František Mertl (born 16 March 1930), who has used the artistic name Francois Mertl dit Franta in France since the 1960s,Regional personalities. 1st ed. Třebíč: District Library, 1995. 68 p. ISBN 80-85062-01-1. pp. 24-25. is a Czech painter and sculptor who emigrated to France in 1958 to join his wife. He lives in Vence, in the Nice area.
Biography Youth in Czechoslovakia František Mertl came from Třebíč, but during the war he lived with his mother and brother in Brtnice in the Vysočina Region. His father, Miloš Mertl, traded in Czech crystal. He was deeply educated and spoke several languages. At the age of seventeen he enlisted in the First World War and later fought in the Czechoslovak legions. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was stationed in Turkey and from Istanbul went straight to southern France where a Czech unit was being formed. He fought on the northern front and after the French surrender he was transported to England. He fought as a tanker at Dunkirk and then went all over Europe. During the war, his mother was often interrogated by the Gestapo and threatened with deportation to Terezín. After František father's return, the family moved to Olomouc.Franta (František Mertl), iUmění on line
František Mertl attended school in Brtnice during the war, where his talent as a draughtsman was noticed by his drawing teacher Alois Toufar and influenced his future direction.Jiří Varhaník, Exhibition and reprint of the 1946 book Brtničtí vzpomínají na učitelitele Toufara, Jihlavské listy, 17.9.2015 However, at his father's request, František and his brother began their studies at the Slavic Gymnasium in Olomouc, and only after two years were they able to go to secondary art school in Brno. Even before passing the entrance exams to the Higher School of Art Industry in Brno, he took evening drawing classes based on a model at the Faculty of Education. After graduation, František Mertl decided between studying architecture or painting. In 1952 he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague to the studio of Prof. Miloslav Holý. During his studies, Mertl's friends included Jan Koblasa, Bedřich Dlouhý, Karel Nepraš, Theodor Pištěk, Milan Ressel and Rudolf Komorous - the circle of the future Šmidra group. Together with them, he participated in the Malmuzherciada recessionist exhibition in December 1954.
In 1956 the school received an offer through the Ministry of Education to study at the Accademia Belle Arti in Perugia. Thanks to the financial guarantee of a former business partner of Mertl's father, who lived in Italy, František Mertl was the only student who managed to obtain visa. He traveled privately without the Ministry of the Interior noticing in time. In Italy, he had the opportunity to study the works of Italian masters and contemporary art, as well as to experience Italian neorealism in film. There he met Jacqueline Sussan, a French student of Italian language and art history. He returned to Prague only out of a sense of responsibility towards his mother and Prof. Holý, who had vouched for him and would have been threatened with punishment by the StB. Upon his return, he discovered that the StB had also been following him in Italy and years later learned that they had planted an agent who posed as an Italian but was from Russia. This was followed by a ban on any further travel abroad.
Jacqueline came from an ancient Jewish family living in Algiers since the 15th century. She visited František Mertl twice in Prague, was arrested several times, and throughout her stay the couple was followed by the StB. On her second return, she was abducted, stripped and interrogated by the StB at Ruzyně airport, and only when she began to cry for help was she rescued by Air France pilots. The StB was bothered by her Jewish origin and considered her a spy. Before her flight, she was told that she would not receive another visa to Czechoslovakia.
Life in France
František Mertl was forbidden to travel after his return from Italy, but in 1958 he managed to join a trip of Academy students to the East Germany. During a stopover in Berlin, he mingled with a group of workers at the Brandenburg Gate and crossed with them to the British sector in West Berlin. He spent two months in refugee camps, but eventually escaped, crossed the border into France on foot and travelled by train to Nice, where Jacqueline lived. When he checked in at the office, he chanced upon a Frenchman who had fought with his father at Dunkirk. Together with a guarantee from Jacqueline's parents, this helped to obtain new documents. In Czechoslovakia, the state authorities took revenge on the family - the father lost his job and the StB tried to force him to cooperate by indiscriminate pressure; his brother's studies at university were interrupted. František Mertl married in France in 1959 and with his wife Jacqueline has a son Pierre (* 1960) and a daughter Catherine (* 1961). Jacqueline's family shared a similarly dramatic fate to that of František Mertl - her parents and brother were expelled from their home in 1962, along with other Frenchmen, after the end of the Algerian War of Independence. So the whole family built a new house in Vence, which included a painting studio.
František Mertl was granted French citizenship, while his Czech citizenship was revoked. When his father died and his mother fell ill, he looked for ways to visit her. The Czechoslovak authorities did not recognize his French citizenship until 17 years after his emigration and after he had paid a large sum for his studies, and granted him a visa in 1974. Throughout his stay, his family was followed and harassed by the StB, who subsequently interrogated the friends he met.
František Mertl first exhibited independently in Paris in 1960 and the following year in Nice, London and Versailles. Since his first exhibitions in France, he has signed his paintings only with his first name Franta. He represented France at the Biennale de Paris (1963, 1965). In the 1960s, the director of the National Gallery, Jiří Kotalík, visited him and purchased a painting, drawings and a sculpture for his collection. In the late 1960s, he was offered a solo exhibition at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris by the director Pierre Gaudibert, but the director was dismissed in 1972 shortly before the planned exhibition and the show was cancelled. It took place two years later at the Musée Galliera.
In 1977, he was invited to participate in the exhibition "Mythologies Quotidiennes (Everyday Mythologies)" organized by Gérald Gassiot-Talabot and J.L. Pradel at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. In the 1980s, Franta taught painting at the École supérieure d'Art de Grenoble and for several years ran summer painting courses in Vence. The Fondation Maeght built studios in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and Franta met many artists there - Antoni Tàpies, Joan Miró, Eduardo Chillida, Paul Rebeyrolle, etc. His neighbours were Marc Chagall, Arman and Graham Greene, with whom he became friends. Graham Greene introduced him to the work of Francis Bacon. He had known Jiří Kolář since the time of his studies in Prague and kept in contact with him throughout the time Jiří Kolář lived in France. Jan Koblasa, a fellow student living in Germany, also visited him regularly in Vence.
In 1983 he had a retrospective exhibition at the Centre national d'art contemporain in Nice. In the 1980s, he and his wife frequently visited the countries of North Africa and the Sahara, and later made some sixteen trips to the Central African region, where he found new inspiration for his work. With an all-terrain vehicle and a tent, he travelled through Mali, Kenya, Niger, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Gambia and Chad. After visiting the slave island of Goree, he decided to travel to the USA to meet African Americans. Since his first visit to New York, he has returned there frequently and has mapped the black neighborhoods of the Bronx, Haarlem and Brooklyn in detail, from where he has taken many drawings. Since 1985, Franta has had six solo exhibitions in New York, most notably two parallel exhibitions in 1989 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Terry Dintenfass Gallery on 57th Street in Manhattan. At that time he always rented a studio in New York and socialized with the art community there, which included Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Roy Lichtenstein, Thomas Messer, director of the Guggenheim Museum, Charlotta Kotik, curator of Contemporary Art at The Brooklyn Museum, Richard Oldenburg, director of Museum of Modern Art, and critics Dore Ashton and Robert Pincus-Witten followed his work with interest.
František Mertl has been a competitive cyclist since his youth and aspired to be nominated for the Peace Race. However, at the age of 16 he suffered an injury while racing and only returned to cycling in France. Here he struck up a friendship with French champion Jean Fréchaut and together with him founded a cycling club in Vence. The two trained together and Franta's son raced for the club.
In 2014, Franta donated 40 of his paintings and drawings to his hometown of Třebíč, which set up a permanent exhibition of his work in the former National House - the Franta Gallery. Since 2016, the exhibition has included his most important sculpture, The Eighth Day (1993), which the town purchased.Trebic buys bronze statue from its native František Mertl. Deník.cz. 2016-12-01
Awards 2014 Honorary citizenship of Třebíč, opening of the permanent exhibition Franta - František Mertl 2016 graduation from the Université Nice Sophia Antipolis 2017 Artis Bohemiae Amicis award, presented by Minister of CultureLuděk Mahel, Painter Franta receives prize from culture minister, Třebíčský deník 1.11.2017
Work Franta is one of the leading representatives of the European post-war wave of New Figuration, which responded to a deep crisis of human values and feelings of alienation. It represents a radical break from realistic representation and interprets the artist's inner reflection in confrontation with the social and existential catastrophes of modern times. He became one of the few Czech artists who have stood out on the world art scene and his importance in France can be ranked alongside names such as Alphonse Mucha, František Kupka, Josef Šíma and Jiří Kolář.Kříž J, in: Panenková D (ed.), Franta, 2009, p. 9
Paintings and drawings Prof. Holý's students at the academy devoted much time to drawing figures and portraits from a model, and were also given the task of modelling a portrait in clay. František Mertl also deepened his thorough knowledge of human anatomy through his friendship with medics who arranged for him to participate in autopsies. During his studies in Italy, he became directly acquainted with the works of the old masters and modern art, and was also influenced by the cinematic wave of Italian neorealism.
After arriving in France, he painted mostly physical and expressive human figures, and the subjects of his paintings often had a social charge (The Fishermen, 1960). All of his early works from around 1962 were acquired by a private gallery, which entered into a three-year contract with Franta. He was later able to buy some of them back at auction. A transition to a different painting style is represented by the strongly expressive painting Total Striptease (1965). Franta does not shy away from depicting extreme existential distress and drastically naturalistic renderings of mutilated or dead bodies (Shelter, 1966).Kříž J, in: Panenková D (ed.), Franta, 2009, p. 10
Early works