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| Photo By Cincinnati Arts Museum |
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Oldrih Kulhanek's "The Successful Pig" slyly shows the
artist's disdain for officialdom.
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"They needed everything. Printing plates, ink, paper -- we brought them all those things," says Dr. Anne Baruch of the Czechoslovakian artists whose extraordinary works make up
Strength and Will: Czech Prints from behind the Iron Curtain at the Cincinnati Art Museum. This sleeper of an exhibition, slipped into the schedule late and is easy to overlook. Don't miss it.
Baruch, a native Chicagoan, and her Polish-born husband, founded the Jacques Baruch Gallery in Chicago in 1967 to bring the little-known work of Eastern European artists to an American audience.
"It was a way of commemorating his family and the part of the world he came from," says Anne Baruch. Her late husband escaped the Nazis, trained as an architect and, like his wife, had a strong interest in art. Behind the Iron Curtain Eastern Europe's vital artistic traditions were intact but struggling. Against the odds of censorship and lack of materials, artists continued to work "with strength and will," but their European reputations did not reach the United States. The Baruchs set out to change that.
Perceptive curators recognized supported their efforts. In 1975, the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) organized Eastern European Printmakers, an exhibition of works lent by the Baruch Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago and private collectors, and down the years CAM has increased its holdings in the field. This exhibition draws from a recent, generous gift from Anne Baruch, who is disbursing her private collection. "I am 80 years old," she says, in a voice sounding much younger, "and I have difficulty walking and seeing ... the Cincinnati Art Museum deserve(s) a share of these works." With this gift, CAM has the largest holding of Czech prints in this country.
The artists' technical virtuosity is immediately apparent. I first saw the show with a former CAM curator, herself a trained printmaker, who said on looking closely at several works "Holy cow! I don't know how they do it." Always interested in bringing informed professional comment to CityBeat readers, I think "Holy cow" says it all.
However, I'll add that these works invite careful study. Jan Kreji's 1979 "Untitled (Self-Portrait with Bat)" seems to suggest a personal quest for equilibrium against odds symbolized by barbed wire, a gun, a bat. Ideas from the West found their way past censorship, as Oldrih Kulhanek's "The Successful Pig" (1988) amply demonstrates. It draws on the famous dictum from George Orwell's Animal Farm -- "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others" -- to depict a pig whose human attributes (an eye and ear) are in the process of disappearing into a porcine physiognomy. Works like these, at the time of their making, were expressions of the artists' underground movement and hidden from officialdom. Political content is slighter in the poetic abstraction of Jifi John's "Layers I" (1966) and Vladimir Galovi's 1973 "Mr. Velesquez in Slovakia," which references local art traditions as well and the Spanish master.
The focal point of the exhibition is "Homage to Victims of Terrorism-Fragment V" (1980), a large print by Jifi Anderle utilizing color drypoint, mezzotint, cut and perforated plate to produce an extraordinarily delicate and moving work. Full disclosure: I have owned a small etching by Anderle for 25 years and never tired of it. GRADE: A
STRENGTH AND WILL, CZECH PRINTS FROM BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN, A GIFT OF THE ANNE AND JACQUES BARUCH COLLECTION is on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum through Oct. 30.š
