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Abstract sensuality

A retrospective sheds new light on a 20th-century painter
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By Lizzy Le Quesne
For The Prague Post
August 8th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Like many of his paintings, Zrzavý's portraits of women are studies in shape.
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Jan Zrzavý

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The National Gallery has mounted a major exhibition of the well-loved 20th-century Czech painter Jan Zrzavý (1890–1977). The impressive retrospective spans his entire career — from pieces made at age 16 to one before his death in 1977 — and offers the first opportunity to see in one place the breadth of his output, with more than 150 paintings, drawings, illustrations, sketchbooks and theatrical designs.
Known for dreamlike symbolism and his feeling-based color theories, Zrzavý’s oeuvre is most celebrated for its melancholic and poetic qualities. Ranging from mythological or biblical scenes to portraits and semi-abstract still lifes and landscapes, the work of this largely self-taught artist shows a number of different European influences, including Pointillism, Post-Impressionism and Cubism, with his major works falling into a polished style of carefully shaded and rounded figures and objects, geometrically composed.
With Zrzavý’s impassioned feeling for color and composition (explained in his own texts alongside the works), the purely decorative pieces are perhaps the most effective. In the tiny but delightful Palm Tree (1908), the asymmetrical pattern is composed of graceful and dainty gold stars and circles, layered over delicate palm fronds painted in red on soft beige paper. The decorative, stylized form of the palm tree recurs throughout Zrzavý’s work, and features dominantly in his magnum opus Cleopatra (1942–57). Taking 14 years to paint, and displayed alongside the full-sized study drawing that preceded it, this huge work dominates the show. Again, it is most successful on an abstract level. A handful of objects and a figure are arranged in a careful, poised composition. Spherical and angular shapes are forcefully contrasted with flat, silhouetted forms, while strong primary colors resonate strangely against a background landscape painted in shades of black and white.
In terms of content, the painting remains emblematic. A reclining woman in glowing cherry red is all soft curves and dark crevices. Shining spherical breasts, belly, calves and thighs are topped with a flat-faced oval head, complete with wide-set, undemanding eyes and a tiny, crescent-moon mouth. She smiles lightly at the viewer while she holds one hand, angled toward us, in a loose, open fist — a distinct gesture that has a crude and comedic contemporary significance. In the background, the ubiquitous palms have morphed unmistakably into marijuana leaves in pure shining gold, towering over a scene of water, pyramids and a giant urn. This bulky vision of earthly delights and sensuality is strangely inert and sour.
Melancholy and shades of torment or madness are other recurring themes from Zrzavý’s early period, presented in several simplistically symbolic images, as in his first major painting The Valley of Sorrow (1907). In this picture of an imagined landscape, a shaded, flat plateau is surrounded by viciously pointed blue-green mountains (apparently inspired by the mountainous background of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which vastly impressed Zrzavý at 17), with a winding pathway leading between the peaks. A slender female figure lingers under a lonely blossoming rose bush. Madman (1918) is two faces superimposed: a bewildered, conscious face with human eyes and a swollen, octopuslike thing wrenching out of it. This form with an amorphous bulging forehead, as if holding a surfeit of overbearing thoughts, also appears in Suffering and Grief (1918). Lovers (Obsession) (1914) depicts a couple embracing in Zrzavý’s rather naive, unconvincing style of abstracted bodies made up from soft shapes in tones of sickly green and blue. Both figures wear feeble delirious smiles, but the man’s upward-looking eyes are red and manic.
Painting from life in his portraits and landscapes, Zrzavý reveals a more delicate touch and sensitivity to color. His paintings of Brittany harbors have a buoyant lightness and lyricism, and some of his color work is spectacular, with succulent greens, reds, pinks and oranges blurring and jostling roguishly together. Early self-portraits show Zrzavý with large, soft red lips and long, flowing dark hair — feminine and sensuous with a poised, glamorous and self-conscious air, painted in a warm, rosy palette. Toward the end of his career, the self-portrait Old Man (1970) shows a gentler, more tender image of an old man’s face.
Zrzavý was not a convincing painter of women, who invariably appear as bulging, decorative objects. Instead, a homoerotic thread runs through his work, most obviously in the large illustrative painting Spring (1924–29), which shows a naked boy reclining in a meadow. The superbly witty and charming drawing Steam Bath (1940) shows four nude, sturdy middle-aged men with handlebar moustaches and pointy beards. Stocky and cherubic, with full soft bellies and plump little breasts and genitals, they stand and sit with cute, pudgy pride.
Zrzavý was appointed a National Artist in the 1960s and enjoyed considerable public acclaim within his country during that era, with various film and radio programs celebrating his work. Accepted both by official circles (where he was not seen as politically engaged) and the art world (for working in a style unaligned with Socialist Realism), he was regarded as a symbolist and a painter of mystical genius. This reputation may lack impact when his work is viewed in a wider contemporary context. But it nevertheless represents an important chapter in Czech art.

Lizzy Le Quesne can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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