Koloman Sokol

Biography

First, his childhood. His mother left the family, and an uncle took the boy in. A doctor he knew, named Mathé, helped him get into Eugen Krón’s private school in Košice. It was there that he first came seriously into contact with the visual arts.

Sokol was born on 12 December 1902 in Liptovský Mikuláš, then part of Austria-Hungary. He studied in Košice from 1921 to 1924, then moved to Bratislava, to the private school of Gustáv Mallý. From 1925 to 1932 he attended the classes of Max Švabinský and Tavik Frantisek Simon at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Even then his paintings had a strong emotional pressure, and he rejected academicism.

In Czechoslovakia he joined SČUG Hollar, an association of graphic artists. He then went to Paris and worked for about a year, in 1932–1933, in the studio of František Kupka. After that he travelled widely. His work of those years shows unemployment, poverty and forced emigration: themes he would not give up for the rest of his life. Expressionism was closest to him. He took a great deal from Käthe Kollwitz, George Grosz and the German group Die Brücke. His typical technique was the woodcut, and even when he began to paint, he kept to the limits of graphic art in form and in the construction of the sheet.

In 1937 the Mexican Ministry of Culture and Education invited him to teach graphic art. He worked at the school of book arts at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, until 1941 or until 1942: sources differ. Mexico greatly influenced his work: there, drawing and painting were added to printmaking, and Mexicans and bullfights appeared among his subjects. His best-known works include “Towards the Goal – Miners”, “The Three Magi”, “Shepherd”, “Lamentation”, “New Mexican Act” and “Women’s Fight”.

From 1942 to 1946 he lived in New York and taught.

In 1946 Sokol returned to Czechoslovakia and taught at the Slovak University of Technology and at Comenius University in Bratislava. In 1947 he received the Slovak National Prize. He did not stay long in his homeland: in 1948, after the Communists came to power, he left for the United States again and settled in Bryn Mawr, a suburb of Philadelphia. There he became a member of the Union of Mexican Graphic Artists.

From the 1960s he lived reclusively. In those years his late, symbolic-mythological style took shape, with frequent images of a dog and a horse, mythological subjects and relations between people. In 1976 his dog Sambo died, and from then on he signed his paintings with the pseudonym Sambo. To my mind, this signature shows that the personal in his late works meant no less than the social.

In his last decades Sokol lived in Arizona, in Tucson. He gave Slovakia 48 of his paintings, and on their basis the Koloman Sokol Centre was created in Liptovský Mikuláš. His awards include the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1991), the Miloš Alexander Bazovský Prize (1995), the Order of the White Double Cross, Second Class (1997) and the Slovak Minister of Culture’s prize (2001). He died in Tucson in January 2003, at the age of a hundred. Posthumously, in 2003, he was awarded the Order of the White Double Cross, First Class.