Mikuláš Medek

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Mikuláš Medek (3 November 1926 – 23 August 1974) was a Czech painter. He united the artistic tradition of over three generations and thanks to the originality of his expression, depth and spirituality of his extraordinary work, he occupies one of the most prominent places in the Czech art history of the post-war period. Medek's entire work must be perceived in the context of the times, as it directly reflects the oppressive atmosphere of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. He worked freely only for a short period between 1963 and 1969 and had only two exhibitions in Prague during his lifetime. He was the grandson of the impressionist Antonín Slavíček, the son of the general and writer Rudolf Medek and the brother of Ivan Medek. Medek's studio was one of the meeting centres for artists and art historians during the communist rule in Czechoslovakia.

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1926–1960 Mikuláš Medek was the son of Rudolf Medek, a teacher, legionnaire and brigadier general of the Czechoslovak Army, and Eva Medek, née Slavíčková. He was the grandson of the painter Antonín Slavíček. He had a sister, Eva (1921-1924), who died tragically as a child, and an older brother , Ivan (1925-2010). His grandmother Bohumila Slavíčková was married for the second time to Herbert Masaryk, and Mikuláš's aunts were her two daughters - art historian Anna Masaryk and Herberta Masaryk, married to art historian Emanuel Poche. Her daughter Charlotta, was married to Petr Kotik, son of the painter Jan Kotík. Mikuláš Medek maintained friendly relations with his uncle, the film director Jiří Slavíček. Rudolf Medek wrote a five-volume chronicle of the Czechoslovak Legions, published legionary short stories, wrote poems for Moderní revue, and was the author of film scripts and the play Plukovník Švec, which was staged by the National Theatre. A debating club of intellectuals and artists of a wide range of political views - from Catholic poets to communists - met in the Medeks' apartment. Rudolf Medek was friends with General Jan Syrový, the architect Strnad, Bishop Antonín Podlaha, the writers Josef Kopta and Viktor Dyk, and the…Citește mai mult

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1961–1969 Artists and theoreticians who met at Mikuláš Medek's flat have tried to register the creative group Konfrontace (Confrontation). In early 1961, a series of arrests and interrogations took place, and members of the group were bugged. The application for registration made in 1961, as well as requests for exhibition dates in 1962 and 1963, went unanswered, and the group gradually disbanded. Only in 1962, thanks to theoretician Jan Kříž, were Medek's paintings presented in Vimperk and Kamenice nad Lipou at exhibitions, organized by the Aleš South Bohemian Gallery in Hluboká nad Vltavou. In the same year he was represented at the exhibition Arguments 62 at the Krzywe Koło Gallery in Warsaw, prepared by Marian Bogusz. The situation changed when in 1963 Medek received a number of public commissions for architecture - painting for the Czech Airlines office in Damascus, a monumental pano for the Czech Airlines hall in Košice, and an altarpiece for Jedovnice. He was accepted as a candidate of the Czechoslovak Union of Artists and in August he had his first major exhibition of paintings at the Teplice Castle together with the sculptor Jan Koblasa. The following year he exhibited three paintings at the D exhibition in…Citește mai mult

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1970–1974 After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and the onset of "normalization", Medek found himself on the index again, his works in gallery exhibitions were removed and placed in a depository, he was not allowed to exhibit, and his contracts for architectural commissions were cancelled. From 1970 onwards, Medek's work was presented only abroad (Hamburg, 1970, Leinfelden, 1970, Zürich, 1976, Bochum, 1976). Medek's monograph, prepared in 1970 by Bohumír Mráz for the publishing house Obelisk, was withdrawn from sale and ended up in the pulp-mill. Due to worsening diabetes, he was hospitalized several times during 1970 and again in 1972. Emila Medková gave up her job to care for Mikuláš. In 1973, he submitted two paintings for the InterContinental Hotel, but they were rejected on the grounds that they were "in stark contradiction to the mission of art in a socialist society". Diabetes also manifested itself in thinning bones, and in 1974 Mikuláš Medek suffered a fractured hip joint, after which he could no longer attend the studio. In June 1974, the family moved to a ground-floor apartment at 6 Estonská Street, Prague. Mikuláš Medek was taken to the hospital and operated on 21 August 1974, but died two…Citește mai mult

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Exhibitions after 1974 A posthumous exhibition of Medek's last paintings was held in his studio in 1975 by Emila. It was visited by many of Medek's friends, including Václav Havel and his wife Olga. A posthumous exhibition on the occasion of Medek's 50th birthday was organized by Jan Koblasa and Petr Spielmann at the Museum Bochum in 1976. In the last years of normalization, Mikuláš Medek returned to the public consciousness thanks to an exhibition organised by Antonín Hartmann in 1988 in the Gallery of Modern Art in Roudnice nad Labem. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue that presented 60 paintings as a representative cross-section of Medek's work from 1944 to 1974. In September 1989, a more modest exhibition was held at the Aš Town Museum. In 1990, after the fall of the communist regime, monographic exhibitions of Mikuláš Medek were held in regional galleries in Prague, Brno, Hluboká, Jihlava, Olomouc and Ostrava. A major retrospective exhibition, prepared by Bohumír Mráz (†2001) and Antonín Hartmann and accompanied by a narrative catalogue, was held in 2002 at the Rudolfinum Gallery. A retrospective of Mikuláš Medek was prepared in 2020 by the National Gallery in the Wallenstein Riding Hall, the Convent…Citește mai mult

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Work During his lifetime, Mikuláš Medek was recognized not only as a painter, but also for his strong intellect, deep artistic and literary education, moral firmness, modesty and selflessness. In the times that were moving away from painting and saw modernity in other areas of artistic expression, his work was considered an elevation and celebration of the hanging picture. Although he worked as a solitaire in the Czech environment, he became part of a whole current of world painting, which, after the exhaustion of the vigour of lyrical abstraction and after the late branches of surrealism fell into academicism, found its way out of the crisis in a new integrity of the world view and the participation of all components of the artist's psychophysical activity in the creative process. Medek's work is marked by a continuous tension, the source of which was dreams and traumatic childhood experiences, disturbing bodily feelings and self-destructive behaviour, as well as the immediate cultural and political situation, especially the complete isolation of Czechoslovakia from Western culture in 1948–1956. He was deeply influenced by the literary works of Ladislav Klíma, Franz Kafka and Richard Weiner, his relationship with Emila and his friendships with Zbyněk Sekal, Libor…Citește mai mult

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Early work (1942–1949) At the beginning of World War II, Mikuláš Medek was preparing to study biology and later used his drawings of details of flowers and animal tissues in his surrealist paintings. At the same time, his first painting experiments were based on the paintings of Antonín Slavíček and reproductions of modern French painters. His relationship to Christianity, later encouraged by Medek's interest in medieval panel painting, was also evident in his juvenile work. Already at the age of sixteen, he executed several expressive, almost Rouault-like tempera drawings with New Testament and literary themes. While studying at the School of Graphic Arts, he tried his hand at cubism and oil mannerist painting in the style of El Greco, with its strong use of colour. The beginning of his work is associated with surrealism. The latter was attractive to him as the last programmatic avant-garde movement operating without regard for borders and resonating with the revolutionary mood of society in the second half of the 1940s, with its leftist orientation. The paintings from the surrealist period include quotations from the works of Paul Klee, Miró, Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst, but the subjects come from the sphere of Medek's immediate…Citește mai mult

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Imaginative painting (1949–1951) Medek did not participate in post-war group life and had reservations about the Ra group and the surrealist group around Karel Teige. He completely rejected the orthodox conception of surrealism and the occultism that surrealism as represented by André Breton had resulted in. Although he eventually became a member of the Surrealist group along with Emila in 1951, he stated in questionnaires that he did not consider himself a surrealist and intended to celebrate consciousness as a sibling of reality. In painting, he drew on the magical realism of Toyen, Magritte and Dalí to create compositions put together of fragments of reality into new units of meaning. The paintings are characterized by precise drawing and a maximally illusionistic rendering in smooth flowing oil paint. The post-war psychosis of the militant communist regime, its constant haunting of nuclear conflict, political trials and Soviet gulags seemed so horrifying to him that surrealism was no longer a program, but the starting point of a new poetry that conveyed an analytical image of reality in full intensity. Medek's images of this period are expressions of the sadism or masochism of the real world, unclouded by the hypocritical veil of everyday life…Citește mai mult

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Prepared paintings (1960–1963) The end of the 1950s marked the transformation of Medek's painting - the subject disappeared and the painting itself became the carrier of all meanings. The whole process had already occurred in the figurative paintings of the previous period, where, for example, in the series Naked in Thorns, internal situations are depicted as psychological micro-dramas. From these Medek moved on to the construction of an optically illustrative model of certain psychological situations that exist in a concrete form and have a concrete effect, but are not communicated by a simple depiction. The series of Prepared Paintings represents a new artistic technique of structural painting and does not imply a complete abandonment of the human figure or the subject, but the figure was gradually stripped of all realistic detail. One of the earliest paintings from 1960 is Uncle Charles Romantic, others such as Two Coccyxes (1960), Meat of the Cross (1961), etc. Medek treats paint and painting matter as living tissue that is torn and injured with a knife and nail, and the violence done is visible and radiates outwards. Medek builds the paintings gradually from several layers, each of which is definitive in its way and contains…Citește mai mult

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1964–1966 Medek's personal situation changed dramatically when, after the democratic election of the new leadership of the Union of Czechoslovak Visual Artists in December 1964, he was accepted as a member and later as an alternate member of the Central Committee of the Union of Czechoslovak Visual Artists. Along with his rehabilitation, he became the subject of critical evaluation by art historians, some of whom considered Medek's painting to be a conservative relic in the mid-1960s. Medek reacted to the interpreters of his work from those closest to him, whom he came to believe were speaking too much into his art and life, with the ironic cycle Inquisitors. Medek's fifth creative period transitions seamlessly from the Sensitive Signals series and represents a return to figuration against the backdrop of pictorial space while maintaining the technique of structural painting. He creates a new figurative typology for his large cycles of paintings, with geometrically stylized necks, limbs and heads, and with elements adopted from earlier periods - for example, hair or hands in the form of long curved spines (or the earlier predator's beaks), the venomous teeth from the painting Smoking Feast I (1950). The characteristic rectangular shape of the head with…Citește mai mult

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1967–1969 The titles of Medek's paintings from the second half of the 1960s, in which figuration predominates, reflect a new relationship to the subject and the creative process, which expresses distance and self-irony. This led to the creation of the entire series of Portrayals of a View of .. (Annunciation, The Hungry Saint, Man in Tension). Some of the paintings refer to older themes (Miraculous Mother III, 1967, Blue Cry, 1967, Sudden Incident on the Border of Yellow III, 1967), but are treated in a new form. Small mechanisms in the form of wheels, gears, beak-like folds and levers appear for the first time in the paintings made during his stay in Genoa. In 1967, the so-called Madrid sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci were discovered with a number of technical drawings. Medek, who had been interested in Leonardo since his student days, when he discovered Fred Bérence's book, Lionardo da Vinci, Worker of Reason (1939), suggested an erotic or sadomasochistic meaning to his machines. In the painting Depiction of the View of a Man in Tension (1967), he interprets them as mutually devouring bird heads attached to a common axis. The painting with a technical subject was also inspired by…Citește mai mult

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1969–1974 The vindictiveness of the cultural normalizers was cruel to Medek, and his exclusion from society after 1970 was not much different from the 1950s. Moreover, Medek was plagued by his illness and devoted all his remaining energy to painting. He returned to some of his subjects well into the 1950s and completely reworked them formally (Golden Scream III, 1969, Miraculous Mother V, 1970). At the same time, his paintings from the 1970s include quotations of motifs from his previous work as well as returns to the biomorphic inspirations of his early years as a painter. In the painting Ivishka II (1970) and several paintings from the angel series (Head of the Thirsty Angel II, 1970, Thirsty Angel II, 1970), the structures of the heads resemble a cross-section of a plant tissue. The book on the medieval religious movement was the basis for the cycle of expressive paintings The Beguines I-III (1970) and the painting The Lamp of the Frenzied Nun. In 1970, Medek created an altarpiece for the chapel in Kotvrdovice, which was preceded by several studies with geometric solids executed with illusory plastic painting. The 1970s also marked an extraordinary creative upsurge in his illness-ridden life. Medek's personal…Citește mai mult

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Medek's painting technique Early works of smaller formats are on cardboard, plywood or masonite, later works exclusively on canvas. He chalked the panels with added alabaster plaster and grinded them to achieve a smooth surface. He assembled the frame himself and began work on the painting by stretching and preparing the canvas, gouging and scribing with floating chalk. During the period of imaginative and figurative painting, he used a thickly bound canvas and added white chalk for a vibrant ground. For preparatory ink drawings, he painted with oil paints in light glaze layers. For figurative paintings, he made preparatory drawings on wrapping paper and then transferred these to canvas. He painted the figures with oily egg tempera and the background with oil paints. As an unregistered painter in the 1950s, Medek had trouble sourcing materials, so he removed some canvases from the frame and reused them from the opposite side. At the end of the 1950s, he began to use synthetic enamel paint (Industrol) diluted with turpentine to create the plastic structure of the painting and painted the first layers of the painting horizontally on the ground. He mixed the synthetic enamel with floating chalk or sand and stiffened and…Citește mai mult

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Commissions - works in public space 1963 Painting Penetration of Space (182 x 401 cm) for the Czech Airlines office in Damascus 1963 fourteen-piece Pano (248 x 1701 cm) for the Czech Airlines office in Košice 1963–1965 Cross, altarpiece, dean's church of St. Peter and Paul in Jedovnice. The frame of the painting is the work of Jan Koblasa. 1966 Wall painting of Fragility (Blue Rotation of the Universe) for a travel agency in Paris (one part now in Prague Castle) 1969 Signals, 319 x 1747 cm, originally for the transit restaurant of Prague – Ruzyně Airport, now in the possession of the National Gallery 1970 Sacred Heart of the Lord, altarpiece, 180 x 140 cm, Chapel of the Divine Heart of the Lord in Kotvrdovice 1970 The Great Iviska, 215 x 120 cm, for a travel agency in New York City 1971 The Fourteen Stations of the Cross, 122 x 1050 cm, St. Joseph's Church in Senetářov 1973 Mosaic of the Sun on the facade of a school in Žďár nad Sázavou (made by the workshops of the Centre for arts and crafts)

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Book illustrations Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One, World Literature No. 4, 1957 (under the pseudonym Dagmar Kozakova) Tage Aurell, Three Stories, World Literature No. 2, 1962 Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, Labyrinth (Committee of Western Science Fiction Stories), SNKLU, Prague, 1962 Taijun Takeda, The Luminous Moss, World Literature No. 5, 1964 Otokar Březina, Hands, Blok Publishing House, Brno, 1965 Vladimír Holan, Death and Dream and Word (From Macha's Region), North Bohemian Regional Publishing House, Liberec 1965 Pain (verses from 1949 to 1955), Československý spisovatel Publishing house, Prague 1966 František Langer, Painterly Tales (Volume I.), Československý spisovatel Publishing house, Prague 1966 Magnetic Fields, KPP, Československý spisovatel Publishing house, Prague 1967 Zdeněk Lorenc, Hollow Lamp, Československý spisovatel Publishing house, Prague 1967

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Vladimír Holan, Babyloniaca, Odeon, Prague 1968 Rio Preisner, Kapilary, Blok Publishing House, Brno 1968 Jiří Mahen, The Moon (Fantasy), Odeon, Prague 1968 Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (excerpts), World Literature No. 1, 1969 Jiřina Hauková, Letorosty (Selection of poetry 1940–1965), Československý spisovatel Publishing house, Prague 1970 Franz Werfel, Song of Bernadette, Vyšehrad Publishing House, Prague 1989 (published in 1972 without illustrations)