Věra Janoušková, née Havlová (25 June 1922 – 10 August 2010) was a Czech sculptor, collagist, painter and graphic artist. She was the wife of sculptor Vladimír Janoušek. In the 1960s, her sculptures made of enamel were among the highlights of Czech modern artMarie Klimešová, Art and Antiques 12, 2010, p. 40 and she is deservedly listed in Hazan's Nouveau dictionnaire de la sculpture moderne (Paris, 1970). After the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops in August 1968, both Věra and Vladimír Janoušek lost the opportunity to exhibit and worked in seclusion. After the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, Věra Janoušková had a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery in Prague. In 2004, she founded the Věra and Vladimír Janoušek Foundation and bequeathed the entire estate of the couple to Museum Kampa – Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation.
Life Věra Janoušková (née Havlová) was born on 25 June 1922 in Úbislavice,Šetlík J, 1960, unpaginated in the family of a country schoolteacher as the youngest of three sisters. On the recommendation of her teacher, who discovered her talent for drawing, she took exams at the School of Applied Arts in Prague (UPŠ) for the study of painting, and although she failed the first time, the atmosphere of the school influenced her decision to devote herself to art. After a year's practice at the Vocational School of Stone-Sculpture in nearby Hořice, where she attended courses in art theory and had the opportunity to draw and model in clay (prof. Plichta), she was accepted in 1942 at the School of Applied Arts (UPŠ) to the sculpture studio of prof. Karel Dvořák.Magda Juříková, Jana Chytilová, 2002, p. 74
After the war in 1945 she moved to the studio of Prof. Josef Wagner, where her classmates were Eva Kmentová, Alina Szapocznikow,Primusová A, 2008, p. 6-9 Olbram Zoubek, Miloslav Chlupáč, Zdeněk Palcr, Vladimír Janoušek, Eugenie Jungová, Antonín Brejník and Vítězslav Jungbauer. During the Nazi Occupation, the School of Applied Arts substituted the closed Academy of Fine Arts and therefore in 1945 it gained the status of a second art college (Academy of Applied Arts in Prague). Among the professors who taught there were Václav Nebeský, Emil Filla, František Tichý, Josef Kaplický, Jan Bauch and Jan Lauda. At school and at post-war Prague exhibitions, students had the opportunity to get acquainted with modern European art. Janoušková absorbed various influences from structural abstraction to pop art, but the closest to her sensibility were the sculptural works of Gutfreund, Picasso, Moore or the works of Dubuffet.
After the war, she negotiated the possibility of studying at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts with the then best French sculptor-portraitist Marcel Gimond (a pupil of Rodin and Maillol), but the communist coup of 1948 ruined this opportunity.Magda Juříková, Jana Chytilová, 2002, p. 75 In 1948, Věra Havlová married Vladimir Janoušek and together with him went on a one-year scholarship to the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia. In the 1950s, the Janoušek couple worked in a barn in Dolní Kalná at Vladimír parents' house. They acquired their first Prague studio in a workshop with an adjoining yard in the former Smíchov prison in Malátova Street. It became a place of meetings and exchanges of opinions of their generational comradesŠetlík J, in: Vladimír Janoušek, 1990, p. 6 and younger artists. Věra was friends with Adriena Šimotová.Adriena Šimotová, in: Řeháková N, 2004, unpaginated In 1951–1959 Věra Janoušková participated in the 1st–4th Czechoslovak Fine Arts Show and in 1958 in the Young Art Exhibition in Brno. At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s the social atmosphere relaxed somewhat. In 1962, the Janoušek couple, together with Zoubek and Kmentová, visited Constantin Brâncuși in Târgu Jiu. In addition to Romania, she also visited Paris (1959–1960), Italy (1967, 1969) and Egypt (1969).Primusová A, 2008, pp. 26–27
In 1960, Věra Janoušková was a founding member of the UB 12 creative group and exhibited her sculptures at the first solo exhibition in Gallery on Charles Square.Vachtová L., 1967 The first UB 12 exhibition in gallery of the then biggest publishing house Československý spisovatel in 1962 was closed three times in a row at the request of the Central City Committee in Prague, was criticised in the party press of the time and a fictional radio interview with an "outraged" visitor was published.Šetlík J, 1994, p. 13-14 This eventually led to unusually high attendance and awakened the interest of theorists – Jindřich ChalupeckýChalupecký J, 1965, unpaginatedJindřich Chalupecký, in: Řeháková N, 2004, unpaginated and Miroslav Lamač. Věra Janoušková's sculptures made from found materials were cited by the party press as a particularly intimidating example.Pánková M: Věra Janoušková – Škvárovky a koláže, 1993 In 1965, she had her second solo exhibition at Václav Špála Gallery, which was run by Jindřich Chalupecký. In the 1960s, she was represented at important exhibitions of Czech art abroad (Budapest, 1960, Genoa, 1965, Liège, West Berlin, 1966, Turin, Middelheim-Antwerp, Expo 67 Montreal, 1967, Paris, 1968, Legnano, 1969, West Berlin, 1970).Šetlík J, 1986
In the second half of the 1960s, the Janoušek couple acquired a plot of land in Prague-Košíře, where they built their own sculpture studio according to the design of Vladimír Janoušek.Famous villas: Sculpture studio of Vladimír and Věra Janoušek The approval project of the functionalist building was created by the office Hrubý, Cubr, Pokorný (authors of the award-winning Czechoslovak Pavilion at the Expo 58 in Brussels)Dolcevita 8, 2009, pp. 66–69 and later modified by arch. Alena Šrámková.Věra and Vladimír Janoušek's Sculpture Studio, Architecture Day After a very fruitful period in the 1960s, when the Janoušek couple presented their work both at home and abroad, the soviet occupation in August 1968, followed by two decades of harsh "normalization", was a disaster for both of them. Opportunities to exhibit were rare and held only in unofficial spaces or far outside Prague, public commissions were non-existent, foreign contacts were broken. No official gallery in a larger city was allowed to hold an exhibition for Věra Janoušková's 60th birthday, and in the end it was held in the modest premises of the theatre in Český Těšín.Zemina J, 1995, unpaginatedZemina J, 2001, unpaginated
Neither Věra nor Vladimír Janoušek did consider emigration because of their grandparents. Finally, the strong attachment to the country and the friendly environment within the community of artists similarly driven into involuntary isolation prevailed. The Janoušek couple worked alternately in studios in Prague-Košíře and in Vidonice near Pecka. In 1986, Vladimír Janoušek died and Věra experienced another long personal crisis.Zemina J, 1998 At that time she mainly created collages and sporadically sculptures with a strong existential accent. In the 1980s, Věra Janoušková participated in the creation of the unofficial anthology "Grey Brick" (published by the Jazz Section, ed. Karel Srp Jr.) and became a member of the New Group of artists (1987).Naďa Řeháková, 2004, unpaginated
After the fall of communism in 1989, the work of both spouses could again be introduced to the wider public. Věra Janoušková gained a firm place in the context of modern Czech sculpture, with retrospective exhibitions of her sculptures and collages taking place at National Gallery in Prague, Gallery of Art in Karlovy Vary, North Bohemian Gallery in Litoměřice, East Bohemian Gallery in Pardubice, Regional gallery of Highlands in Jihlava, Gallery of Modern Art in Hradec Králové, GuBJ in Klatovy, Stodola in Český Krumlov, Prague City Gallery, Mánes exhibition hall, Museum Kampa. She exhibits abroad (Europe, USA, Asia), is awarded honorary citizenship of Nová Paka, becomes a member of the renewed Umělecká beseda (1990). In 2004, she founded the Věra and Vladimír Janoušek Foundation and contributed to it with a significant collection of the artworks of both sculptors. The estate of both artists is currently administered by Museum Kampa – Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation.
Věra Janoušková died on 10 August 2010 in Prague at the age of 88.Věra Janoušková, sculptor inspired by Picasso and metal, iDNES 11 August 2010
Work One of Věra Janoušková's first creations, important in the context of her later work, was the figurative tapestry "Ulysses" (1948), sewn from scraps of fabric on an old blanket. The source of inspiration was ancient art and Roger Bissière's large-scale fabric collages, presented at the French Modern Art Exhibition in Prague (1947).Věra Janoušková, in. 84 "Ulysses" and the following "Self-Portrait with Sculpture" and "Pierrot and Columbine (1952–1954)" foreshadow later coloured paper collages and sculpture-collages assembled from coloured enamels.
Her sculptural sensibility was most influenced by Gutfreund, "New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit)" and Naïve art, as well as later classical realism.Earth J, 2001, unpaginated Equally strong and stimulating was the introduction to the work of Picasso, Giacometti and Dubuffet, the Flemish Expressionists (Constant Permeke, Gustave De Smet), M. Marini, and Fritz Wotruba. Almost everything that establishes her distinctiveness is evident in her early sculptures – a strong feeling for volume, colour and material. Janoušková was a type of spontaneous and intuitive creator, incomprehensible to the layman and unclassifiable by art theorists. She ignored the contemporary tendencies of Czech Informel and New Figuration, and with the essentially constructive focus of her artistic activity, she brought back to life the rubbish found on the scrap heap, from which she created new entities. In this respect her composing of materiels as a creative sculptural principle is closest to Zbyněk Sekal, Karel Nepraš or Aleš Veselý.Zemina J, 1982
Despite her rejection of profaned classical noble materials and her conscious effort to deny "beauty", her work achieves an unquestionable aesthetic quality. Janoušková negates the established criteria of usefulness and uselessness and finds value in something that others have already disavowed of any value, and beauty, where all find only decay, deterioration and destruction. Her personal preoccupation, which has the character of an "obsession with material", finds inspiration directly in the found object. It becomes a thematic moment and a starting point for improvisation.Pánková M: Věra Janoušková: Smalty, 1987 Janoušková eliminated in advance the randomness and indeterminacy of the combination of the found objects and by joining them she established their solid relationship and the confidence of a new reality.Nešlehová M: Věra Janoušková, 1988 Although Janoušková belongs to the artists whose work is based on spontaneity, she is guided by an intellectual control that shapes the works and makes them clairvoyant.
The personal traumas of World War II and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops in August 1968, and the subsequent occupation and normalization spanning more than twenty years, provide an existential theme in her works, outwardly evident as an effort to suppress feelings of insecurity and fragmentation and to create a system that encompasses lived experience and offers the possibility of returning the world to its original integrity.
Sculpture