Vladimír Jarcovják

(1924 - 2007)
Selected Works

Ludvík Ševeček

Vladimír Jarcovják, excellent Czech painter and graphic artist, was born 90 years ago, on March 17, 1924. The ninetieth anniversary of the birth of the Zlín native, who died on March 19, 2007, as well as the fact that we have not seen a major exhibition of his work for several years, provided the Zlín-based Václav Chad Gallery with a good reason to present to the public - after some time and within the space available – at least some of the trends and manifestations of his extensive, but internally remarkably coherent and truly robust work. He was the son of the renowned Zlín architect Josef Jarcovják and spent his childhood and early youth in a family villa on Kvítková ulice street, in times of dynamic development and overall flourishing of "Bata‘s town", which attracted more and more attention both home and abroad not only thanks to its production and business achievements, but also other activities in the field of culture and art. The young painting apprentice would in addition to attending the local grammar school (1936-1943) also at the same time frequent regular evening classes of figurative painting led by professor Rudolf Gajdoš (1939-1943), organized by Baťa’s School of Art, at which Jarcovják also subsequently - albeit briefly - studied (September-December 1943). It was at that time that he, undoubtedly also inspired by renowned salons of contemporary Czechoslovak fine art and other notable art-related activities, which took place in the town, made a major decision – to embark on an artistic career and devote himself to painting professionally.

When I interviewed Vladimír Jarcovják several years ago, he recalled how deeply he was inspired and motivated already in 1940 by Filla's famous painting Bird Complaining to a Bird (Žaloval sa pták ptákovi, 1939), exhibited by courageous organizers of the fifth Zlín Spring Salon - at a time when the author had been interned for more than a year at a Nazi concentration camp for his anti-war and anti-fascist works of earlier provenance (Remembering Emil Filla – An Interview with Vladimir Jarcovják. Prostor Zlín, III., 1995, No. 6, p. 1). This early experience eventually brought Jarcovják to the studio of the famous artist at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (VŠUP), with whom he started to work. As he also mentioned in the interview: "... when I learned in 1945, after the war was over, about Filla’s return from the concentration camp and his being appointed professor at the Academy, I was determined that - if possible – I would join his studio. And I succeeded in doing that. Between 1945 and 1950 I attended his special school of monumental painting and afterwards, before starting my military service (1950-1951), I became his assistant. When I came back from the army in 1953, professor Filla unfortunately was not alive any more." At that time, Vladimir Jarcovják already permanently worked in Prague, where he started a family and eventually had a studio in Ostrovní ulice street. Gradually he started participating in important non-public and from the perspective of the cultural policy of the communist state completely undesirable art activities. He became one of the founding members of the Trasa 54 (Route 54) group, which, in the difficult situation of those times, was formed on the basis of non-public studio meetings of several students of the „Filla school“ (apart from V. Jarcovják, the group’s members included Č. Kafka, J. Válová, K. Válová, V. Heřmanská, and later others); apart from having important exchanges of opinions, they also presented their latest works to each other. The group was founded in late 1954 and made its first public appearance at the Prague-based Youth Gallery (Galerie mladých) in October 1957. The group‘s early appearance in an official exhibition hall, which followed shortly after an extensive, but generationally and ideologically indeterminate, and rather polyphonic-sounding group Máj 57 (Obecní dům, May 1957), undoubtedly significantly stimulated the emergence of other similar and ideologically more compact creative groups, which gradually formed a broad artistic movement, which effectively contributed to the emancipation of the Czech art scene from the subjection to the demagogic political doctrine of the totalitarian regime.

The core philosophy of the painters belonging to the Trasa group, who were in 1959 joined by several sculptors, graduates from the studio of Josef Wagner at the VŠUP, (E. Kmentová, Vl. Pretzel, O. Zoubek, or Z. Fibichová), was inspired by their teacher, Emil Filla, and based on pragmatism; they strived to create active artistic forms, based on graphic analysis and transposition of everyday topics. Vladimír Jarcovják became one of the leading personalities of the group thanks to the fact that he treated its main theme from the position of his exceptional coloristic talent; moreover, he was always fascinated by anything that was somehow related to the natural world and to its haptic and sensory qualities. His paintings and graphic works from the second half of the 1950s are associated with the material aspect of everyday reality. He painted numerous strictly stylized, monumental still lifes, which were built with special compositional deliberation, characteristic for his work, and featured planar but also cubistic forms in rich colours with bold black contours defining individual shapes. From the works exhibited at the Zlín exhibition, this period is quite convincingly demonstrated by Jarcovják’s drawings from 1960 and especially by his painting Still Life with a Bird (Zátiší s ptákem, 1962), which also indicates certain changes that were already under way. These were inspired by the author's greater openness to psychological themes, to the world of things and nature representing an integral part of human existence. The existential experience of the world in his painting became stronger in the 1960s. In addition to treating the forms of the world of outer reality in a more abstract way, he was more frequently experimenting with new combined (material) techniques, giving considerable emphasis on the colour texture of the painting, which led to the origin of pendant paintings-objects, represented in the Zlín exhibition by large-size compositions from the late 1960s, such as Creator (Stvořitel), Networks (Sítě), or Idol, but also Orant.

An essential component of this part of the artist's work, however, consists mainly of impressive reminiscences of ancient mythical, archaic and historical events and phenomena, mediated by structural images, often employing a combination of various painting techniques and non-traditional art materials and objects of ancient provenance (gold polychromy, old fittings, nails, sheet copper, but also cult and other historical items). The meditative approach to "man’s sojourn in being", to what remains, what is constantly present (to eternity), with a connotation to what remains, is subject to destruction and disappearance, brought him in the late 1960s into the existentialist realm, to the ground of - as he put it - "shape symbolism". It was probably the artist's happiest creative period. His unique and imaginative compositions with monumental feeling positively resonated not only at home but also abroad. His painting Ancient Battlefield (Dávné bojiště), today in the collection of the National Gallery in Prague), for example, won the Best Foreign Participant Award at the International Festival of Visual Arts in Los Angeles (1965). A collection of paintings, which officially represented Czech art in the national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1970, must also be included among the most significant works of this provenance. It is good news that two compositions from this collection, which concluded this remarkable decade in the artist’s career, Pieta and Space (Vesmír, both 1969), are among the dominants of the Zlín exhibition.

With the onset of normalization, it was clear that, also thanks to these achievements, Vladimír Jarcovják had for a period of more than fifteen years to leave the public art scene and in 1974 was expelled from the VŠUP in Prague, where he had worked as assistant professor for 16 years. For two decades that followed, he made his living by restoring murals and sgraffiti. Also in this field of art, as well in the case of monumental art works in architecture - usually at important places and buildings both at home and abroad (1962-1983) – he left behind an extensive and important work that still awaits appropriate expert appraisal. He did not return fully to free art, especially panting, until the late 1970s. In contrast to the structural and material concept of the previous decade, however, he programmatically avoided all non-painting means of expression. From that time on, his paintings remained exclusively abstract. His works from the 1980s and from the decades that followed were mainly spiritual visual compositions, with no obvious links to external visual reality, which disappeared from his work completely with autonomous painting themes with psychological poetic contexts, represented for example by the paintings Touch (Dotek, 1980), Relationships (Vztahy, 1981), Denouement (Rozuzlení děje, 1982), or Wonderful Uncertainty (Krásná nejistota, 1981). The artist’s extraordinary colouristic talent probably for the first time fully shows in the delicate geometric and organic lines, the subtleties of colour valeurs, his work with light, but also in the depth of the colour tones of these truly poetic, harmonious paintings with compact expression. The joy of painting and sense of monumentality of the form and space led him in the 1990s led to "multi-painting" compositions, especially to diptychs and triptychs, which are, despite the characteristic robustness of the painted shapes, imbued with special imaginary atmosphere, resulting from the artist's preoccupation with the spiritual phenomenon of light. A big role was undoubtedly also played by his long-time efforts to artistically visualize music, often illustrated by the very names of a number of his paintings, such as his free (long-term) cycle titled Pipes (Píšťaly), e. g. Light Pipes (Světelné píšťaly, 1990), the composition Symphony (Symfonie, 1993), or the diptych Magic Light (Magické světlo, 1992), which - not by coincidence - closes the whole installation of the Zlín exhibition. Musical inspirations were, in line with the increasing spiritualization of the artist's expression, typical for his final creative period, for his paintings and graphic works, on which he worked in his Prague studio even at the turn of the 21st century.