Vincent Hložník

Biography

At fourteen, Vincent Hložník was already signing his drawings. He chose that signature himself, long before he was known.

He was born on 22 October 1919 in Svederník, a village on the Váh a few kilometres from Žilina. His father, Imrich Hložník, and his mother, Mária, née Puškárová, were Catholics; Vincent was the eldest of five children. Among the younger ones was Ferdinand Hložník, who also became a painter. His childhood was spent by the river. At the village school in Svederník, and then at the grammar school in Žilina, he was taught drawing by Zdeněk Balaš, who noticed the boy’s talent. From 1937 to 1942 Hložník studied at the School of Applied Arts in Prague under František Kysela and Josef Novák. His fellow students included Ota Janeček, Arnošt Paderlík, Václav Plátek and Zdeněk Seydl. He lived first in the Masaryk College, then in the Štefánik College, and remembered his student years with pleasure. In Prague he came to be close to the circle of Seven in October and Group 42, joined Umělecká beseda (the Artistic Forum), and made friends with older Slovak artists, among them Cyprián Majerník. In the war years Majerník and Hložník shared a common figure, Don Quixote. His diploma work was “The Circus”: a figure composition on etched and matted glass, six panels measuring 300 by 200 centimetres in all.

His first exhibition in Bratislava, at the House of Art, took place in 1942. Critics saw something unfamiliar in it: compositions built on deliberate dissonance, the anatomy of the figures laid bare, joints deformed. In 1943 he returned to Slovakia and lived in Žilina, later in Svederník. War became the main subject of his work: “Driven Out by War” (1944), “Refugees” (1945), the lithograph cycles “Man”, “Fascism”, “Uprising” and “Transport”, and the woodcut cycle “Atomic Terror”.

From 1945 to 1949 he belonged to the Prague association Mánes, and on 29 August 1945 he became a founding member of the Group of Fine Artists of 29 August. In 1948 he travelled to Italy to study. In 1952, at the invitation of Rudolf Pribiš, he came to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. There he headed the department of free graphic art and book illustration; Albín Brunovský is named among his students. He was vice-rector in 1955–1959 and rector in 1960–1964. In those decades his work was shown in Budapest, Mexico City, Berlin, London, Brno and Prague; in 1958 he received a prize at the Venice Biennale for the cycle “Agony of War” and for his book illustrations, and in 1968 he was given the title of National Artist.

He illustrated constantly; by different accounts he illustrated from a hundred to more than three hundred books, many of them for children: Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”, Hauff’s fairy tales, Andersen. He worked in linocut, woodcut, lithography, tempera and watercolour, and gave oil painting less attention. In the 1960s he arrived at a contrast of solid black planes, hatching and pastel patches, in places close to abstraction, but he never abandoned the figure entirely. He painted the interior of the church at Dolný Hričov (1970) and made stained glass for several churches; from the mid-1980s the biblical theme returned to his work. In 1972, during the period of “normalisation” (the hardline political regime that followed the suppression of the Prague Spring), he failed a political screening and was forced for political reasons to leave the academy. After that he worked as a freelance artist. He also designed Czechoslovak postage stamps, among them the stamp “Bulls” (1994). I would note that this enforced independence, it seems, did not harm his work: it was after 1972 that “The Cage”, “The Horsemen” from the “Apocalypse” cycle and “People and Predators” appeared.

Hložník died on 10 December 1997 in Bratislava. In 2009 his family donated 799 of his works to the Žilina Self-Governing Region, and a permanent exhibition was opened at the Považská Gallery of Art.