Bohuslav Reynek House at the Stone Bell

After almost 20 years, the City Gallery Prague is again showing works by Bohuslav Reynek in the same venue, the House at the Stone Bell, this time commemorating the 40th anniversary of the artist's death.

An extraordinary quiet emanates from Reynek's works. Whether he is depicting a still life, a religious theme or nature, beauty and gentleness are always present. This is an excellent time of the year to focus on the tiny graphics of a fragile soul in the wonderful space of a medieval palace.

The typical image of Reynek is of a fragile old man living in the forgotten village of Petrkov, somewhere in the rugged Vysočina region. A shy man who in his privacy created deeply spiritual Christian-inspired graphics after reading the Bible by the light of a candle is a very tempting idea that might answer to the traditional notion of a hidden genius working alone and not really paying attention to others and their views - and, of course, waiting to be discovered and admired. But this does not paint a complete picture of Bohuslav Reynek.

Reynek was born into a family of farmers at the end of 19th century, during the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. His father wanted him to study agriculture at a Prague university, but this effort ended a few weeks into the first term, and Reynek returned to Petrkov.

There, he started to work on translations of his favorite poets from German and French. He also got in touch with a local publisher, Josef Florián, and thanks to this contact, Reynek gained a deep knowledge of contemporary literature. And not only that: He also had an opportunity to mingle in top cultural circles. For instance, Reynek became friends with the famous painter Josef Čapek, who made illustrations for some of his published translations.

Being in close touch with art and literature, Reynek soon became not just a mediator and translator but also an author in both fields. At the beginning of the 1930s, Reynek studied a book of graphic techniques that inspired a lifelong interest in dry-point and etching. Although active in the fields of graphics, poetry and translation, all remained independent and did not overlap. According to Reynek's words, which one can hear in a documentary that is part of the exhibition, graphics and poetry were for him two different views of the same world. Thus, for instance, he never illustrated his own books of poems.

The translations Reynek worked on were not of minor authors - they included Verlaine, Baudelaire, Valéry, Corbiere and Hugo, to name just a few. One can contemplate how each poet influenced Reynek's work and life, but there was one poet who truly changed his life: Suzanne Renaud, a French poet who published her first book of poems, Ta vie est la, in 1924.

Once this book got into Reynek's hands, he fell in love with the poet, even though he had never seen her. One day the shy man from Petrkov decided to meet her and went to Grenoble, France. Two years later, he married Suzanne.

The family lived half the year in Petrkov and half the year in Grenoble until 1936. It was in Grenoble that Reynek started to draw extensively, and these works caught the interest of a local bookseller and gallery owner, Jules Laforge. Together, they prepared an exhibition of Reynek's drawings, and after the success of the first show they repeated the event annually. Reynek sold hundreds of works. After 1948, it was no longer possible for him to travel freely out of Czechoslovakia, so Reynek and Renaud remained in Petrkov, marginalized.

In the 1960s, a window opened for a breath of fresh air in the period leading up to the Prague Spring. Reynek also gained a number of admirers and became a kind of cult figure for artists and art historians. For instance, among the first to regularly visit the aging man were art historians Věra Jirousová and her husband, Ivan "Magor" Jirous. But many others visited Reynek, including the artist and poet Jiří Kolář and the poet Ivan Diviš. The forgotten village of Petrkov became a place of pilgrimage for many intellectuals.

But the period of Normalization - the restrictive 1970s, when the communists reasserted their strong totalitarian power - also made a mark on Petrkov, and Reynek's last book of poems wasn't allowed to be published. Still, Reynek had already become a subject of intellectual interest.

Only history, with its absurd sense of humor, can give rise to the strange contrast of contemplative religious graphics from the 1950s and forced communist collectivization. The same kind of absurdity that sees the world-famous freedom fighter and humanist Václav Havel dying the same weekend as the world-famous despot Kim Jong-il.

In a democratic Czech Republic, today we can freely admire the power of Reynek's art. We can forget annoying day-to-day troubles and devote some time to the quiet contemplation of Christianity, its European significance, to freedom, what constitutes a good life and other values, if we wish. With this in mind, we all remember Václav Havel, whose fight for many of these values made our world better.

Filip Šenk can be reached at
fsenk@praguepost.com