Ľudovít Fulla

Biography

In 1937 the jury of the World’s Fair in Paris awarded the Grand Prix to Fulla’s work “Songs and Labour”. He was thirty-five, and behind him were a Prague education and several years of teaching in Bratislava.

He was born on 27 February 1902 in Ružomberok, in Austria-Hungary; today it lies in the Žilina Region of Slovakia.

From 1922 to 1927 Fulla studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Prague. The Prague modernism of the 1920s influenced him strongly, and his works show traces of the principles of Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee.

From 1929 to 1939 he taught at the School of Arts and Crafts in Bratislava. There he introduced ideas close to the German Bauhaus, the design school founded by Walter Gropius. In those years, together with his friend, the painter Mikuláš Galanda, he became the author of the manifesto of the Slovak modernists, the only one of its kind. In it they tried to combine different styles and work out a shared position.

In 1932–1934 Fulla painted the murals of the church in Klížske Hradište. It is one of the few known examples of his work on a large scale: he made wall paintings for a public building rather than easel pictures.

His manner was built up in several layers. He took individual devices from Fauvism and from folk woodcut prints, knew peasant art and East Slavonic iconography, and painted in bright red, orange and yellow. He drew his subjects from Slovak life, folk songs and legends: “Slovak Girl”, “Balloons”, “Slovak Madonna”, “Village Wedding”. Among his other works are “Blessing of the Cattle”, “Expulsion from Paradise” and “Crucifixion”. People often speak of the “poetry of the image” in his pictures, and I think the phrase fits: his figures are generalised and stylised, and the colour lies in flat decorative patches. Besides painting, he worked in graphic art, woodcut, designs for tapestries, stage design, book illustration and bookplates. He is also credited with the reverse side of a banknote of 5,000 crowns that was never issued.

In 1949 Fulla became head of the department of mural and decorative painting at the newly founded Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. Three years later, in 1952, he left it for political reasons.

From 1956 to 1962 he lived in Žilina and founded a gallery of his own there. He devoted those years to painting, graphic art, drawing, stage design and book illustration.

In 1963 he was given the title of National Artist of Czechoslovakia, and he was a professor. Fulla died on 21 April 1980 in Bratislava. The Ľudovít Fulla Gallery was established later.