FRANTIŠEK CHMELAŘ

František Chmelař
The Painter Who Wrote Poems
 
František Chmelař, academic painter, graphic designer, medallist and university teacher, was born on December 30, 1921 in Liptál. The roots of his desire to capture fragile inner feelings can be seen from his early youth in his short poems. The beginnings of his art work fall into the late 1930s, when he joined the painting department of the newly founded School of Arts in Zlín.

In the School of Arts, thanks to Richard Wiesner and Rudolf Gajdoš, he had the opportunity to delve deeper into the study of figures, while Vladimír Hroch and Karel Hofman introduced him to the principles of landscape painting. František Chmelař also focused on decorative painting, glass painting, mosaics, graphic techniques, exhibition and scenic composition. In his spare time he together with his classmates privately studied the works of Michelangelo Buonarroti, Matthias Grünewald, “a Barbarian with a pure heart”, and of the Dutch masters Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch. The list of his activities and inspirational resources seems to indicate the nature of his future professional career, in which he worked on monumental assignments, often related to architecture, as well as on small, intimate portraits and landscape compositions.

After completing the initial four-year school of applied arts, he continued to study in a special class led by Rudolf Gajdoš, where, together with Václav Chad, Vojtěch Štolfa and Jan Blažek, he designed stained-glass windows for Baťa's dormitories with titles like Engineers, Chemists and People after Work. In the autumn of 1944, after the bombing of Zlín, when the School of Arts practically ceased to exist, František Chmelař became a member of the Pro Vlast (For Homeland) resistance organization, which operated in Wallachia. He was in close contact with Vaclav Chad at that time and participated in anti-fascist activities, such as the publishing of the illegal paper Naše Pravda (Our Truth), until Chad’s tragic death in February 1945.
 
When the war was over, František Chmelař applied to the Prague-based Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, and completed his study of art in 1949 in the studio of applied painting led by Josef Kaplický. During the last year of his studies, he and his classmates decided to re-establish their former cooperation and they founded the so-called Artistic Collective, the purpose of which was to accept and work on assignments within the framework of a "collective of artists". The first and also the last big assignment of the Artistic Collective was the complex design of the exposition of the Brno Region Exhibition for the Brno Exhibition Center in 1950, in which they could fully utilize their experience from Zlín. The unfavourable conditions for the existence of the Artistic Collective in the early 1950s brought its activities to a halt. After that, its members took different paths. However, those of the former schoolmates, who stayed in Brno (František Chmelař, Jan Rajlich, Miroslav Šimorda, Konrád Babraj, Olga Babrajová and Milos Axman) stayed in touch and collaborated on a number of art assignments.

A strong impulse for the creation of the Artistic Collective were the exhibitions of graduates of the School of Arts, which took place in Zlín in 1945 and 1947. For both these exhibitions, František Chmelař wrote the introductory word for the catalogue. In this context, his perhaps less well-known role as a keeper of the legacy of the School of Arts needs to be mentioned. Chmelař's efforts to commemorate this exceptional institution culminated in the years 1974-1975, in which he worked together with Zdeněk Čubrda on a monograph of the Zlín School of Arts. Its aim was on one hand to clarify the context of the establishment and functioning of the school, introduce its teachers and students from the point of view of an art historian’s perspective, on the other hand it also represented an exceptional personal testimony by one of its graduates. Perhaps it was precisely this aspect that caused the book’s content to be considered inappropriate and ultimately prevented its publication. However, thanks to his efforts at that time, a number of important memories, documents and photographs were preserved, which would otherwise have been lost.
 
The present exhibition presents the two most important aspects of the work of František Chmelař - landscape and figurative painting. His landscape works reflect his relationship to nature, especially in the vicinity of Liptál in Wallachia and Domašov in the Jeseníky mountains. They turn into a space for his inner contemplation and meditation, the discovering of the properties of colours and shapes and their transformations. In addition to these optical qualities, his landscapes became a platform for projection of psychological inner feelings and desires and a poetic reflection of the personal experience of the place.
 
The second aspect of his work is figural painting. In a series of portraits, he penetrates deeper into the issues of human relationships, to himself and especially to his closest friend and later wife Magda. A complementary counterpart of the paintings is their personal correspondence, which they kept during periods of forced separation, caused by their working circumstances. Their letters show the permanent fragility of hope, passion and warm love, as well as tribulation, bitter disappointment and unfulfilled expectations. The culmination period of the study of figures are the 1960s, when the theme of communication of two or more figures becomes an intense reflection of interpersonal dramas for František Chmelař.
 
The works selected for this exhibition represent the most important examples of the public and private aspect of his work. They illustrate his development and artistic maturing in the period from the 1940s until the early 1970s, during which he deals with the legacy of the School of Arts and modern artistic trends, the realism of the 1950s as well as the rediscovered abstraction and surrealism, when paper or canvas served as a necessary catalyst for the internal feelings of his soul of an artist and a poet.
 
Vít Jakubíček