Růžena at Prague Castle Imperial Stables

In the first decades of the 20th century, while many Czech artists were cavorting in the European art capital of Paris, at least one, Růžena Zátková, went off to the capital of Italy.

The purpose of her sojourn was to follow her diplomat husband, who was representing Czarist Russia in Rome. In Italy, Zátková met with members of the Futurist movement. Not long after, she contracted tuberculosis. Soon after her premature death, she fell into obscurity.

The Czech art historian Alena Pomajzlová has spent years piecing together the fascinating story of Zátková, the only Czech artist and one of the few women to ally with the Italian Futurist movement.  

The title of the resulting exhibition, "Růžena," or "Rose," is a tip-off that the primary aim of the show is to present the artist as a personality. There are not many of her works in the show; the whereabouts of most of them are unknown. However, a number of Zátková's documented works are shown as black-and-white reproductions. The relatively few works are supplemented with pictures, documents and works by artists in the Italian Futurist circle, including postcards sent to Zátková by Giacomo Balla and, for artistic context, works by other artists with whom she allied in Italy.

The Futurists, with their declared glorification of war, endorsement of nationalism and scorn for women, seem improbable artistic cohorts for a Czech female artist. But then, Zátková was an unlikely figure for her time. Born in 1885, she studied with the Czech Impressionist painter Antonín Slavíček, though her main artistic development happened after leaving her homeland to follow her husband, whom she married in 1910. In Italy, Zátková befriended the leading Italian Futurist artists, and through her husband, became acquainted with the Russian avant-garde and found a kindred spirit in Natalia Goncharova. Her second husband was an Italian leftist journalist.

The exhibition and especially the accompanying catalog (the text is in English as well as Czech) do a commendable job of piecing together the story of this artist's life and work from fragmentary information. Zátková's personality and ideas are revealed through correspondence with fellow artists and her sister, who was also a painter.  

Was Zátková a proto-feminist? The case is not made explicitly, but it is implied. Catalog texts explain how she sought a place of freedom through her art that was not commonly afforded women of her day. She formed a friendship, perhaps as early as 1914, with the Russian Cubo-Futurist and Blaue Reiter member Goncharova - a trailblazer in terms of how to function as a woman in the male-dominated art world. Yet it was only after the end of World War I, when the status of women began to improve, that Zátková was properly recognized as an artist.

When she exhibited together with the Futurists, Zátková wished to be identified only as Signora X. She had two solo shows in Rome, in 1921 and 1922 (the 1921 exhibition poster Latinizes her name as Rougena), and she was preparing a retrospective exhibition for Berlin and Prague at the time of her death.

Despite her early art training with Slavíček, whose influence is seen in a number of her early works, such as Impressionistic landscapes, urban scenes, and garden and river views from the first decade of the 20th century, Zátková was more interested in capturing an essence than in recording fleeting impressions. Driven by spiritual and intellectual concerns, she traveled a path from objective to nonobjective art. Like many artists of the time, she was drawn to the occult, and she participated in séances. Three spiraling drawings from her "States of Mind" series are on display: Victory of the Stronger, Affection and Anxiety.

Zátková worked in different styles simultaneously. While producing fully abstract works, she was also making naturalistic drawings. Her work followed parallel streams of development rather than a linear course. Her subject matter is typically gentler than that of the speed- and machine-glorifying Futurists. Most in line with the Futurist agenda was her 1916 sculpture Ram (The Sensibility, Noises and Rhythmical Energies of a Pile Driver.) The sculpture's whereabouts are unknown, but the sculptor Michal Gabriel has created a replica for this exhibition using photographs.

Among the show's other highlights are Untitled (Park) from 1913-15, in which the objectively painted buildings in the background give way to angular abstraction in the foreground, and the brightly colored Roosters from 1922.

The show also presents three of Zátková's collages from 1919-21: one, ostensibly titled Moon from her "Luminous Paintings" series, a light-reflecting abstract collage created from foil and metal; Snow, whose surface shimmers with tiny seed beads; and Water, with cut cardboard evoking ripples and waves.

Although the Futurists occasionally created portraits, images of the machine age were their main concern. Zátková produced a number of "psychic portraits" of her friends, and her best-known work is a portrait of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Futurist movement's driving force. Visitors are greeted by a monochrome rendering of the Italian artist's intensely gazing face.

The show culminates with the vividly colored painting Marinetti - Sunlight from around 1922. Having Marinetti as the alpha and omega of the exhibition places Zátková perhaps too solidly in the Futurist context, while it is clear that her artistic interests and spiritual leanings were more wide-ranging and the aims set out in the Futurist Manifesto at odds with the Zátková presented in this exhibition and catalog.

An independent but related exhibition that ran during the month of May, "A Room of One's Own," presented Zátková in the context of other little-known women artists: Edita Hirschová, Marie Galimberti-Provázková, Mirka Miškovská and the better-known artist Eva Kmentová. Perhaps her place in art history is ultimately less with the Futurists and more among the ranks of accomplished yet under-appreciated female artists at the vanguard of European Modernism who sought a way to break free from convention.

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