Bohumír Matal

BOHUMÍR MATAL / PRESENCE OF MEN BANNED PAINTER FROM HEART OF EUROPE'

Bohumír Matal (13 February 1922 Brno – 7 July 1988 Prudká at Doubravník) is one of the most striking personalities on the Czech and Moravian post - World War II painting art scene. His work does not only show a refined and discerning sense of colour and space, plus love of music, literature and theatre, but it also shows the inner stance of a man, whose life was severely affected by the war, and by the unfavourable and very difficult 1950’s, preceded by the onset of the communist totalitarian regime in 1948, whose ending in 1989 came, unfortunately, after the death of the artist.

The name of Bohumír Matal is inseparably connected with the City of Brno (the Capital of Moravia - Czech Republic) and its cultural environment. It was in Brno, where Bohumír Matal, in 1942, completed the Secondary School of Art Trades, subsequently got married and started living in nearby Bílovice. In October of the same year he was arrested and deported to a labour camp in Lohbrück, near Wroclaw (then Breslau). From this period, several letters that the artist wrote to his wife have been preserved, together with the accompanying surrealistic pencil sketches.

After returning home and following a further three-year dormant period, Bohumír Matal renewed his painting activities, and became the youngest member of the “Group 42”. There he got to know the works of František Gross, František Hudeček, Jan Smetana, Jan Kotík and Kamil Lhoták. He was also developing friendly contacts with Jiří Kolář and Jindřich Chaloupecký, with Ivan Blatný, a poet who lived in Great Britain as an emigrant, and with Josef Kainar, a musician and a poet. Another one of his Brno friends was the Brno-born novelist, Milan Kundera, who emigrated to Paris, France, in 1969. Milan Kundera tried several times to help Matal stage an exhibition of his paintings in Paris, but those efforts failed invariably and every time, because of the communist regime of the then Czecho-Slovakia. One of Matal’s childhood friends was also the writer Bohumil Hrabal, who used to visit his grandmother and grandfather in the neighbourhood of where the young Mirek Matal lived.

"The Matal Exhibitions" is a film with catalogues, describing a very important artist, Bohumír Matal (1922 – 1988.), who is listed in the "Lexicon of World's Painting". Matal, when he was a very young man, had success with his exhibition in Paris, where he stayed with other young Czecho-Slovak artists. There he made quite an impression on George Braque, whose Atelier he used to visit regularly for painting and inspiration lessons. Whilst the exhibition was taking place, his country of Czecho-Slovakia was overtaken by the communists, in their February 1948 putsch. He did not emigrate, but returned home. From that point in time, his works and paintings were banned in his home country. He refused to join the communist party, and instead he decided to be a free artist, painting whatever he wanted to paint . . . During his lifetime, Matal renewed and brought back to life several old and forgotten art techniques that no art schools were teaching. His home country, where he did all his artistic work, offered him places as a Professor of Painting at its Art Universities, with the condition that he becomes a communist. He refused that. He refused to create and paint "socialist realism". The above-mentioned "Lexicon" listing occurred while he was still alive, and the book was officially brought and shown to him from abroad, when he was already old and of ill health.

We hold such experts and artists (and Matal was indeed one of them) in high esteem, and we want to hand over the cultural heritage that they left behind to future generations. Many tried to organize exhibitions for Matal abroad. For example, Milan Kundera, the world renowned novelist, who used to come incognito to Matal's country mill, tried to arrange and organize an exhibition of Matal's paintings in Paris, but in the end he failed to be allowed to take Matal's works over the Czecho-Slovak border with the free West. Milan Kundera, a friend of Matal's from their home town of Brno, who has been living in Paris for many years now, is one of the people who, as young budding artists, were starting their artistic carers together.

From 1946, the work of Matal started to exhibit the “cyclist theme” - not only in the sense of “a man controlling a machine”, but also, and especially, in the sense of “cyclist the sportsman”. In these paintings, Matal was growing ever closer to “geometrical morphology of paint shapes”, and was creating an ever more original art form, which signaled the arrival of his new, purely abstract paintings and works.

During the 1950s, Bohumír Matal, together with Jánuš Kubíček, founded the so-called “Brno Group”, later renamed as “Brno 57”, which was later joined by other important artists, such as painters Pavel Navrátil, Josef Kubíček, Karel Hyliš, Vladimír Vašíček and Vladislav Vaculka; architects Ivan Ruller and Zdeněk Řihák; and music composer Jan Novák. Matal’s Studio / Atelier in Česká Street, Brno, became a place of meetings and discussions. However, after the 21 August 1968 Russian invasion of Czecho-Slovakia, Bohumír Matal began to lose confidence in the belief that people who came to the Atelier were not communist informers. Matal therefore left Brno, and found a new home in the valley of the Prudká River, near Doubravník (some 38 km north of Brno), where he gradually reconstructed an old mill to serve him as his new atelier. In the pristine countryside, Matal found not only peace for artistic concentration, but also a haven to shelter him from the ever-growing pressures of the communist regime. At around that time, the artist’s work began to be more and more influenced by right angle shapes and cleanliness of colour tone. Matal started to develop constructively-oriented series of paintings which he called “The Presence of Man”, in which vertical structures envelope colour areas. Two of the paintings of this series belong to the Collection of the Museum of the City of Brno. In the first one, from 1968, we can see the repercussions of the artist’s initial informal stages, and reminiscences of the “Group 42” painting styles, such as living brushstrokes, traces created by the pouring of colour paints, the dialogue of impasto structures with glaze painting techniques, and the contrast of shades and light forms.

Matal was timeless. He painted quite a bit images of the Universe at a later stage of his life. He used to say that "in future, we shall be extracting all our energy from the Universe". Another one of the ideas which he liked to express was that his last paintings were not abstract, but realistic. According to Matal, the art experts would discover that after he'd die . . .

Ilona Víchová, Art historian, Prague Prague (capital of Czech Republic) and Brno (Czech Republic) English translation: Dipl. Ing. Petr F. Durna, BE, MEngSc (Sydney, Australia - Brno, Czech Republic)

BOHUMÍR MATAL

The Exhibition of paintings and drawings by Bohumír Matal at the Brno House of Arts has been prepared in the year of the 10th Anniversary of the artist‘s death. This present selection from the works of one of the most prominent figures of Czech post-war artistic creation follows Matal‘s artistic development in paintings from the 1940s through to his last works.

Matal started painting and creating his works under the guidance of his uncle - teacher when he was 10 years old. His uncle recognised, even at that early stage, his huge talent, and started buying for him oil colours and large canvasses. Some of these painted canvasses have been preserved to this day. Matal painted realistic flora and fauna, and soon he started developing and creating abstract paintings.

Shortly after completing his studies at the Brno School of Arts and Crafts Bohumír Matal was sent to work in Germany as a part of the Nazi forced labour programme- from there, he sent his family letters with surrealistic drawings, reflecting his situation and feelings. After returning home in 1945, he became member of Skupina 42 (Group 42), whose orientation was close to his. “Man in the City, City in Man“ - this was one of the pivotal themes of the period; reaction to war years had not yet totally faded away, and the artist focused on the poetry of the city, the periphery, the relation of man to the contemporary world. The main characteristics of Matal‘s works in the 1940s were compositions inspired by cubism, the fusion of the constructed human figure with the tectonics of urban architecture and machines as symbols of modern civilization, still-life with frequently reappearing physical attributes. The rationally constructed painted compositions were still based on the author´s imagination and echoes of Chirico‘s metaphysical painting. The paintings created in that decade are of fundamental importance, their principles continued to be developed by the painter, but later he used other artistic means. The motifs of interior architecture and self-portraits of the 1950s carry an existentialist message, while the "Cyclists" series shows a significant divergence from visually perceived reality, geometric stylization and cadence of the painted surface with colour and line. These features basically remained present in the artist‘s subsequent works, bringing him systematically to the limits of non-figurative painting. Liberation from the bond to sensation was characteristic of the “informal“ paintings created in the following decade: the constructive composition of the painted surface vanishes, and stains of colour, the artist‘s spontaneous hand and imagination become the dominating features (Genesis, Pre-landscape, Karst). In the large cycle The Presence of Man, Bohumír Matal deals with notions of time and space in relation to humanity, and with values whose importance surpasses any limitations of time. He again uses geometrically abstracted morphology, applying order and harmony.

In the early 1970s, Bohumír Matal left Brno and spent the rest of his life in a mill at Prudká near Doubravník. Following the exhibitions of his works in the 1950s, the painter encountered a very negative attitude on the part of official critics, and this lack of recognition followed him constantly, nourished by the contemporary political atmosphere. His withdrawal to the sidelines did not mean isolation - he was visited by friends and he could fully concentrate on his work. He painted the cycles Bird Actors and Monuments, dynamic compositions of diagonals and curves, a galore of shapes, paraphrasing the political atmosphere and the false pathos of the time. Having made the cycles Space Jumble, Downfalls and Wrecks, in which colour still plays a significant role, Matal‘s work closed in the 1980s with the cycle Narrowing Space, translating the feelings of inner resignation, hopelessness, manifested in a loss of colour. In the last two years of his life Bohumír Matal only drew- he died in the summer of 1988. His work is closely related to the time of its origin and spontaneously reacts to it but its topicality and significance by far transcends it.

Jana Vránová ,The art historian, Brno (Czech Republic) Book Monography Matal Brno House of Arts

¨Jindřich Chalupecký: “Mirek already had at a very young age already an exhibition in the House of Arts in Brno. His monumental paintings filled the whole House of Arts from the top to bottom, and no one ever achieved that after him.“

"Association of Friends of Fine Arts„ Organizing exhibitions Bohumír Matal in London (GB) in Clerkenwell gallery / Frameless Gallery in October – November 2016. BOHUMÍR MATAL / PRESENCE OF MEN / BANNED PAINTER FROM HEART OF EUROPE.