of a lack of talent. In this exhibition I wanted to provide evidence for the thesis that in art consumer biases concerning freshness, the development from worse to better, more modern and current do not apply. I did not follow a developmental line in (Czech) sculpture — isms did not interest me. As far as I was able, I based my selections on quality and beauty.
Pavlína Bartoňová

Karla Vobišová-Žáková
★1887 Kunžak ✚1961 Prague
1913–1921 School of Applied Arts in Prague with Stanislav Sucharda, Štěpán Zálešák, Josef Drahoňovský and Bohumil Kafka, 1921–1924 in Paris with Emil Antoin Bourdell

Hana Wichterlová
★1903 Prostějov ✚1990 Prague
1903–1990 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Jan Šturs

Stanislav Kolíbal
★ 1925 Orlová
1945–1950 Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague with Antonín Strnadel
1951–1954 Academy of Performing Arts in Prague with František Tröster

Zdeněk Palcr
★1927 Svitávka u Brna ✚1996 Prague
1945–1950 Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague with Josef Wagner

Josef Klimeš
★ 1928 Měřín in Moravia ✚2018 in Prague
1949–1954 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Jan Lauda

Věra Nováková
★ 1928 in Prague
1947 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, after the putsch in 1949 at the beginning of the fourth semester she was expelled during the political screenings

Vlasta Prachatická
★1929 Staré Smrkovice
1946–1951 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Otakar Španiel

Václav Frydecký
★ 1931 Olomouc + 2011 Prague
1950–1955 Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague with Bedřich Stefan and Jan Lauda. Assistant to Jan Lauda, Vincenc Makovský, Karel Hladík and Václav Bradáč.

Stanislav Hanzík
★ 1931 Most
1951–1956 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Jan Lauda
Assistant to Vincenc Makovský and Karel Lidický

Čestmír Mudruňka
★ 1935 Uhersko
1958–1964 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Jan Lauda, Karel Pokorný and Karel Hladík

Jan Hendrych
★ 1936 Prague
1955–1961 Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague with Josef Wagner and Jan Kavan

Jiří Sopko
★1942 Dubové na Podkarpatské Rusi
1960–1966 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Antonín Pelc

Jindřich Zeithamml
★1949 Teplice
1976–1982 Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf with Norbert Kricke

Petr Císařovský
★1950 Prague
1969–1975 Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague with Jan Nušl, Josef Malejovský, Jiří Soukup and Bedřich Hanák

Pavel Míka
★ 1952 Prague
1977–1983 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Jiří Bradáček

Jan Turský
★1955 Prague
1974–1980 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Jiří Bradáček

Michal Blažek
★1955 Prague
1977–1983 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Jiří Bradáček. Professionally assisted Jan Hendrych. Based on the wishes and testimony of Mr. Blažek I will add that he was thrown out of the Academy of Fine Arts after two years (1995) after he signed a petition protesting the fact that Knížák finished his studies in two months and received his diploma from his subordinate Aleš Veselý.

Jiří Plieštik
★1956 Nové Město in Moravia
1981–1987 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Miloš Axman and Stanislava Hanzíka. Assistant to Hana Wichterlová and Karel Nepraš

Jiří Středa
★1956 Náchod
1976–1982 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Karl Kolumk and Jiří Bradáček

Marius Kotrba
★ 1959 Čeladná ✚ 2011 Rožnov pod Radhoštěm
1981–1987 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Stanislav Hanzík and Miloš Axman

Tomáš Smetana
★1960 Praha
1980–1985 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Arnošt Padrlík

Libor Pisklák
★1962 Kladno
1985–1991 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Jan Hendrych. Assistant to Jan Hendrych

Šeborová Marie
★1966 Prague
1990–1993 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Jitka Svobodová
1993–1996 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Jan Hendrych

DenisAnfilov
★ 1967 Prague
1983–1987 the Václav Hollar Art Academy in Prague

David Janouch
★ 1967 Prague
1986–1992 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Jan Hendrych, 2014 – 2016 with Petr Siegl

Jaromír Švaříček-RASVA
★1967 Třebíč
1990–1996 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Jan Hendrych

Daniel Talavera
★1969 Městec Králové
Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Petr Siegl

Jiří Kobr
★ 1974 Dvůr Králové nad Labem
1997–2003 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Petr Siegl and Jindřich Zeithamml

Chládková Barbora
★ 1979
2001–2007 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Jan Hendrych

Kateřina Strach Tichá
★1987 Čáslav
2007–2013 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague with Milan Knížák, stáž u Jana Hendrycha
2011–2012 Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague with Eva Eisler

Exhibitions

• Titillating Sculpture