Ester Šimerová-Martinčeková

Biography

In 2016 Slovenská pošta, the Slovak post office, printed her “Chess Composition” on a stamp. The picture was painted while she was a student in Paris, when she was not yet twenty-five.

Ester Fridriková was born on 23 January 1909 in Bratislava. Her mother was a musician who had met with obstacles in her own career, and so she supported her daughter’s work in art. During the First World War Ester attended a Lutheran school and then a gymnasium, and in her last years there she took private lessons at the painting school of Gustáv Mallý. After the gymnasium she left for Paris. There she studied at the Académie Julian, founded by Rodolphe Julian, and at the private school of Aleksandra Ekster, an artist from the Kiev region. Ekster, to judge by the descriptions, influenced her more than anyone else, and Cubist and Cubo-Futurist devices can be seen in her early work. Already in her Paris years she produced pictures that are now mostly in the Slovak National Gallery: “Grey Still Life”, “Chess Composition”, “Port of Dieppe”, “Quartet” and “Grapes”. Chess remained a constant theme of hers later on. She seems to have been the only Slovak artist of her generation to learn directly from the School of Paris, and she often returned to Paris.

In 1931 she had an exhibition in Prague and joined the art section of the Umělecká beseda, a Czech artists’ society. In a newspaper interview in 1934 she said that modern art has first of all an artistic function, while photomontage, film, radio, theatre and literature suit a social idea better. Thirty years later, in 1966, she was still reproaching modern art for relying too heavily on politics. Critics of the 1930s called her modernist pictures brave and pioneering; under the Nazis such art was branded “degenerate”.

In 1932 she married a doctor, František Šimer, and they lived in Bratislava. After the break-up of the First Czechoslovak Republic they moved to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, to Plzeň. Šimer, chief physician of a hospital, sheltered Czechoslovak paratroopers who had come from Britain at the time of the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich. The Gestapo arrested him after a betrayal in 1942, and he was executed.

After 1945 Šimerová returned to Slovakia. She was elected chair of the Block of Slovak Artists and took part in cultural life. In 1947 she married a lawyer, Martin Martinček, who at the time headed the presidium office of the Slovak National Council and later became a well-known photographer. After the communist coup of 1948 he was removed from public service. In 1952, during a campaign in which the authorities expelled people they considered unreliable from Bratislava, the couple were forced to move to a village near Liptovský Mikuláš; Martinček had been labelled a “bourgeois nationalist”. From 1954 they lived in Liptovský Mikuláš itself, and she remained there for the rest of her life.

Her subjects changed. In the 1960s interest in her early modernist work returned, and at the same time she took up collage and made a good many, mostly with motifs of gardens and still lifes. In her later work one finds workers, doves of peace and other recognisable political symbols. Besides painting, she designed theatre costumes for the New Stage in Bratislava. In 1966 she was named a Merited Artist, an official Czechoslovak title. She exhibited in galleries in Slovakia, Poland and other countries. In 1984 she received the Liptov Prize, and in 1987 the Czechoslovak post office issued a stamp with her “Tulips”. Higher honours followed: in 1991 the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, 4th class, in 1992 the Martin Benka Prize, in 1998 the Miloš Bazovský Prize from the Fine Arts Fund, in 2001 the prize of the Tatra Bank Foundation and a French distinction for art and literature. In 2002 President Rudolf Schuster awarded her the Order of Ľudovít Štúr, 1st class.

In the 1990s her health declined, and she made her last work in 1994. Ester Šimerová-Martinčeková died on 7 August 2005 in Liptovský Mikuláš.