Vladimír Vašíček

The Czech abstract painter Vladimír Vašíček, a native of Mistřín near Kyjov, was never a household name though his work was highly thought of by critics (receiving warm praise from Luboš Hlaváček, Arsén Pohribný and Jiří Padrta among others). Nevertheless, he enjoys a secure place in the history of Czech modern painting. His work was highly influenced by the character, geography, history and prehistory of Slovácko. 

Beginnings, inspiration and barriers

The firm where Vašíček trained as an apprentice was involved mainly in lettering, painting rural churches and gilding. Thanks to local contracts, this religious artist discovered the captivating world of church painting, but also acquired a sense of order, intense colour synchronisation and a decorative sensitivity for the arts. These values were to characterise his work for the whole of his life. In 1938, he worked for an advertising and decorating firm in Zlín, where he was a member of the art scene. He applied to the local school of art sponsored by Baťa. After graduating in 1944, he was taken on by the Baťa design studio as assistant to Miroslav Drofa in the architecture department headed by Vladimír Karfík. “The young artist here learned about constructional thinking, a sense of order and the beauty of line, and set off on the road to becoming a painter. The entrance gate was to be the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.” (Maliva, 1993)

In 1945 he passed the AVU entrance exam and was accepted straight into year two, bypassing year one. He studied at the Vratislav Nechleb studio, and then in order to escape normative criticism he transferred to the department headed by Jan Želibský, who advocated a freer approach to painting and preferred modern art. Here his fellow students included Mirek Tichý and Miroslav Šimorda. “The young student understood that the main role of the artist was to make every effort to achieve an honest, internally true, nonconformist and creative interpretation of emotional feelings and the relationship to life and events that irritate him, while not losing his respect for general moral rules and aesthetic values.” (Ibid)

In 1947, he married Božena Žďárská. In 1949 he took the important decision to break free from the cultural environment of Prague, and after returning from military service lost the possibility of having his permanent residence in the capital city where the political situation was deteriorating. He decided to return to Moravia, his native region. He struck up new friendships and maintained contacts with all the cultural centres in the region. As soon as the political situation permitted he also begin to seek inspiration abroad. In 1959 he visited the collection of modern art of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and studied the work of Filonov, Malevich, Kandinsky, etc. and the works of the French at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. The following year he travelled to Austria, where he became acquainted with Oskar Kokoschka. He also travelled to Bulgaria and France. In 1973 he exhibited in Barcelona, and in 1963 he was sent to the São Paulo 7th Biennial in Brazil. He also participated in exhibitions in Krakow, Algiers, Tunisia, Egypt, Zagreb and Italy. However, in his home country Vašíček’s modern art was deemed by the regime to be “uncomfortable” and was condemned by the communists as being difficult to understand. In 1955, he was introduced to the public unofficially in the privacy of the Brno Research Institute of Architecture. It was only after the political relaxation in the second half of the 1950s that he was able to hold solo exhibitions. During the sixties his work received wide acclaim both in the region of the traditionally formed Slovácko and on national forums (Maliva), as well as international success.

He began to distance himself from the discreet colourful modelling and soft, light-infused painting practiced at the studio headed by Ján Želibský while at AVU. “We see the beginnings of Vašíček’s independent style at the turn of the forties and fifties. The expressive style of painting and the noteworthy water colours of that time point to the immediacy of painterly gesture and the application of spontaneity and the authorial subject when transcribing the sense of perceived reality. Landscapes lose nothing in legibility but are transformed into dynamic lines and stains, sometimes reminiscent of the focus of Japanese calligraphy, sometimes corrected by an intuitively composed schema based on the order of landscape or architecture,” writes the theoretician Jiří Valoch. During the 1950s we see the painter concentrating more on the compositional characteristics of the image. He is stricter, more restrained, the borderline becomes more dominant when set against a counterpoint of coloured surfaces. “Reality is perceived is analysed, the painter reconstructs it on the surface of the painting from newly created geometric lines and surfaces,” writes Valoch. Thanks to his thoroughgoing stylisation of figural and landscape subjects, at the end of the fifties Vašíček arrived at this first abstract painterly compositions. In the summer of 1948 he painted the smaller portrait Girl With Red Hair, in which he drew for the first time on a wide range of colour surfaces developed in the spirit of Fauvism. Josef Maliva believes the colour scheme of Landscape with Black Trees (1951) allows us to call Vašíček the Gauguin of Svatobořice.

The 1960s saw a boom in Czech modern art, and the work of Vašíček followed this trend and was shown at many exhibitions. In 1959, he held his first large retrospective curated by Vilém Jůza (along with Josef Maliva, a genuine expert and interpreter of Vašíček’s work).

While at the start of his career his worked is characterised by the endeavour to subject his own artistic spontaneity to a certain a priori order (landscapes inspired by Fauvism), later the dynamism of the painterly gesture become more and more important. “The canvases of this time, subject more to the creative temperament of their creator, draw attention to themselves by virtue of their full, colourful rhythm of form, which adds a special conviction to his painterly expression, as well as a more natural order,” writes Maliva.

Full of contributions, the sphere remains in harmony

We can identify three polarities in Vašíček’s work.

1) The polarity between modernism and tradition is a telling instance of Vašíček’s dialectical understanding of the artwork.

2) The polarity between expression and construction is a relationship of complementarity, as two poles that mutually complete and qualitatively enrich each other. They encounter each other on the canvas of a single painting as a semantic and visual contradiction creating a comprehensive testimony.

3) The polarity between figurative and subjectless, the frequent oscillation on the boundaries of the material and the pure autonomy of the visual composition.

4) Work with intense multicoloured chords alternates with almost fully monochrome works in which the artist follows the possible application of a variable structuring of the surface of individual elements or differentiates the surface of the painting using different tones of a single colour.

According to Jiří Valoch, Vašíček’s relationship to modern art could be defined by the terms expressionism, cubism and cubo-futurism. His painting is close to techniques more associated with music. As far as other artists are concerned, it seems that the most influential were the loners of the founding generation. With František Kupka, as well as the polarity of expressive construction he also shares a tendency to analyse the visible model and transfer it into an autonomous visual composition in which distinct qualities emerge that do not point outside the painting but underline the autonomy of the work and the uniqueness of the relationships that arise in it. He is close to Robert Delaunay in the application of post-impressionism, work with pure coloured surfaces, and also (and especially) in the location of a polarity between figurative and subjectless, i.e. the insertion of this tension into a single image. An obvious link with the work of Bohumil Kubišta was conditional not only upon Vašíček’s admiration for the former’s interpretation of cubism, the newly emphasised semantic, sometimes almost metaphoric urgency of subject matter, but also a positive relationship to Kubišta’s understanding of visual composition representing a synthesis of cubist composition and futurist dynamic. An interest in the polarity of expression and rationalism links him to Jan Kotík and the gradual genesis from figurative subject to independent painterly process. Vašíček did not aim for the thorough development of one pole, but for their synthesis, a creative application of the expression/construction, spontaneity/order polarity.

As early as 1958 the first subjectless paintings had been created, characterised by a non-violent transition from the perceived model to the autonomous image. According to Valoch, the key period of Vašíček’s work is that between 1958 and 1962, in which “he gradually rids himself of the link with the seen model, replaces it with the autonomy of the visual composition, and elaborates on the entire range of elements and relationships that will appear in his future paintings.”

At the start of the 1970s, Vašíček’s work began to feature recurring symbols that are “immediately derived from the seen. We can identify them as field or tree, building, lake or road. Their repertoire allows the painter to compose freely not landscapes but images of a certain emotional, sensory and creative qualities,” writes Valoch. Another possibility was to free up the shape as much as possible and emphasise certain dominant features through contrasting colour surfaces. Boundary lines with a free composition of colour surfaces also formed the starting point of Vašíček’s figural compositions in which he applied spatial deformation far more in the form of a generalising, abstract discovery, and a dynamic composition paraphrasing movement in a kind of abbreviated form. The spatio-motion analyses, the rationally occurring geometric compositions represent the acquisition of independence on the part of the colour surfaces. The expressive lines free up the dynamic curves that earlier used to border individual volumes. The rarity of the artist’s sensibility and ability to orchestrate to the maximum the free-flowing colour structures predominates. During this period of his work, the painting carves out a definitively independent place for itself inside a richly differentiated whole. Transformations, process and events are played out within the framework of the painting.

Titles often make reference to physical or natural processes, not by depicting them, but by means of a creative parallel. Harmony and dissonance are equally important to Vašíček, and he remains consistent in the application of antitheses. “The set of ink drawings from 1970 and the related paintings are a blend of the organic and geometric, the lyrical gesture in the background of experienced rules.” (Ibid) They again make reference to the artist’s roots in his native Slovácko. The organic shapes paraphrase plant forms or natural processes of sprouting and growing. The new qualities are achieved by means of the subtle spraying of paint (oil and gouache), and new combinations arise hinting at a geometric or natural formation, though most often creating the illusion of space. In the second half of the 1970s, building on his newly acquired experience with geometric compositions, Vašíček reopens the problem of the relationship between black line and colour surfaces. “He does not identify with the creators of concrete art of the sixties and seventies, but initiates a new dialogue with the founders of modern art, above all with František Kupka.   

The turn of the seventies and eighties is characterised by transformation and a non-narrative reflection upon states or feelings in the psychic sphere. It is represented by composition based on painterly gesture, which is, however, often confronted with geometrically conceived surfaces of strikingly austere colours. However, this sphere of the artist’s work also contains canvases drawing on a creative and a priori reduction of his traditional means of expression.

In the 1980s we see a new form of synthesis of the expressive and constructivist approach. One painting might contain an encounter of two or three forms of painterly style, a spontaneous record approximating the form of gestural calligraphy or dripping, a geometric composition of clearly bordered colour surfaces, and perhaps lyrically formed structure of coloured (sometimes simply white) material. The painting becomes testimony to the character of painting, its possible forms, and the experience of modern art.

However, comprehensiveness remains important throughout the artist’s oeuvre, so important indeed that the artist views modern art as the only entirety aiming to achieve the autonomy of the artwork. Vašíček remained loyal to the most classical of the visual disciplines, painting, and his work (in its development similar to that of modern art) means not only mechanically keeping up with current trends, but working on personal development too. The painter attempts to penetrate to the sensory values of the painting, and often this involves a certain reflection upon psychological states, which in turn hints at a certain specialised research, an oft unremarked psychological thematisation of his work.

Alongside the awareness of the meaning of modern art and a knowledge of his own place in its development, Vašíček is firmly ensconced in the Czech tradition, not only of art, but also in the cultural context of the rural environment where he was born and to which he remains loyal. 

From the end of the 1980s onwards he began to work on paintings accompanied by countless watercolours and gouaches that respect to a greater extent the spirit of his earlier work. These are harmonious, organically composed paintings based on the order of colour and form. As well as free, spontaneously conceived paintings, around this time we see compositions that operate above all by virtue of the rhythmic discipline of their forms, through the apportionment and discipline of the dynamic painterly gesture by means of rational elements. The structure of these works is carried within the framework of a kind of new “mobile” painterly geometry resulting from the articulation of intuitive and structural components of spiritual reality. In fact, the artist is presenting his conception of the world, attempting to capture and pin down his idea of a cosmic order within the spirit of which a work arises and to which all human being should be directed. These compositions are more or less internally connected with the whole of Vašíček’s oeuvre. Even the individual works of different periods of his life display mutually creative (spiritual) connections and agreement.

The intrinsic integrity of the painting as a whole, which is characteristic of this painter “with a studio overlooking a vineyard”, indicates that the decisive values upon which he draws are embedded in deeper instinctive levels of the work consistent with the artist’s creative mentality. The persuasiveness and power of the artistic expression of his individual works largely resides in the ability of their creator to identify with them. 

kompletní seznam výstav a realizací zde:

http://art.vasicek.contact.sweb.cz/Vašíček%20Vladimír.html

Maliva, Josef. Vladimír Vašíček. Ostrava: Chagall, 1993. 78 s. Galerie soudobých autorů; 2. ISBN 80-900648-3-3.

Maliva, Josef. Vladimír Vašíček. Ostrava: Chagall, 1993. 78 s. Galerie soudobých autorů; 2. ISBN 80-900648-3-3.

Vašíček, Vladimír a Valoch, Jiří. Vladimír Vašíček: Obrazy, kvaše, kresby: Katalog výstavy, Brno 21. 1.-16. 2. 1986, Gottwaldov 29. 4.-15. 6. 1986. Brno: Dům umění města Brna, 1986. 

Katalogy větších výstav za života:
http://art.vasicek.contact.sweb.cz/Vystavni_katalogy_texty.htm 

Další publikace: http://art.vasicek.contact.sweb.cz/publikace.html
a stati: http://art.vasicek.contact.sweb.cz/pratele.html