Ľudovít Lehen

Biography

Ľudovít Lehen’s first solo exhibitions, in 1967 and 1968, opened in Leopoldov prison. At the time he was serving his sentence there as a prisoner.

He was born on 3 June 1925 in Banská Bystrica, in a family where, besides him, there were a brother and three sisters. From 1949 to 1955 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (the state art school, then called the Vysoká škola výtvarných umení) under the professors Dušan Milly and Vincent Hložník. In 1956 he took first prize in the national competition for Slovak realist painting, repeated the success a year later, and in 1958 won second prize in the national graphic art competition. His prints were shown in Brussels, in the Soviet Union and in China. In 1961 his second daughter, Taťána, was born.

In 1962 Lehen was arrested and convicted on political grounds. The length of the sentence is given differently: six years of imprisonment in practice and eleven by the verdict. His marriage broke up afterwards. In 1966, when an attempt began in Czechoslovakia to review political cases, he was allowed to paint at Leopoldov; later, while he was still a prisoner, two exhibitions of his work were organised there. In 1968, at the height of the Prague Spring, he was released under a presidential amnesty. The rehabilitation granted to him was not honoured in practice during the “normalisation” of the 1970s, the period of hardline rule that followed the Prague Spring, as was the case for thousands of other former prisoners.

Then comes the story of a theatre curtain. Lehen won an open competition for a stage curtain for the theatre in Košice, but when the work was nearly finished, the “normalisation” censorship commission would not allow it to be hung in the auditorium.

In 1973 an exhibition of his tapestries was held in Trenčín; only one, it is believed, survives. After that he worked almost exclusively on paintings, collages and woodcuts. His main subject was the female figure: sometimes a daughter, sometimes Venus, sometimes a girl in traditional dress, sometimes undulating Madonnas. The figures are stylized, with visible influences from non-European art. At first he took Picasso and Modigliani as his models, but then developed a manner of his own, turning realistic vision into dreamlike vision. He also painted portraits and still lifes, and, occasionally for friends, landscapes. Some of the works retold his own dreams. He is credited with being the first in Czechoslovakia to have a nude painting approved for public showing.

He lived and worked in a flat in Petržalka, a prefabricated housing estate in Bratislava; the flat served as a studio and sometimes as an exhibition room. His exhibitions were held in Trenčín (1973), Šaľa (1985, pastels), Galanta (1998) and Bratislava (2001, “Nudes”; 2003). Several works belong to the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, and to the galleries in Trenčín and Banská Bystrica.

From 1977, at the age of fifty-two, Lehen began composing chess problems: two-movers, helpmates and fairy chess. Many of them were written with the International Master Juraj Brabec, who proposed the scheme while Lehen brought it to an elegant form. There were other co-authors too, among them Peter Gvozdják and Jozef Taraba. In 2005 he received the title of FIDE Master for chess composition. In hard years he was helped by his daughters and by friends from the chess world.

Lehen died in Bratislava on 12 May 2014.