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Art from the thaw

A significant but mild-mannered bid for artistic freedom
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
September 12th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Jiří Martin's Fikus is a typically innocuous entry in this once-inflammatory exhibition.
Art Group Máj 57

at Prague Castle Imperial Stables Ends Dec. 15. Open Tues.–Sun. 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

The exhibit of the Art Group Máj 57 includes approximately 70 paintings and sculptures from the late 1950s and early 1960s by 36 Czech artists who were striving to break out of the constraints of the Communist Party’s state-sanctioned Socialist Realism.
After Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, there was a temporary political thaw in Czechoslovakia. Máj 57’s first exhibition, held in May 1957 at Prague’s opulent Obecní dům, would have been unthinkable just a year earlier.
Today, especially from a Western cultural perspective, it’s hard to imagine any of these works causing a stir.
At the beginning of the show there is an Abstract Expressionist painting by Jiří Balcar beside two other gritty and more interesting works by the same artist — one urban view titled Street with Petřín (1957), and a dark mix of abstract street grit titled Street III (1957). Other works from the group’s first and largest exhibit mostly encompass modernist landscapes and figurative art. Besides Balcar’s pieces, the only other standout is Jiří Martin’s Grief (1952), a circle of bright yellow around a white-haired woman crouching in remorse. The nearby sculptures by Stanislav Podhrázský of a woman’s legs turned upside down, and by Miloslav Chlupáč of a ram’s head (1950), are hardly confrontational.
After the first exhibit, the number of artists in Máj 57 decreased and the core of the group became more well-defined. The new group exhibited twice in 1958: in May at Palais Danube in Prague, then in June at the Crooked Wheel Gallery (Galeria Krzywe Koło) in Warsaw.
After these three successful shows there was another exodus, as some members of the group set off to pursue their art with a greater personal focus, while others simply had no reason to remain in the group. Máj 57 arose in a climate of safety in numbers, when artists outside of the Socialist Realist style felt the need to exhibit as part of a larger group. But by the end of the third show, this concern had dissipated.
And it’s hard to imagine how the paintings of Jitka Kolínská, for example, which include Still Life With Lying Dog (1956), Still Life (1955) and Widow (1951), could have ever sparked an uproar or revolt of the masses. On the other hand, the suppression of such innocuous works, and many others like them, eventually led to the demise of the absurd political doctrines regulating artists.
There are centerpiece works in this exhibit by Zbyněk Sekal, including his Still Life With Coffee Mill (1953–54), which portrays a Modernist-Surrealist mill aged (with cracks on the canvas, intentional or not) to resemble an Old Master painting. The drab, purple-faced brunette titled Girl (1957) by Sekal best communicates the zeitgeist of Czechoslovakia in this era, with the subject’s look of utter weariness and plain boredom.
In 1961, the group put on a fourth exhibition, in Poděbrady. This time, the show finally caused a public scandal and was closed down three days after it opened. A text (if not manifesto) by Miloslav Chlupáč in the catalog for the exhibit was the likely trigger for the crackdown, as the art itself seems unlikely to have set off alarms.
A text on display shows the communists’ response, taken from an editorial in the Party newspaper Rudé právo (Red Justice), criticizing Máj 57 for their “spurious” interpretation of Khrushchev’s 1956 speech and suggestion of “the failure of our Socialist art.”
After another gradual lifting of restrictions on artists, the group exhibited two more times, in Prague and Teplice in 1964, before they disbanded. These last shows included strong mixed-media paintings by Sekal, noteworthy works by Jan and Eva Švankmajer, and above all Theodor Pištěk’s Diary of a Missing Person — Object in Four Parts (1963): four automobile radiators, rusting and smashed up a bit, on four metal plates. Vojta Nolč’s mixed-media painting Erosion (1963–64) is the subtlest standout: a black hole surrounded in baked golden brown.
More than anything else, this show points up the idiocy of the anti-cultural climate under the communist regime in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the end, it is a political exposé as much as an exhibition.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (12/09/2007):

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