Václav Chad

One of the Legends of Czech Modern Art
Ludvík Ševeček
 

The painter Václav Chad was born on September 8, 1923 in Břeclav. However, his family soon moved to Otrokovice. After finishing fifth grade at a secondary school in Uherské Hradiště and successfully passing demanding entrance exams, he was admitted to a recently established Baťa company school in Zlín (1939), from which he graduated in 1944. He then started working as a graphic designer at the promotional department of the Bata Works and in October of the same year joined the anti-fascist resistance, a decision which later proved fateful to him. Shortly before the end of the war, on February 24, 1945, after a sudden Gestapo raid on the company's boarding house where he was staying, he was shot dead while trying to run away just a few meters away from the School of Art and from the Tomáš Baťa Memorial. Today, the place of Chad's demise is still marked by an inconspicuous portrait memorial, created immediately after the war (in 1946) by the sculptor Miloš Axman, one of his fellow students at the School of Art. In its time, the School of Art itself represented an unique art school, showing the characteristic features of all Baťa facilities and paying considerable attention to the social welfare of its students throughout their studies, their education in self-reliance and success in practical life. The main objective of the school was to educate designers for the needs of the company; however, its reach eventually considerably exceeded the original intent of its founders. This was also caused by the fact that the architect František Kadlec, creator of the school’s statutes and curriculum, modelled its core concept of study on that of the Bauhaus, which was closed down in 1933 after Hitler came to power. And so it happened that the Zlín school, "undercover", in a completely different historical context and under difficult social conditions, successfully repeated and updated the legacy of Bauhaus during the Nazi occupation of the country (1939-1945). Although the school was established on the eve of World War II and its expansion was limited by the difficult conditions of the Protectorate, it soon matured into a unique institution, which remained unchanged until the twist in political climate after 1945.

Considering the nature of teaching and significant demands imposed on students, the school represented a higher post-secondary educational institution; however, proof of completed secondary education was not required for admission. The school’s main advantages included quality teaching staff; its composition was influenced by the closing down of Czech universities after November 17, 1939. Theoretical subjects, among others, were for instance taught by Albert Kutal (history of fine arts) or Vilém V. Štech (history of art industry). Besides Kadlec, who was appointed the school’s headmaster, the school’s teaching staff included other functionalist architects, especially František L. Gahura and Bohuslav Fuchs. One of the central figures of the teaching staff was also the internationally renowned brilliant sculptor Vincenc Makovský. It was especially thanks to him that School of Art became the cradle of Czechoslovak industrial design. Architect Jan Vaněk, sculptor Jiří Jaška, or painters Richard Wiesner and Vladimír Hroch were among other professors who contributed to the school’s stimulating creative atmosphere. The school produced a number of specialists - graphic artists, stage designers, machine and tool designers, but also a surprisingly large number of fine artists. Its students also included a group of followers of then banned modern art, the leading figures of which were Václav Chad and his close friend Čestmír Kafka; the original works of its protagonists left a permanent mark in the history of Czech fine art.

The work of Václav Chad can be characterized by an intensive search for the artist‘s own path. He progressed steadily, in a wide ideological spectrum and with a kind of "creative obsession"; with his own painting and drawing virtuosity, he spontaneously seized the creations of artists from distant and more recent past, accentuating them in an original way in his own compositions. In accordance with the atmosphere of the time, he was above all fascinated with masters of the dramatic view of the world and works of an expressive or existential nature. He concentrated mainly on the works of Pieter Breughel Sr., Vittore Carpaccio, Peter P. Rubens, and Francesco Goya. His influences from more recent past included Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch as well as Paul Klee. Significant for his searching nature was his fascination by the works of Léon Chauliac, a forgotten painter from the periphery of modern painting; some of the features of Chauliac’s works were appealing to Chad and he could benefit from them artistically. His special ability to "absorb" and include in his own works sometimes quite contradictory artistic expressions, often mediated only by means of poor quality reproductions in magazines and books, was more than remarkable. Although a big role in the shaping of his work was surely played by the Zlín Salons and other exhibitions of modern art, which, thanks to the courage of the Zlín organizers, were organized for several years after 1939, it was also the possibility to communicate with some experienced members of the teaching staff, especially with Vincenc Makovský, a leading figure of Czech inter-war surrealism.

Although Václav Chad did not manage to fully develop and fulfil his work, he left behind an extraordinary and original body of work, which until today fascinates with a sharpness of view, unusual for his age. At the same time, his work seems to have developed and existed with a knowledge of shortage of time, with a time-constrained nervousness and remarkable commitment, actually starting when the author reached eighteen years of age and lasting until the day of his tragic death, for a period of less than five years. Despite the perils of the time of the Protectorate - with sudden Gestapo raids on the school and the boarding house – his work developed in touch with the then banned modern art. At first, especially with expressionism and cubism, but later also with surrealism. An important part of the artist's legacy in this regard were especially inventive figurative ink pen drawings, found in his sketchbooks, which in an unconventional way utilized cubist morphology and expressive exaggeration, in essential harmony with his distinctive surrealist imagination, often tinged with sarcastic vision of man in the context of the complex wartime and social reality of the Protectorate. In a way, Chad was a precursor of the so-called Czech fine art grotesque of the second half of the twentieth century. His moral integrity, ethical approach to life, and his stance as a citizen are also reflected in his work - in the aforementioned drawings as well as in the urgent communicativeness of his paintings. This is especially true of his soul-exploring figural compositions, the finest of which include Judas (1940), one of his early works, as well as his portraits (Portraits of M. S.) and numerous self-portraits. But for example also in the harsh verism of his expressively tense Crucifixion paintings, or in the "Picassoesque" dramatic cubist stylization of his works inspired by the current war situation, as indicated by the very names of some of them, e. g. War Conversation, War Landscape (both 1943), or Figures (1943-1944). The artist's existentialist, visionary, formally experimental, but often also naturalistically formed symbolic works represent a somewhat deeper parable, reaching beyond the time and place of their creation – they represent a legacy of an extraordinary personality, consistently and sometimes fiercely searching for deeper meaning of life and art in tragic situations and contexts of modern existence.

The legacy of Václav Chad was not forgotten also thanks to the memories and publicity of his numerous colleagues from the School of Art, among whom we must in the first place name the painter Čestmír Kafka. Already the first solo exhibition of the artist's work, which was organized in the Prague-based Youth Gallery (U Řečických Gallery), represented not only a great discovery, considering the social situation in the country (1958), but certainly also an important impulse and almost a revelation, especially for the emerging generation of artists, who were still finding their place in the world of art. An equally important and praiseworthy event, which took place at the time of the so-called normalization, was an extensive exhibition of his works, commemorating the fortieth anniversary of his death, organized in 1985 by the Brno House of Arts at the House of the Kunstat Lords in Brno and at the Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Gottwaldov. But it was not until an exhibition of Chad's complete works curated by Eva Petrová was organized at the North-Bohemian Gallery of Fine Arts in Litoměřice (1997) that his contribution in the context of Czech modern art could be fully assessed and appreciated. Eva Petrová, a leading researcher and expert on modern Czech art and on the works of Václav Chad, which she studied for several years, is also the author of so far the most comprehensive study about the author, published in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition; the study is so far the most recent contribution to the yet unfinished Chad research. However, the Zlín Regional Gallery has since the early 1980s been preserving his legacy, not only by organizing the above-mentioned exhibition, but also by gradually building a small but compact collection of his works from different periods, expressing different opinions and utilizing varying themes. The efforts of the gallery to revive some of the Baťa traditions, which also led to the renewal of the tradition of the Zlín Salons, led to the establishment of 1997 of the Václav Chad Award, regularly awarded to selected participants of the Zlín Youth Salons. The uniqueness of the artist's appearance, his works and life story have not lost their attractiveness until the present time ...