Vladimír Vašíček

Biography

Vašíček got his first work in his trade at sixteen: in 1935 he was taken on as an apprentice in the decorating workshop of Antonín Sychra in Kyjov. There he first met church painting, and the experience came back to him some forty years later, when commissions for easel paintings dried up.

He was born on 29 September 1919 in Mistřín near Kyjov, into a smallholding farming family, the eldest of three brothers. After Kyjov he worked from 1938 in an advertising and decorating workshop in Zlín, where he first saw contemporary Czech art at the Zlín Salons. In 1939 he was sent to forced labour in Germany, but the next year his return was secured and he was taken on again in Zlín. In June 1940 he entered the newly opened School of Arts. While the universities and colleges were closed, it unofficially took the place of an academy. Among the teachers were the architects Kadlec, Gahura, Fuchs and Bouček and the sculptor František Makovský, among others; his fellow students included Václav Chad, Čestmír Kafka and Jan Rajlich. In 1944–1945 he worked as an architect’s assistant in the design offices of the Baťa company.

From 1945 Vašíček studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, first under Vratislav Nechleba, then under Ján Želibský, and graduated in 1949. There he made lifelong friendships, among them with Richard Fremund and Miroslav Tichý. In 1947 he married. After finishing his studies he settled in Svatobořice (later merged with Mistřín) and stayed there for the rest of his life. In the same year his first exhibition took place in Kyjov, and he joined the Brno association SVU Aleš.

From 1951 a group of five Moravian painters took shape around him: Bohumír Matal, Jánuš Kubíček, Vladislav Vaculka, Miroslav Tichý and Vašíček himself. They looked for concentrated expression and stylisation, drawing on Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism and especially Orphism, and took František Kupka as their model. Socialist Realism, the official doctrine of the state, they kept at a distance. In 1955 Vašíček had a solo exhibition in the unofficial premises of the Research Institute of Architecture in Brno. In 1956 he and his colleagues organised an exhibition in the surgical pavilion of the hospital in Kyjov; this was probably the first collective public show of its kind in the country. In January 1957 he had a solo exhibition at the House of Arts in Brno. He, Matal, Kubíček and Vaculka formed the core of the Brno group, later named “Brno 57”, and exhibited together, for example in Prague.

His first abstract paintings appeared in 1959–1960. From then on he worked consistently in a non-figurative manner. At first his form was changeable; then two main lines emerged, resting on a common principle: the dynamism of life, a sensual relation to reality, the harmony of the whole. He responded to the explorations of world art: to the texture of the paint surface, to geometric abstraction, to the freedom of Tachism and the spontaneity of gestural painting. His pictures are conceived as a paraphrase of intangible phenomena: energy, natural forces, physical and biological processes.

Between 1959 and 1973 he travelled a good deal: to Moscow and Leningrad, to Austria (where, by some accounts, he met Oskar Kokoschka and Giacomo Manzù), to Poland, France and Switzerland, where he had exhibitions in St. Gallen and Biel. He sent work to the first painting biennial in Pistoia (1969) and to shows in Barcelona. The writer Milan Kundera, in the early 1960s, thought highly of both his friendship and his paintings, which were tied to the south of Moravia. In 1969 his father died, in 1970 his mother, and in the same year he lost his close friend Richard Fremund.

With the start of “normalisation” in the 1970s, the period of tightened political control after 1968, Vašíček again found himself in the shade. With the support of the prelate Josef Moštěk he took commissions for painting and restoring church interiors. He exhibited less in these years; in the 1980s several large exhibitions were held. His studio in Svatobořice remained a place of meetings and free conversation, visited by people from various fields, including some who had left the country.

In the 1990s his work gathered new strength. In 1993 a monograph on him, written by Josef Maliva, was published in Ostrava. He exhibited infrequently and, I think, preferred painting to publicity. In 1994, together with Tomáš Baťa, he became a patron of the reopened School of Arts in Zlín. In 1995 he received the Prize of the Masaryk Academy of Arts, in 1996 the František Kupka Prize, and in 2002 he became an honorary citizen of Kyjov. To my mind, the most interesting of the late paintings are those in which the earlier bright colour gives way to a spiritual and philosophical line.

Vašíček died on 29 August 2003 in Svatobořice; he was working at his easel literally until the last day.