JIŘINA DOUBNEROVÁ - CESTY DOMŮ
Jiřina Doubnerová – Ways Leading Home
As its name suggests, the Václav Chad Gallery has, in addition to presenting contemporary Czech fine art, been researching
the phenomenon of the School of Arts in Zlín. In the eight years of our exhibition activities, we have presented the work of several exceptional personalities related to the School of Arts in Zlín, and we have also organized other accompanying art or educational events. We continue the gradual introduction of graduates of the School of Arts in Zlín by presenting the work of the painter Jiřina Doubnerová (1922–2016).
Jiřina Doubnerová (b. Tlustá) was born on March 31, 1922 in Vinařice near Kladno into a family of a landowner and mayor as the fourth, youngest child (her siblings‘ names were Marie, Anita, and Josef). She studied at a grammar school in Slaný, but became ill in the fourth grade. Her state of health not improving, she started a curative stay at a boarding house in Hostinné in 1937, where she also received education from the nurses of the Order of St. Ursula. Shortly afterwards, the Sudetenland was occupied by the German army, and the young student had to move to a boarding house in Lovosice, then to Roudnice, where the boarding house was temporarily relocated from the occupied Lovosice. The girls lived in Krabčice, close to the memorable Říp mountain, and had to take a 20-minute walk to nearby Roudnice every day.
As her stay in the boarding house was drawing to an end, she was more and more considering studies at an art academy. This was not possible due to the closing of Czech universities in 1939. However, Jiřina learned from the director of the boarding house about the newly established School of Arts in Zlín, which educated artists using the Bauhaus principles. She did not hesitate, immediately submitted an application and, having successfully passing the entrance exams, was accepted to study (1940–1944). She applied to study painting, but found herself in the studio of reproduction stone sculpture and restoration, led by Professor Vincenc Makovský, who chose her for the studio. Her classmates included, for example, Čestmír Kafka, Milada Kůrková (Dočekalová), Olga Schicková (Babrajová), Vladimír Vašíček or Vlastimil Večeřa. During her studies, she also met Václav Chad, František Chmelař and Konrád Babraj, with whom she maintained friendly relations. After her studies, she left Zlín due to an illness and moved back to her native Vinařice near Kladno.
She founded a family with her husband Karel Doubner (1922–2004), whom she married in 1946. During his stay in the Terezín concentration camp, her husband contracted typhus. Upon his return, he enjoyed good health until the late 1990s. While caring for her husband after 1997, she decided to write the yet to be published Saga of a Peasant Family (completed in 2004). Together with her husband, they raised three children, Karel (b. 1951), Václav (1953–1963) and Marie (1955–2007).
In July 1945 she became secretary of the regional committee of the Kladno branch of the Union of Czech Youth and two years later she worked for the regional committee of the Czech Communist Party in Kladno. In early 1949, she was transferred to Pardubice, where she worked as the regional cultural secretary of the Communist Party. Subsequently, until 1951, she held the position of a personnel secretary of the Pardubice Regional Council. After criticising the party, she was sent for a corrective one-year study at the Political University of the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party (1950–1951). Following her criticism of the party's totalitarian practices and her sister Anita's emigration to the United States, she was eventually removed from office and expelled. However, the local party organization in Kladno accepted her back. From 1951 to 1953 she worked at the Ministry of Education, Science and the Arts and subsequently as the head of the department at the State Institute for Conservation and Nature Protection (1953–1962). Until the first half of the 1960s, she worked at the Ministry of Education and Culture; in the second half of the 1960s, she became the director of the Alois Jirásek and Mikoláš Aleš Museum at the Hvězda summer house. After she and her husband signed the Two Thousand Words manifesto in 1968, she was expelled from the Communist Party and removed from the position of director, working as a specialist. However, in 1978, when she was only fifty-six, she was forced to retire. Having to live on a low pension, she and her husband had to earn extra money by selling flowers, seeds and flower arrangements.
The exhibition Ways Leading Home presents a retrospective of the work of Jiřina Doubnerová from the years of her adolescence during the late First Republic until the end of her life in 2016. She began to develop her interest in art at the boarding house; the art of painting and drawing was taught by the painter František Šístek there. This was where her studies of still lifes with flowers, books or plaster busts came to life. They did not fulfil her artistic ambitions, she wanted to become independent in her work. She painted her first oil painting titled Roudnice (1938), then created a cycle of drawings – portraits of her classmates (1940). From her works created at the School of Arts (1940–1944) we have the opportunity to examine ink studies of female figures, charcoal portraits and landscapes, tempera and oil still lifes, as well as linocuts. Since the 1950s, she painted landscapes and industrial environments, mainly around Kladno. Her work is complemented by a series of self-portraits and portraits, mostly of family members. In the last years of her life, in which she was suffering from limited mobility following a stroke, she devoted herself to painting views of Prague. During her life, Jiřina Doubnerová created an extensive body of work, which we are now happy to commemorate on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of her birth.
Miroslava Ptáčková
