Painting the cosmos

If you find yourself with some free time during the holidays, spending a few hours with Václav Boštík's radiant and transfixing art works at the Municipal Library would be an excellent way to end the old year or start the new one. It is a rare opportunity to see a comprehensive display of one of the finest Czech artists of the 20th century. This is Boštík's first complete retrospective, although the show's curator, Karel Srp, also organized Boštík's partial retrospective in 1989.

Boštík was born in 1913 in Horní Újezd near Litomyšl and moved to Prague as a young man to study drafting and descriptive geometry at the Czech Technical University. Like all artists of his time, his path to nonobjective art began with realistic depiction, which gradually yielded to more abstract expression. Some viewers may be familiar only with the long abstract phase of his career, so it is exciting to be able to see the kernels of his mature work in his early paintings.

The show begins with a young Boštík, the son of a small-town miller, painting the family flour mill in a number of variations. The Mill from 1935-36 is composed of simplified geometric shapes in light, muted colors. His landscapes from the late 1930s blur recognizable geographical features into cloudlike forms or patches of color floating against the sky. By the late 1940s, the mill is depicted more abstractly, in slabs of different greens with touches of brown and a patch of sky. Proceeding through the show, it is interesting to note how the family mill was not only a springboard for Boštík's mature abstract style but also a touchstone to which he continually returned for inspiration.

Over time, Boštík gradually stripped his paintings of all unnecessary manifestations of objective reality, focusing only on what was fundamental: geometric form, surface structure, color and especially light, all of which became metaphors and symbols imbued with deeper meaning. Along his journey toward total abstraction, symmetry became Boštík's unifying principle, especially in the 1950s, when he made such works at Spider, in which the recognizable form of an arachnid becomes a symbolic point of equilibrium.

In the same period, Boštík painted numerous nebulae and color fields, clusters, grids and rasters, anchoring his geometric structures with points of light and dark, or squares of luminous color. These soft forms and structures came to dominate his later work, with line asserting itself more strongly from the late 1960s onward. In parallel with his paintings, Boštík also made several hundred pastels from the early 1980s until the end of his life, and there is a section of the show devoted to them.

There is an unmistakable parallel between the work of Boštík and Mark Rothko, who was dealing with very similar aesthetic concerns while working half a world away. In both artists' early work, one can see the seeds of their well-known mature styles.

Rothko and fellow New York painter Adolf Gottlieb published a manifesto in which they wrote, "We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth."

Boštík was also searching for higher truths. He viewed abstract expression as an analogy for the cosmos, a universe that prefers order over chaos, light over darkness, one that is in favor of rational thought. His Christian orientation inconspicuously permeated his entire body of work. It was never just soft geometry. As Rothko famously said, "There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing."

One major difference between Boštík and his counterparts beyond the East bloc was that Boštík had to contend not just with cranky art critics but with a totalitarian regime that dictated Socialist Realism as the only legitimate style and also repressed any expression of religious faith.

Boštík dealt with religious themes throughout his career, from Crucifixion scenes in the 1930s and 1940s to The Shroud of Turin from 1995, which, exceptionally, brings a figurative element back into his ethereal fields of color. Religious symbolism also appeared in the form of crosses and triangles, the latter emerging later in his career and sometimes expressed merely with points rather than lines or a solid form. These are eternal symbols Boštík used to communicate elemental metaphysical ideas.

Loathe to burden his works with titles - he often would name them simply "Painting," "Drawing" or "Print" - Boštík unequivocally gave a name to one of his last large paintings: Universe. In this work from 1996, a point of light that is barely perceptible from close up comes into focus as one steps back. At the same time, the painting draws one deeper into its green-blue color field and halo-like circle. Boštík wrote, "The surface becomes my field of operation. It is within that surface that I have to plant my whole concept of the universe."

After several solo shows between 1957 and 1968, Boštík could no longer exhibit his work in totalitarian Czechoslovakia. He gave up painting for several years, during which time he made drawings. The board of the Union of Czechoslovak Artists rejected a proposal in 1963 to hold a retrospective for his 50th birthday. Nearly a half century later, Boštík is finally getting that long overdue retrospective, and what's more, in the exhibition space he considered to be the most beautiful in Prague, where he wished to have his work exhibited one day.

The only minor drawback to this show is perhaps its overabundance. This comprehensive exhibition demands time; one simply can't rush past Boštík's exquisite paintings and be out the door in 20 minutes. A visitor may emerge from the gallery into Prague's darkening streets and realize that several hours have passed. But beautifully.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com