The Prague Post Online: Tempo: Light in a time of darkness

September 7th, 2008

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Light in a time of darkness

Painter, art collector, gallery owner gathered world-class experience

By Victor Velek
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
September 26th, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

Art critics say Jiří Anderle's works, such as Grandmother and Child (1990) of his Appasionata series, show "human inner worlds."

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

A new addition to Anderle's gallery — a portrait of his mother.

THE ANDERLE FILE

Born: Sept. 14, 1936
Education: The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (195561)
Artist: Graphic works, paintings, book illustrations (for authors such as Franz Kafka, Bohumil Hrabal) and laureate of a number of printmaking awards
Represented: In collections of prestigious galleries and museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York City; the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Exhibited: First solo exhibition in 1966, since then works displayed in Germany, the United States, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Poland and the former Yugoslavia; countless joint exhibitions
Art collector: Passionate collector of tribal art from sub-Saharan Africa
Gallery owner: Since 2003, he has been running — in cooperation with Prague 6 — Galerie Anderle (Anderle Gallery), a fin de siecle villa in PragueBubeneč hosting a permanent exhibition of his pictures, his African art collection and temporary displays

As the story goes, an unexpected Aurora Borealis appeared in the Prague sky the night of Nov. 17, 1989, ushering in the Velvet Revolution that collapsed the previous totalitarian regime.

Sitting in his house near the Baroque St. Matthew’s Church in Prague’s placid neighborhood of Hanspaulka, Czech painter and printmaker Jiří Anderle, now 71, was mesmerized by the colorful play of light in the sky.

Anderle heard of clashes in the center of the city on a forbidden Voice of America broadcast on the radio and wondered what the future might bring.

“I was completely stunned,” Anderle says. “ ‘What message does the universe send us through this shining light?’ I wondered.”

Magical moments like this have been turning points throughout Anderle’s life, helping him create signature pieces that hang in museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Although he lived behind the Iron Curtain, Anderle was able to travel around the globe, first as a member of the Prague Black Light Theater established by his fellow student Jiří Srnec, later as a distinguished artist whose fame spread far beyond the hermetically enclosed confines of communist Czechoslovakia.

Despite traveling throughout the world — an unreachable privilege for most of his compatriots during totalitarian rule — Anderle was anything but a communist protégé. He never joined the Communist Party.

“The one who loves jazz cannot become a member of the Communist Party,” Anderle, a great devotee of classical and jazz music, says with a faint smile.

“My life has just been marked by a long chain of lucky coincidences.”

The fortunate series started as early as in his childhood, which was spent in the small village of Pavlíkov in central Bohemia. It was a period he remembers as a beautiful time full of magic.

A local teacher encouraged him to apply for admission to an art college in Prague, and Anderle left his rural background for the fine arts school in the Czechoslovak capital in the early 1950s. It was the depressing Stalinist era, when the newly established communist reign strengthened its position through show trials and party purges.

But young Anderle managed to escape the darkness by immersing himself in music and art. He read classics such as Flaubert, Zola, Dostoevsky and Kafka, attended concerts of classical music, listened to jazz on foreign radio stations and played drums in a band.

Years of playing with the band at countless village dances inspired Anderle in his first mature works — the series Vesnické tancovačky (Village Dances). The Chagal-like prints and paintings of bundled dancing couples capture the strong human emotions stirred by music and motion in the dance hall.

After eight years of nomadic life with the Prague Black Light Theater, filled with performances in all corners of the globe, Anderle had a unique perspective of what was going on in the international art scene. While his contemporary Jan Švankmajer, a distinctive Czech filmmaker, got acquainted with his beloved Surrealism through reproductions printed in a Soviet book criticizing “bourgeois” and “degenerate” art forms, Anderle had the chance to see modern art firsthand, including art forms not allowed in Czechoslovakia.

“I was the best-informed artist in Prague,” Anderle says, smiling as he recollects the trips in the 1960s.

Those inspirations were so overwhelming, however, that Anderle’s imagination got blocked.

So, like many other local artists at the time, he decided to experiment with LSD under a psychiatrist’s supervision.

“The key piece of knowledge stemming from my LSD experiments was that nothing must strip me of my time, that time is the most precious thing I have,” Anderle says.

During a tour in Australia in 1964, Anderle became fascinated by the art of Australian Aborigines. The distinct, transparent, X-ray-like pictures of this native art tradition become a great source of inspiration for his work. Anderle then started collecting tribal art, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa.

Later that year, Anderle visited the Biennale in Venice, a large international art exhibition. He recalls the depression into which he sank when he realized that theater hampered his dream of being an artist. He decided to quit the theater and devote himself to painting.

“The very same day two decades later, I stood in the Biennale’s central exhibition in front of my own pictures,” he says.

Unique bundle

Anderle has a unique creative personality combining various inspirational sources — tribal art, a postmodern spirit of quoting freely from past artistic achievements and existential preoccupations, says Richard Drury, a curator at the Czech Museum of Fine Arts. His pictures are attempts to break into human inner worlds, Drury adds.

“The very strong existential turn his work has is something specifically Central European,” Drury says. “[Anderle’s fascination with] the inner working of the human psyche [is] something specific.”

Nevertheless, Anderle’s artistic output crosses all geographical confines, Drury adds. His work is universal, which is what makes it popular across the world.

“Anderle, I think, is strangely uncategorizable, incomparable,” Drury says. “You can draw lots of threads in his work — primitivism, the Renaissance tradition, the 20th-century explosion of abstract color and imagination; it’s all there. Anderle is such a complex bundle of different threads; you just can’t compare this bundle to someone else. You can’t.”

This uniqueness fits a description Anderle reserves for himself — that of the “lonely runner.” He says he has always followed his inner creative voices, and distrusts mainstream fashionable or fame-promising trends.

“The very basic thing of artistic creativity is inspiration,” he says. “Today, artists often create according to PR strategies. This might be rewarding in the short term but it’s fatal for the future.”

During his work at the Black Light Theater, Anderle realized that applause and fame are ephemeral.

“Success is a chimera,” he stresses. “The whole world is a big theater scene.”

Anderle’s growing success abroad in the 1970s and 1980s met with official ignorance at home. While many other artists retreated or went into “inner exile,” Anderle kept a low profile, but kept working.

Like some other unconventional figures of the time, including his close friend, novelist Bohumil Hrabal, Anderle was generously ignored, rather than persecuted by the establishment.

Anderle says he was allowed to travel to and exhibit in the West because it brought money to the state budget. He describes it as an era of paradoxes.

“My pictures hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York next to Piccasso’s and Bogan’s [Bohumil Hrabal’s] novels were published in Portuguese,” Anderle says. “In Prague’s streets, we crept along the walls, trying to be invisible to the regime.”

Anderle’s print Appassionata (1976) and theme series such as Hommage a Diane Arbus, Iluze a realita (Illusion and Reality) and Commedia dell’arte (all created in the 1980s) are disturbing reflections of the times.

Anderle’s escapes to brighter realms were directed towards Old Masters — Bosch, Leonardo, Durer, Rembrandt and Goya — and his own family. His mother remains a recurring inspiration to this day.

Two new 2007 additions to the permanent exhibition of his work in Galerie Anderle (Anderle Gallery in Prague), the gallery he established, are large paintings featuring portraits of his mother.

“I will always remember a visit to my mom’s house, my native house,” he notes nostalgically, “She was very old, past 90. I came and asked her, ‘Mom, when was the last time you took a bath?’ ‘Oh, just yesterday,’ she replied. ‘Come on’, I said, ‘Take a bath right now, I’ll help you.’ ”

“I helped her with the bath, and I saw her shrunken small body and wondered that life is a great mystery. I saw her and thought, ‘From this being I have come into this world.’ ”

Since his LSD enlightenment, Anderle carefully watches his time. “Life is so short, I must very carefully choose what picture should be completed,” he says.

The next day, Anderle delivers a speech in his gallery to open a temporary exhibition of African raffia mats. The speech is on his love of Africa.

“According to newest scientific findings, all humanity has stemmed from three African women,” says the African art enthusiast to assembled guests. Around, on three floors of the gallery, 200 African masks and sculptures of the permanent display calmly listen to his words. Amid them, Anderle’s own art works are juxtaposed, giving the space an uncanny atmosphere.

“You all standing here, we all, in fact, are Africans.”

Victor Velek can be reached at vvelek@praguepost.com

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