VÁCLAV CHAD
The creative period of Václav Chad (September 8, 1923 Břeclav - February 24, 1945 Zlín) stretches over the span of only five years, but its scope, form and meaning make it one of the major artistic expressions of Czech art in the first half of the 1940s. The crucial year was that of 1939, when the emerging painter was admitted to the newly-founded Zlín School of the Arts, one of the few places where it was possible to study even after the closure of Czech institutions of higher education by the Nazis. After his graduation in 1943 he attended a special school in Zlín and started working at the Baťa Works. However, he did confine himself exclusively to the world of art; on the contrary, he felt the need to actively oppose evil. In 1944, he joined the anti-fascist resistance with a clear awareness of the risk that this decision entailed. In February 1945, a few months before the end of war, while trying to escape arrest, he was shot dead by the Gestapo. He was only 21 years old.
His violently interrupted work can be divided into several thematic areas and stylistic layers. It features landscapes, figural scenes, often with Biblical themes or references to war, unabashed eroticism, imaginary abstract composition, melancholic portraits. However, the treatment of topics is more worth the attention than their selection. We can notice a kind of accelerated development, an coexistence of several stylistic levels rather than a slow linear development. Everything comes to life in a feverish haste, perhaps with a foreboding of one’s own limited time. One of the distinctive aspects of his works is its expressiveness, featuring caricature-like deformed shapes, hyperboles and grotesque persiflages of traditional themes, reflecting „Godless“ times. At the same time, they show approaches inspired by surrealism, labelled as „degenerate art“ by the Nazis. Due to their candour, deliberate provocation and taste of the forbidden fruit, they became the symptom of free, unbound creation for the young artist, representing a kind of protest against the current situation. Finally, there are existentialist, internally focused works, which in contrast to expression or provocation turn towards the internal, to more general issues and philosophical considerations.
Chad's works, which are presented here in the context of the School of the Arts, are testament to the search for free space in non-free times: they deliberately incite, break down taboos, reject goodliness and empty aestheticizing. They excel in the directness of the artist’s statement, in which the ideas of the emerging painter collide with the need to respond to the difficult times in which he lived. They rightly belong to the progressive line of the curtailed Czech art of the early 1940s.
The earliest of the exhibited works are robust drawings dating back to around 1940, thematically connected with the motif of death. In contrast, a series of considerably more relaxed dynamic sketches featuring an erotic female figure from later time are presented here. The two contradictory positions, still separated by the early 1940s, would become much closer and intertwine in Chad's later work.
This can be eloquently shown on the Crucifixion series, omnipresent in the painter’s work. Chad was interested in the compositional solutions of the old masters, but his own interpretation of the Biblical scene was markedly different. The painter transformed the topic of sacrifice and redemption in a blasphemic way. He connects it with deformities of shape, melting shapes, open eroticism and scandal-inducing excretion. He mixes the animate and the inanimate, the human and the mechanical, death and eroticism in a provocative grotesque whole, capturing everything without restraint, without shame, without moralizing. His cruel mockery of the traditional Christian values is born from hopelessness, being a blasphemous counterpoint to the existentially oppressive reality and the ravages of war.
Drawings are Chad's distinctive form of artistic expression. They are immediate, momentary, capturing immediate ideas. This is especially true for his sketchbook drawings, covering a longer period between the years 1943-1945; it is impossible to reconstruct the exact sequence of the individual sheets today. They represent a sort of a painter's diary, in which he captured in a special symbiosis figurative and abstract motifs, ideas for future works, various fragments, caricatures, obsessive visions. Certain themes recur (clocks ticking away time, clues leading nowhere, ladders jutting into space, shapes similar to parachutes or jellyfish, which sometimes evoke falling bombs, dark sun etc.), but they reappear in new contexts. They resemble encrypted communication with a difficult and multi-layered or ambiguous way of reading.
Integral scenes, often referring to war, are easier to read. These include a group of coloured and watered expressive drawings combining brutality and caricatural deformation in an absurd and bitter grotesque. Another variation are surreal visions accompanied by written messages (e. g. "Of the two worlds, one is dead, the other unable to be born"). They are expressions of despair, scepticism and a seemingly non-existent or hardly conceivable future.
Chad's paintings document the painter‘s search for his own style. They include expressive renditions of landscapes, abstract surreal visions and the obsessive topic of a grotesquely conceived crucifixion. A series of portraits and self-portraits represents another distinct group. With their simplicity, they represent an antithesis to the absurd grotesque visions and blasphemous transformations of traditional themes. They emit strange melancholic atmosphere, are filled with sadness, express loneliness and abandonment.
The "double portrait" Painting with a Red Gate or two paintings titled Landscape of War and The War Discourse, all from 1943, evoke the same impression. In the first painting, two characters are standing on the imaginary boundary of two worlds, seemingly not belonging to any of them. The past is lost, there is not sight of any future. The feeling of rootlessness and uncertainty is a symbolic depiction of the situation in which the artist and the times found themselves. The "war" images depict the impossibility of communication and establishment of normal human contact. Unlike the first image, they are almost monochromatic, simplified symbolist paintings.
The unique image Characters (1943-1944) further continues the process of stylization of shapes. A preparatory drawing, which has been preserved, fills the surface in an identical way with a composition of geometrized bodies the shapes of which are pressed into the predetermined space. The caricature-like deformation is no longer the result of impulsive expression, but of the geometrization of physical forms, most noticeable in overdimensional hands and their gestures. This may suggest the painter's move towards greater constructiveness, but this hypothesis unfortunately remains without an answer.
Alena Pomajzlová
