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- Title
Der erloschene Spiegel: Zur Gesichtslosigkeit von Václav Hejnas Männern am Tisch.
- Authors
Tesan, Harald
- Abstract
Václav Hejna made hundreds of sketches dealing with the theme of Man at the Table. He depicted the large- handed, slouched figure several times, in Cekdrna dr. Schauera (Dr. Schauer's Waiting Room, at the National Gallery in Prague), and yet again, incessantly in other paintings from 1933-1939. This series of works is still interpreted in the literature as ,a symptom of the economic and political depression that beleaguered Czechoslovakia between World War One and World War Two. From a constricted visual angle, Hejna has been considered as an artist with the usual social leanings. For this reason, the particular.subversive'possibilities of his early work originating in his painterly gestures have not been duly recognised. The following contribu- tion centres on Hejna's expressive, impastoed figural paintings of the 1930s taken within a wider context. At the heart of these cultural-historical considerations is the theme of the mirror. Basic questions are raised regarding the relationship between the appropriation of reality and art. In Hejna's work, the motif of the smeared- out, scraped-off face appears often. On one hand, it is anchored in the rhetoric of Modernism, which extends from Baizac's The Unkown Masterpiece to. the aggressive over-painting of Arnulf Rainer. At the same time, Hejna's disquieting, dehumanised depiction of figures reveals a critical distance from the entrenched culture of the avant-garde, from the culture of so-called Classical Modernism' generally and particularly from the long-enduring culture of Cubism in Prague. It emerges that Hejna's unmistakable painterly vocabulary was developed independently and in a congenial relationship with the philosophical trend of existentialism in France. While the black oval of a head represents a loss of faith in any human cultural form, the rough painting of Hejna's pre-1939 work may be considered a harbinger of Art Brut and L'art informel.
- Subjects
PAINTING; MENTAL depression; WORLD War I; WORLD War II -- Psychological aspects; RHETORIC; MODERNISM (Art); EXISTENTIALISM; PSYCHOLOGY
- Publication
Art / Umění, 2007, Vol 55, Issue 2, p133
- ISSN
0049-5123
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2478/v10008-007-0005-1