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July 5th, 2008
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Tender fury

Guth retrospective charts a journey of loss and discovery
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
March 5th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
An early woodcut, In Front of a Mirror, includes an angelic grace note.
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To mark the 100th anniversary of Hella Guth’s birth, the Jewish Museum in Prague has assembled a commendable retrospective of paintings, drawings and textile designs by this overlooked avant-garde painter and graphic artist of Jewish-Bohemian origins.
Guth was born 1908 in Sokolov, near Karlovy Vary, west Bohemia. Her family moved often due to her father’s employment, so as a child she also lived in Kladno and Ústí nad Labem. She studied at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna, and after her return to Czechoslovakia she lived in Liberec before moving to Prague in 1930.
The retrospective at the Robert Guttman Gallery starts with works made in the second year of her art studies (1928–29). Some of these early pieces already suggest strong promise for the future. Mother shows a woman watching (and barely touching) a naked child walking dangerously on a windowsill; the child has the face of an adolescent, or even older. In Front of a Mirror shows a nude woman and her mirrored reflection watching each other intently, with an angel at the top corner of the work.
Guth’s works from the early 1930s (after she had moved to Prague and enrolled in a painting class with Willi Nowak) include a number of brush and ink drawings and watercolors on paper. Her subjects are mostly figures — lovers, circus people, Gypsies and black jazz musicians. In this period, her works were influenced by a realist style known as Social Civilism, which was widespread in Bohemia after World War I and whose best-known proponent was Otto Gutfreund. For instance, her brush and ink drawing/watercolor On the Outskirts (1932–33) shows a group of laborers, four men and women, standing idly and gazing in separate directions — each seemingly looking for a more exciting place to go.
Some of her best graphic works were done in 1932–33 as a series from The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht. This includes The Ballad of Mack the Knife, Pirate Jenny and the Cannon Song, among others. They are not illustrations, but independent woodcut compositions inspired by literary and musical motifs in the opera.
After the success of this series, Guth was invited to exhibit in a number of group shows, including the Prager Secession exhibition of 1936. She worked with many of the German artists (including John Heartfield) who sought refuge in Prague from the Nazis between 1934 and 1939. After Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, she emigrated to London with the aid of the Thomas-Mann-Gruppe, which helped refugees get to England via Poland.
The works from her years in London (1939–50) are influenced by her detachment from her family and homeland, as well as by art trends from Paris. After World War II, Guth began her Surrealist period, and important works in this style are placed at the entrance to the show: Dancer and the Beggar (1946) and Pleasure Ride (1949).
While these notable works are considered Surrealist, Guth’s earlier Cubist influences and her inclination toward more abstract, avant-garde painting are also visible in these pieces.
Guth’s mother and sister died in concentration camps, and her brother barely escaped, which deeply affected her work, as similar tragedies did with many other displaced artists in Europe. Up to this point in her life, she was not able to support herself as an artist. In Prague and in London, she made a living as a graphic artist and illustrator. While there were a few grants available from the Czech government in exile, and exhibitions at the Czechoslovak Institutes in London and Scotland, she did not get much attention from art critics or private galleries until she moved to Paris.
Guth lived in Paris from 1951 until her death in 1992, at the age of 84. From this period, Dissolved Figures (1952) is among her best works, looking like a sinister, crowded sidewalk. The figures are splintered or shattered into colored fragments, giving a house-of-mirrors effect. (It could also be a city skyline fractured to similar effect.) Heads on Black (1950) has similarly colorful shards, looking like a tower of animalistic bodies against a strikingly black background.
Guth maintained this style till the end of her career, and the exhibit includes a couple of fine geometric abstractions made with tempera on black cardboard, along with gouache and tempera on handmade paper, from the 1960s. In the 1970s, she lightened up her works and began to reveal figures again (especially faces).
Guth’s paintings and drawings from her last years hold true to the vision she seemingly had at the beginning of her career in Prague, which became especially strong after she moved to Paris. She confidently aligned with the avant-garde, whether with figurative (graphic art), Surrealistic or geometric abstract works, always infusing them with a feeling of loss and displacement. At their best, they are works seeped in both tenderness and subtle fury.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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