Jiri Anderle: The Czech Printmaker of Beautiful Evil

Jiří Anderle (b. 1936) is a Czech artist, originally from Pavlíkov, Rakovnicko. Anderle faced oppression in the making of his work, and he fought through the era of the Iron Curtain to produce a large body of prints, paintings and drawings which has received international acclaim. Fortunate for us, his work has been exhibited globally and is included in numerous museum collections.

Anderle’s evidently looked at the Old Masters, borrowing a thing or two from the excellent, detailed still lives and seductive portraits of Caravaggio. He has utilized his great drawing skills to portray portraits of young Renaissance-period women, youthful clad in elegant gowns and hair plaited with ribbons and pearls.They exude an aura of innocence and purity. Yet, there lies and undercurrent of something beyond their facade. No maiden could be so untouched, could she?

He contrasts these women with his later, more abstracted style of portraiture which is clearly influenced by Dubuffet, Klee and Bacon. Their facial and figural surfaces are butchered, nearly extinguished, yet their emotional/physical impact leaves the viewer with the feeling they have truly seen someone evil. One is reminded of the sickeningly ugly faces of Nolde and the German Expressionists who tore away the mask of civility to reveal Mankind’s truer nature. Anderle gives us a hint of that, and scrapes away the flesh of his subjects to reveal a complex interior system of hoses and pipes and chaos. We don't see the figures for the chaos of what's pouring out from their interiors.

The family portrait above looks a lot like the work of fellow printmaker Mauricio Lasansky. The faces are detail but everything else is left undone. He gives us what we need to see. Nothing more.

Throughout his work the drawn line is revered, and the polar contrasts of good and evil are presented in classically drawn faces imposed upon composed surfaces of emptiness. The portraits are virtually complete, yet he lets the faces evolve and change in a serial sort of passage of time. In contrast to the elegance of his drawn line, the edges of Anderle’s images appear to be eaten away, eroded and corroded. They break us from whatever narrative he tried to imbue upon the image, and tear us away back to the surface’s edge. They stop us from delving into the composition and make us explore the irregular edge of things, the breakup of the world. These images are indicative of the state of Man, our want to see beautiful things, but in the end they show the reality of our society’s unending need to destroy everything.

The more abstract images are harder to look at, morbid, in fact, but look we must. For they tell us about our own truer destructive nature, and foretell our own demise. Anderle’s work is not bleak or somber. It is sometimes dually ugly and inviting. Whatever Anderle chooses to depict, he invites us to look. We can’t help ourselves. It’s like trying to eat just one of your favorite mom's freshly baked chocolate chip cookies that she just took out of the oven. You can’t eat just one. You have to have more and more until you are sick to your stomach. Not trying to equate Anderle’s work with food per se, but it does compel us to look at it, ingest it, savor it, and then spit it back out. His beautifully evil work can be addictive. It should be. Take a look for yourselves, my inked up friends. Anderle makes certain there is enough for everyone's taste.

Jiri Anderle lives and works in Prague, the Czech Republic.

Facts:
1955-1961 – studied at the School of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts, in Prague.
1961-1969 - member of the Black Theatre of Prague.
1964 - Marries Milada, a fellow member of the Black Theatre company.
1968 – USA exhibition debut, works with Jacques and Anne Baruch Gallery, Chicago.
1981– awarded Grand Prix at International Biennial of Prints, Ljubljana.
1982 - exhibited at the Biennale di Venezia. Print retrospective at the National museum, Stockholm.
1995 - Retrospective at the National Gallery, Prague.
2008 - Largest USA retrospective of Anderle's prints at Cincinnati Art Museum.
2006 - awarded the Medal of Merit III.

100 - solo exhibitions throughout the world

Selected Public Collections:
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, UC, Berkeley, California, USA
Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris, France
California College of the Arts, San Francisco, California, USA
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
Czech Museum of Fine Arts, Prague, Czech Republic
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan, USA
Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy
The Jewish Museum, New York, New York, USA
Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, USA
Musee d’Art Moderne, Brussels, Belgium
Musee des Beaux-Arts, Liege, Belgium
Musee National d’Histoire et d’Art, Luxembourg
Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Macedonia
Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, USA
Narodni galerie v Praze (The National Gallery in Prague), Czech Republic
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA
Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden
Slovenska narodna galeria (Slovak National Gallery), Bratislava, Slovakia
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy
USC Fisher Museum of Art, USC, Los Angeles, California, USA
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England
World Print Council, San Francisco, California, USA

The Expressive Jaroslav Vodrazka - from the Czech Republic

I recently came across this artist's work while on a search for eastern European printmakers, and I felt compelled to share this artist's story and his work....  



Czech artist Jaroslav Vodrazka lived during several chaotic upheavals in eastern Europe in the 20th c. He was born in Prague in 1894 during the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Surviving the period of peace between the two World Wars was short-lived, however, once the Nazis invaded and occupied Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Further, their endurance of the Soviet forces which separated the eastern block countries from the west placed an enormous hardship upon countless artists and creative individuals. Those artists that didn't lose their minds or limbs from military service, or lost their creative inspiration from years of oppression, dug in their heels and entrenched themselves for the duration; finding precious small pockets of time to produce their artwork, usually in secret or on the side from their other 'government-sanctioned' art.

1. Attached to the tree trunk, there is a slip of paper with the numbers: 21. VIII.1968 ( the date of the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.)

The early part of the 20th c. saw numerous eastern European artists working under these terrible conditions. They were often called 'internal emigrees', and during the day while at their jobs, they did what they were told. They also fought an artistic 'war' of their own while they struggled to keep creative and produce artwork in virtual seclusion. The penalties for intelligence and enlightened minds was severe and swift. You see, the Nazis were not known for their sympathies for visionary artists or any non-ultra realistic imagery.

Religious themes, like Christ's portrait above,  were important to Vodrazka. The artist kept a painting of St. Vaclav, the Czech national patron saint, in his own personal library with other examples of inspiration, like a collection of printmakers Rembrandt, Durer and
Schongauer.  Vodrazka's survivning sketchbooks are full of proposals for never-realized projects about stained glass windows and church sanctuaries. 

 

Vodrazka was the son of a miller who married a baker’s daughter. Their family ran a bakery in Prague. The young boy showed artistic promise at an early age, drawing on sidewalks and the margins of newspapers. He studied art The School for the Applied Arts, where he studied printmaking. Soon afterward he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I, where he sketched and made watercolors, even while serving on the Italian Alpine front. A Czechoslovak state was formed after the war and Vodrazka became a professor of printmaking and graphic arts. In 1923, he went to work with Svaty Martin in Slovakia, where he spent the next 16 years doing book design and typography in the previously suppressed Slovak language,(which occurred during Hungarian rule.)

On the eve of World War II, Vodrazka left his position in Slovakia and returned with his family to Prague, even though it was a Nazi-run Protectorate. While there, he settled into a life of teaching, book illustration, and print-making. He produced wood engravings, linocuts, etchings, engravings, and lithographs, and was always interested in exploring new printmaking techniques, using materials such as plastic and plexiglass.

From 1939 he and his wife, Ella, a writer-poet,and their son, Jaroslav, who became a noted

musician in classical organ and professor of music, lived quietly in a place of refuge on the West Bank of the Vltava River in Prague with a view of the spires of St. Vitus Cathedral, an image frequently seen in his etchings.

Vodrázka always remained rooted in figurative art, creating images of peasants, landscapes, and religious scenes. His real passion was for intimate, small-format prints and ex-libris book plates, commissioned by collectors who wanted special subjects, symbols, and scenes incorporated into these miniature graphics.

Unfortunately, Vodrazka did not live long enough to see the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. He died five years before the 1989 Velvet Revolution routed the Communists out of power in his beloved Czechoslovakia. However, the vitality and creative spirit is still evident in these prints discussed today. It is admirable that artists can work under what we western artists consider to be difficult conditions. In truth, it was just their way of life, and Vodrazka was able to teach and produce artwork even in this restricted society. His work has a beauty and depth of emotion as seen in the portraits. His respect for religious subjects is evident, and references to other western artists such as Goya, Rembrandt, Durer and even van Gogh shine through his own lines and compostitions. I was excited to find this artist's work, and hope more people will explore his oeuvre.