When Czechoslovakia came under communist control in 1948, the impact on political and cultural freedoms was immediate and long-lasting. The avant-garde artists who had been forging a distinct Czech style since the 1930s had to choose between producing Social Realism or having no careers at all. Ties that had been forged with Western Europe creative circles were cut. And when it came time for critics to chronicle modern art, this isolation meant that many histories left out Czech art produced in the postwar period entirely.

Now, a major survey of two of the avant-garde's key artists, František Gross and František Hudeček, has come to the Municipal Library, featuring the most comprehensive collection to date of their work. An insightful long-term look at the painters' lives and oeuvres, the show explores Gross and Hudeček both as individuals and in relation to one another.

Born in the same year, 1909 (Gross in Nová Paka and Hudeček in Moravia's Němčice), both men moved to Prague in 1928 and became friends while studying at the School of Applied Arts. Both eventually quit the school, moved by the development of European art in the 1920s and '30s, which failed to impress their professors. Gross and Hudeček went on to form Skupina 42 (Group 42), one of the key creative movements in Czech modern art, along with several other like-minded writers and artists, including Jiří Kolář and Kamil Lhoták.

While in many respects the artists' lives ran in parallel — sharing friends, experiencing the same social and political upheavals that defined the 20th century — their creative approaches and conclusions differ dramatically, as this exhibition reveals.

Curated by Eva Petrová, a scholar of Skupina 42 and expert on Gross, and Jiří Machalický, a freelance curator who's worked with the National Gallery and is preparing a book on Hudeček, the show features nearly 600 works and personal documents, including paintings, drawings, photographs and a video. Alternating between Gross and Hudeček room by room, the show's first section explores early works created during the 1930s; the second section spans the 1940s, including the Skupina 42 period and works produced in response to World War II. Both men stopped painting during the 1950s, unwilling to conform to the Soviet idea of art. Gross found employment at arts-related institutions, while Hudeček confined himself to postal stamps and illustrations.

The show concludes with works created from the 1960s until the respective deaths of the artists: Gross in 1985 and Hudeček in 1990. Many of these later paintings are new to local audiences, as emphasis has traditionally been placed on pieces produced pre-1948.

Divergent paths

Following the 1930s, when inspiration came from Cubism, Surrealism and Dada, and the Skupina 42 period (1942–48), which took Prague and its unseen beauty — peripheral neighborhoods, discarded objects and industrial landscapes — as its primary themes, Gross and Hudeček developed in divergent directions, in keeping with their contrasting personalities.

Gross, known as humorous and lighthearted, yet a strong-willed man of determined character, shifted from Cubism to dark, analytical realism to abstracted, colorful forms. He often blurred the line between imagination and reality, translating actual objects, landscapes and people into interpreted images. A fascination with machines appears as early as 1936 in Strojky (Tiny Machines), and continues throughout his career.

Gross was a prolific, dedicated artist who painted or drew every day until he died, and his Hlava (Head) series gives us a sense of what the inside of his own head must have been like: intensely busy and crowded, hardly able to contain the ideas, thoughts and objects swirling around inside. Gross favored strong, primary colors in his monumental works, with hues of red — inspired by the soil in his native Nová Paka — appearing throughout his paintings.

"Gross was full of creative power, his playfulness and lively imagination staying with him throughout his career," writes curator Petrová. "A spontaneous and rational painter, he was able to connect even contradictions with an infallible artistic feeling."

Whereas Gross' work is populated with quirky shapes, distorted faces and friendly chaos, Hudeček's depicts solitary figures, dreamlike settings and organic shapes, captured in cool shades of blue and green. An introverted, moody character, Hudeček is said to have created the atmospheric Noční chodec (Night Walker) series after solitary nocturnal meanderings through Prague.

"Hudeček is melancholically pensive, and perhaps also more profound and philosophical [than Gross]," says freelance curator Machalický. "His work displays a markedly romantic feeling, yet at the same time a sense for precise order, a clear and strict arrangement of pictorial space."

At times emotional and deeply personal, at other times rational and painstakingly detail-oriented, and sometimes both — as in the magical textures in Les (Forest) and Fialová (Purple) — Hudeček was an individualist unafraid to forge ahead on his own. Before Skupina 42 dissolved in 1948, for instance, Hudeček broke with the group's glorification of the city and started depicting rural themes. Unpredictable and experimental, he explored geometric abstraction, realism and op art — in fact, Hudeček is considered the only notable Czech op artist.