Stanislav Podhrázský (10 November 1920 – 20 May 1999) was a Czech painter, sculptor and restorer. He is one of the outstanding figuralists of Czech painting of the second half of the 20th century.Primusová A, 2023, p. 11
Life Stanislav Podhrázský was born in the family of a master bricklayer in Pejhov (now Pýchov, an integral part of Nová Včelnice). He trained as a room painter in the painting school of the Viennese decorator Emil Dvířka.Primusová A, 2023, p. 8 In 1936 he went to Prague and continued his apprenticeship at the Černý firm in Žižkov. He lived in the family of the legionary Novák, where he painted his first portraits; he was an amateur boxer.Klimešová M, 2013, p. 223 In 1942–1944 he attended the carving specialty of Professor František Kment at the State Central School of Housing Industry in Prague, Žižkov.
In 1945 he was admitted to the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the studio of Prof. František Tichý. His classmates were Zbyněk Sekal, Josef Lehoučka and from 1947 also Mikuláš Medek. Until 1949, he had the opportunity to attend lectures by Prof. Václav Nebeský, an important theoretician of Czech and French modern art, a member of the Tvrdošíjní group. Mikuláš Medek, influenced by interwar surrealism and familiar with the Minotaure, brought the impulses of surrealism to his classmates as well.Klimešová M, 2013, p. 10 During his studies, Podhrázský was in contact with the Surrealists of Spořilov, including his classmate Libor Fára. He moved to Tomášská Street in the Malá Strana, where he lived until 1990.
After the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état, Miloslav Chlupáč and Mikuláš Medek were expelled from the Academy. He finished his studies with the defence of his thesis The Great Act in 1950, but like Zbyněk Sekal he left the school without passing the final state examination, as he was unable to meet the new communist ideological demands. In his psychological distress he attacked a policeman and was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital in Dobřany, where he was submitted to electric shocks.Primusová A, 2023, p. 9 He was released from the hospital when Miloslav Chlupáč vouched for him. Between 1951 and 1953, due to mental illness, he hardly created at all and destroyed many of his surrealist sculptures and paintings from the time of his studies, which had too poignant a personal meaning and threatened him with their intensity.Klimešová M, 2013, p. 18Primusová A, 2023, p. 10
Due to Podhrázský's experience with the masonry craft, Josef Wagner invited him to participate in his restoration commissions. From 1952 he worked as a fresco restorer, first in Fričovce, Slovakia (with Zdeněk Palcr and Miloslav Chlupáč), and later in Strakonice, Písek and Klatovy (1955-1956, with Zdeněk Palcr and Mikuláš Medek). He returned to free creative work in 1955.
In 1956, he married Olga Milotová and through her employment in the advertising firm Rapid, he was able to obtain foreign publications on art and painters of the Renaissance and Mannerism. The following year his daughter Jana (Jana Chytilová) was born, but the marriage broke up shortly afterwards.
He was briefly a member of the Umělecká beseda and from 1957 a member of the group May 57,Jan Kapusta Jr., Podhrázský, 1995, p. 49 with which he exhibited until its dissolution in 1964. He had his first solo exhibition (together with sculptor Zdeněk Palcr) at the Aleš Hall of Umělecká beseda in Prague (1960).
In 1963, together with Zbyněk Sekal, he took part in a tour of the Artistˇs Union to the Leningrad Hermitage and at the same time became close to Jaroslava Červená, who married him in 1968. In 1963-1973, he spent summers with other artists (V. Kiml, J. Jíra, M. Preclík) at the Nezabudický mill on the Berounka River and often visited his birthplace.
Since the mid-1960s he had several solo exhibitions in Prague (1966, 1969), Brno (1966), Hradec Králové, Cheb (1969), Karlovy Vary (1971) and Litoměřice (1972). In 1968 he made his only trip to Italy (Venice, Ravenna, Florence).
With the beginning of normalization, he was forced to resume restoration for existential reasons and from 1974 to 1987 he worked in a team of restorers led by Olbram Zoubek (Z. Palcr, V. Boštík, etc.) at Litomyšl Castle. Litomyšl became important centre of unofficial culture, which included, for example, the philosopher Petr Rezek or the writer Libuše Moníková, whose stay in Litomyšl inspired her to write the novel Facade.
In 1981, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris purchased four drawings by Podhrázský on the initiative of art historians Jana Tvrzníková (married Claverie)Jana Claverie: art historian and recipient of the 2011 Gratias Agit Award, Embassy of France in Prague and František Šmejkal.
In the seventies and eighties he was not allowed to exhibit solo. The only exception is the exhibition at the Municipal Cultural Centre in Dobříš, prepared by Vladimíra Eidernová-Koubová and Marie Klimešová in January 1982. The vernissage became a cultural event, attended among others by the theoretician Jindřich Chalupecký and the director of the National Gallery Jiří Kotalík.
In 1990 Podhrázský had to leave his studio and apartment in the Malá Strana and moved with his wife Jaroslava to a tenement house in Vyšehrad. In the first years he still painted smaller formats there, but the cramped space did not satisfy his need for freedom, which he absolutely required to create, and from the mid-1990s he did not paint anymore.Jan Kapusta Jr., Podhrázský, 1995, p. 8
Work In František Tichý's studio there were strict requirements for mastery of drawing and volume according to the model, and the inclination of many of his students towards surrealism can be explained by the overpressure of aggression, which they vented on personal and social traumas from the war and the following Communist coup of 1948. The work of the young generation of Surrealists after 1945 thus had little in common with the original Surrealist programme.Bohumír Mráz, Výtvarná práce 1960, no. 25-26, pp. 16 The earliest drawing of a nude from 1946, which stands out from the rest of the work, reveals Podhrázský's influence on Czech poetism.Klimešová M, 2013, p. 9 At the beginning of his studies, Podhrázský understood drawing in an almost hypersensitive way, as a dangerous activity that could harm a person.
He identified with the process of creation to the extent that he perceived it not only as a search for truth, but as a question of life and death.Klimešová M, 2013, p. 52 The introduction to surrealism had a dramatic effect on Podhrázský's hypersensitive nature and offered him creative freedom. His work from that time has an intuitive to mediumistic character and is characterized by a painterly culture.
The need to create a magical inner space in his work was related to the psychophysical need of the author.Klimešová M, 2013, p. 151 The numerous references to Mannerism in Podhrázský's paintings are related to his strong perception of the genius loci in his place of residence in the Lesser Town, where he "felt the presence of the Rudolphine painters from the nearby Jánský vrch and Vlašská Street", as well as his long direct experience with the restoration of Renaissance sgraffiti at the castle in Litomyšl.Klimešová M, 2013, p. 1479
Sculptures In 1947-1948, sculptures strongly influenced by surrealism were created - Nun (plaster, destroyed) and the hallucinatory anxious vision Jeníček''' (plaster, National Gallery in Prague), which have no parallel in the sculptural work of the timeJindřich Chalupecký, New Art in Bohemia, 1994, p. 39 and are considered a distinctive value of Czech post-war surrealism. The sculptures Coat (1948) and Ashtray (1948) also have a Surrealist background. The sculpture Legs (1948) was created as a working model for drawing studies of girl figures.Zdeněk Palcr, Podhrázský's Ten Sculptures and the Law of Specialization, in: Stanislav Podhrázský, 1995, p. 11
In the 1960s, when Podhrázský was influenced by the morphology of sculptures by M. Chlupáč and Z. Palcr, he briefly returned to sculpture. His Standing Torso (1964) is an assemblage of abstract elements, while Two Heads (1964), referring to the now missing sculpture Head from 1948, represents the theme of precariousness and stopping in motion. Torso from 1965 is an expression of existential distress - a delicately modelled girl figure is topped with a box as a symbol of psychological shelter, which turns the sculpture into an object. Podhrázský's own variant on seated figures by Palcr from the late 1950s (Seated Figure, 1968) is composed of a set of modelled boulders and relates to the work of Henry Moore.Klimešová M, 2013, p. 134 The schematically austere sculpture The Swordsman (1964, GVU Náchod) was probably created as a free model for the male figure from the painting The Couple (1965).Klimešová M, 2013, p. 142
Drawings and paintings Stanislav Podhrázský is known primarily as a masterful draughtsman and painter. In the late 1940s, like many members of his generation (Medek, Sekal, Fára), he was influenced by Surrealism. This period was relatively short, because the frightening personal experience of exploring his own subconsciousness discouraged the author from further experiments. The most important works of this period are Head in the Mould (1948) and Imaginations of Fear (1949), a reflection on generational feeling. The painting is an aggressive metaphor of the terrible time after the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état.Klimešová M, 2013, p. 14 Among the technical discoveries of the Surrealists, he uses grattage or decal in his work on the picture surface.
Already during his studies, he created the stylized Nude (1946), which is particularly notable for its luminous modelling of charcoal drawing. His graduation work was a slightly larger-than-life charcoal drawing, Large Study of the Nude (1950). His later large-scale drawings are also mostly studies of girls' figures, faces and hands. The charcoal drawing is sometimes combined with pastel (Drawing III, 1956).
In his drawings and paintings from the mid-1950s, when he returned to free work, he uses more formal attributes of surrealist painting - undefined space without perspectiveJan Kapusta Jr., 1995, p. 7 with mysterious objects, the motif of expansive body cavitiesKlimešová M, 2013, p. 27 and vegetation surrounding the girl figures (Girl at the Table, 1956, Drawing III, 1956). The surrealistic mythologization of reality in the recurring motif of the broken jug symbolizes the transition to adulthood and the loss of innocence (Broken Jug, 1956). Podhrázský may have been influenced by Heinrich von Kleist's then-published play Rozbitý džbán (Orbis, Prague 1954), in which a guilty man investigates a crime he himself has committed. The motif illustrates well the hypocrisy of the communist nomenklatura of the time. Two monumental pastels with the motif of a broken jug from 1956 could have been Podhrázský's competition designs for the new building of the Biophysical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Brno (1957).Klimešová M, 2013, p. 23