Eva Svankmajerova; Painter, ceramicist
Hyfler/Rosner
obit.
Eva Svankmajerova
Painter, ceramicist and art director
02 November 2005
Eva Dvoráková, painter and ceramicist: born Kostelci nad
Cernymi Lesy, Czechoslovakia 25 September 1940; married 1960
Jan Svankmajer (one son, one daughter); died Prague 20
October 2005.
Eva Svankmajerová saw the art establishment as a world where
"artistic artefacts" are "exploited by civil servants of
every stripe". Proposing an alternative to this
utilitarianism, she declared, "What interests us more than
the mere artefact is creativity itself, that secret boiling
and bubbling of the soul. Our task is to take the lid off."
She was born Eva Dvoráková in 1940 in the Czech town of
Kostelci nad Cernymi Lesy. In 1958 she arrived in Prague to
begin her studies at the School of Interior Design, later
moving on to the Theatre Department of the Music Academy.
In 1960 she met Jan Svankmajer, who was at the time creating
his first theatrical production Skrobené hlavy ("Starched
Heads") for the Semafor Theatre, where the couple held their
first joint exhibition in 1961. Their artistic collaboration
on film, painting and ceramics would continue for the rest
of her life.
Svankmajer left the Laterna Magika Theatre in 1964 and made
his first film, Poslední trik pana Schwarcewalldea a pana
Edgara (The Last Trick), in association with Svankmajerová
and other members of the Black Theatre. Svankmajerová's
signature work of the late 1960s is a series known as the
"Emancipation Cycle" in which works by old masters are
reinterpreted, replacing the women in the pictures with men.
This use of irony established her place on the Czech scene.
The couple joined the Surrealist Group in Prague in 1970 and
were continually active in the movement, contributing to the
group's journal Analogon and hosting many exhibitions at
their Gambra Gallery, a room on the ground floor of their
home in the Czech capital. Speaking of their conversion to
Surrealism and joining of the group, Svankmajer said, "It
was not until my meeting with Vratislav Effenberger and the
active force of the group that I realised how superficial my
notions of Surrealism really were."
Censorship by the neo-Stalinist Czech regime of Svankmajer's
"horror documentary" film Kostnice (The Ossuary, 1970) and
Leonarduv denik (Leonardo's Diary, 1972) led to his being
banned from making films for seven years. The couple
therefore took to other projects, including
three-dimensional "tactile art" as well as ceramics, using
the pseudonyms E.J. Kostelec (Eva/Jan) and J.E. Kostelec
(Jan/Eva).
In 1981 the couple purchased a derelict château in Horní
Stankov, Bohemia, and transformed it over time into a
Surrealist palace, including a former chapel filled with
many of the animation puppets used in their films.
The exhibition "The Communication of Dreams", organised in
1992 in Cardiff by the Welsh Arts Council, was the first
opportunity to see Svankmajerová's work in Britain. Further
exhibitions in Western Europe followed in 1994 (Sitges),
1996 (London), 2001 (Rotterdam) and 2002 (Annency).
Svankmajer and Svankmajerová won Czech Lion awards (the
country's equivalent of the Oscar) in 1994 for Lekce Faust
(The Lesson of Faust), a film for which Svankmajerová was
art director. In 1998 they organised a touring exhibition,
"Animus Anima Animace", which visited venues throughout the
Czech Republic. The show was accompanied by an extensive
English-language catalogue, Anima Animus Animation, which
remains the best source of information on their work.
The publication of Surrealist Women: an international
anthology in 1998 was the first opportunity to read
Svankmajerová's writings in English, including poems and
prose. The editor, Penelope Rosemont, notes: "The fact that
Svankmajerová is a painter definitely outside every 'trend'
in today's art market makes it all the more notable that she
also happens to be one of the most widely known Surrealist
painters of our time."
Svankmajer's inspiration for the film Otesánek (Little Otik,
2000) came from Svankmajerová's illustrations for a
children's fairy tale by K.J. Erben. This is the
Surrealistic story of a tree-stump with a voracious
appetite, raised by parents who are unable to have children
of their own. The film won Czech Lion awards for Best Film,
Best Art Direction (Svankmajer/Svankmajerová) and Best Film
Poster (Svankmajerová). Svankmajerová's most significant
contribution to the work is a short film-within-a-film which
retells the Erben original in two-dimensional animation.
Baradla Cave was published in 2001 by Twisted Spoon Press as
the first English translation of a novel, Jeskyne Baradla,
which had appeared originally in samizdat in the 1980s. The
work examines the role of women in society whilst providing
a satirical look at the "mother-state" and consumerism. "The
playfulness in Svankmajerová's art and her twisting of
gender expectations in order to satirise their limitations
saturates almost every line of Baradla Cave," the book's
translator Gwendolyn Albert says:
English has limited resources for expressing the complex
kind of grammatical jokes based on gender contained in the
original - it was almost impossible to capture all of the
humour of the text in translation.
When I asked her how long it took to write, she said it was
a work that had come basically in a long rush of inspiration
that she captured and didn't much alter afterward. It is
eerie how some of the central themes seem to foreshadow the
demise of the regime and the subsequent controlled chaos of
the transformation that was to occur in Czechoslovakia in
1989.
A film documentary about the lives of Svankmajer and
Svankmajerová, Les Chimčres des Svankmajer, by Bertrand
Schmitt and Michel Leclerc, was released in 2001. Schmitt
said of their work:
The more I worked with Jan, the more I realised that the
influence of Eva was essential. Their whole life is
dedicated to their work, which takes on gigantic
proportions, without separation . . .
Last year a major retrospective of Svankmajerová and
Svankmajer's work was held at Prague Castle. Svankmajer's
film Sílení (Lunacies), on which Svankmajerová worked
extensively as art director, premieres in Prague this month
and will serve as testament to their work together.
Marcus Williamson