Karel Havlíček is one of the most interesting figures linked with Czech art brut. This is due both to his specific style of drawing and processing his subject matter, and his life story and historical situation, which are reflected in his work. He started drawing intensively only when he was thirty-eight at the end of World War II, when he set himself the task of creating at least one drawing every day: “And that’s how I began. It was 25 November 1945 I think I’m right in saying, and since then, today and every day – or should I say night – I persist.”[1]
It was the drama of that time, the end of the war, the communist coup and the advent of Stalinism that led him to this approach. All of these events affected him both existentially and psychologically, and drawing appeared to have some therapeutic significance for him. This would account for his obsessively thorough style, in which the resulting images combine subtlety and sensitivity with the organic power of often disturbing motifs. Drawing was a tool for expressing his feelings regarding contemporary events and for distancing himself from them.
Despite being a trained lawyer and civil servant (to begin with in Děčín, and then as director of the regional police in Kadaň, from which post he was dismissed after the coup of 1948 as a non-communist and transferred to be an ordinary civil servant in Pilsen, where he was finally to give up his career as a state employee), even as a child he had been influenced by artistic circles thanks to his family and close surroundings. His father Karel Havlíček was a painter and stage designer, his cousin Josef Havlíček an architect affiliated with the Prague surrealists. Later on, when he gave up working as a civil servant and decided to devote his energies to art, an important contact was Karel Teige, who wrote an extensive analysis of Havlíček’s work and is even credited with completing a tiny sailing ship on what is undoubtedly Havlíček’s most famous drawing Gigantomachie / Outsider Art of 1948. What at first sight seems an insignificant piece of trivia shows, in fact, to what extent interpretations of his work can change, and also how a theorist of such huge importance as Teige can influence a work of art at a time dominated by surrealism in a way that is not necessarily to its benefit, when looked at with hindsight. The art historian Terezie Zemánková sums the situation up thus: “Teige was also Havlíček’s Fate, who granted him somewhat controversial gifts from today’s perspective. One of Teige’s ambiguous contributions is his artistic intervention in the drawing Gigantomachie, which Havlíček sent him to assess a year after creating it.”[2] At the same time Teige’s “intervention” in the drawing is at odds with the fact that he adjudged Havlíček’s work to be an imaginative “inner” drawing, i.e. free of the gaze of the outside world.
Karel Teige placed Havlíček’s work mainly within the context of Art Nouveau and fantasy art. In addition, he was the first to associate Havlíček at least in part with art brut – probably in order that he be accepted by the official culture of the time, i.e. socialist realism, and might exhibit his work publicly, a cause for which Teige lobbied, albeit unsuccessfully. In Havlíček he saw an artist moving between art brut and professional art and able to break down the barrier between these two artificially created worlds. However, the ideology of that time was completely at odds with Havlíček’s imaginative motifs – mostly dark and sometimes moving in the direction of abstraction – and his drawings, which were a “bizarre herbarium, illustrations from some natural history book on ghosts”, stood no chance of being accepted by official culture of that time. He was not able to exhibit publically until 1963, when he had a solo exhibition at Mánes. Teige’s study was only published in his collected works as late as 1994[3].
Havlíček’s mostly black-and-white drawings always depict one motif that most often represents a dreamlike fantasy creature from his own personal mythology. We see strange plants (Lidožravá rostlina/ Man-eating Plant, 1949), real and fantasy animals (Psí hlava / Dog Head, 1956, Praplaz / Anapsid, 1971), mythological creatures (Obr / Giant, 1952), or beings arising from the artist’s own imagination and coming together to form a unique freak show (Potvory / Monsters, 1952, Kloaka / Cloaca, 1952). In some cases the images are almost humorous and picturesque. An important role is played by the titles, which co-create the individual works and set them within an illustrative concept. Terezie Zemánková, in the catalogue to the retrospective exhibition Gigantomachie, which took place in 2012 at the Museum Montanelli, cites the characteristic traits of his drawings, which include: “[…] metamorphoses of vegetative, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic objects, a compactness and monumentalism of form situated in an empty, almost infinite space, a direct link between theme and title that often foregrounds the metaphorical significance of a drawing.”[4]
A period comparison might be ventured with František Janoušek, though parallels are also apparent in contemporary art. When we look back upon Havlíček’s work, it would appear as though he bypassed his own times and would perhaps have enjoyed greater success on the contemporary art scene. On the Czech art scene his work reminds us of the drawings of Petr Nikl or the work of the sculptress Anna Hulačová. However, as we stated above, his daily drawing was closely linked to the events of that time and with the non-literal depiction of the traumas being experienced. It is therefore difficult to imagine what his work would look like if created today and even if he would become an artist.
[1] Výtvarná práce – orgán Svazu československých výtvarných umělců, no. 26, vol. XIV., Praha, 29 December 1966. Rubrika ”Hovory”, no. 9, p. 6 (transcribed by Alexej Kusák from a tape recording).
[2] Terezie Zemánková, “Autonomní tvorba Karla Havlíčka”. Petr Hlaváček, Terezie Zemánková (eds.), Karel Havlíček: Gigantomachie. Praha 2012, p. 24.
[3] Karel Teige, The Liberation of Life and Poetry. Studies from the 1940s (a selection from vol. III), Prague 1994, pp. 387–402.
[4] Terezie Zemánková, “Autonomní tvorba Karla Havlíčka”. Petr Hlaváček, Terezie Zemánková (eds.), Karel Havlíček: Gigantomachie. Praha 2012, p. 23.
