The painter, illustrator and graphic artist Karel Souček suffered the fate of many so-called official artists after 1989. While before the Velvet Revolution his works appeared at almost all major art exhibitions, after the Velvet Revolution he fell almost into oblivion. This situation is eloquently evidenced by the fact that a more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held only in 2015 at the Gallery of Fine Arts in Cheb, more than thirty years after his death in 1982.
Karel Souček’s entry into the art scene is linked to Group 42, which he was brought to by his close friend Jiří Kolář. He fitted perfectly into the community of diverse artistic personalities with a penchant for the periphery and a desire to transform the cultural ambience. As far back as the 1930s, he recorded on his darkened canvases the immediate reality as he saw it around him day after day. His expressive paintings from the 1940s, executed with spontaneous brushstrokes, feature motifs of Kladno’s cityscapes, industrial buildings and steelworks. While the other painters of Group 42 preferred urban subjects that eliminated or strongly stylised human presence, Souček, inspired by the legacy of the avant-garde and the works of the Old Masters, remained a realist at all times. His working-class origins, poor family circumstances, and above all the industrial character of his native Kladno were reflected in an emphasis on the strong social and existential subtext. Already in his early years, Souček established a register of motifs to which he remained faithful throughout his life. On countless canvases, prints and drawings he repeatedly depicted scenes from sewing workshops, hairdressers, station waiting rooms and platforms, vending machines and city streets full of shop windows and passages. With his focus on the seemingly banal realities of everyday, bleak days, Souček perfectly fulfilled the unwritten agenda of Group 42.
Just as he has remained faithful to several recurring motifs, so it is with the formal symbols that accompany these motifs. Souček was endlessly fascinated by the light of the street, its colourful reflections in the glass walls of shop windows, and the dynamics, rhythm and reflections they cast around them. His paintings are composed of intricate transparencies creating complicated spaces in which interior and exterior are mirrored at the same moment. In some of the paintings we see real scenes, but thanks to the loosened vision of several things at once, almost dreamlike visions emerge, enhanced by muted colours.
After 1945, Souček took a position as assistant to Vlastimil Rada at the Academy of Fine Arts. The improved economic situation allowed him to increase the size of his canvases, and he applied his tendency towards monumental scale in the following years, in two large canvases with revolutionary themes for Kladno Town Hall. It was then that he found himself facing a paradoxical situation. The painter, who was a convinced communist, had to leave his position at the Academy in 1948, when he painted the canvases for the town hall in the style of the Congress of National Culture, because his painting did not meet the new requirements of a purely social realist art.
It was during the following ten years, when Souček did not exhibit, did not participate in public events and worked unnoticed in his Kročehlav studio, that his work reached its peak. The themes remained the same, the only difference being that narrative content prevailed over an interest in formal representation. The fundamental innovation is the structuring of the action of the painting into individual sequences. In some paintings, the plot is divided into separate, almost cinematic scenes. The viewer’s sense of the unfolding plot is enhanced by the division of the scenes into strips. And so several stories appear on the screen at the same moment. The drama of the narrative is thus enhanced. Souček no longer paints individual scenes, but divides his paintings into large cycles. Epic sequences, as in the cycle Měsíce / Moon (1954–1956), are filled with figurative scenes. The same period also saw the creation of the monumental paintings Osudy velkoměst / Fates of Great Cities, Krystaly života / Crystals of Life, Kladno Station and Před výkladní skříní / Before the Shop Window (all between 1955 and 1957). Souček then took his first steps outside the classical field, when he framed his paintings with the text “Člověk v mých obrazech” (Man in My Paintings), which he published in Výtvarné umění in 1956. This was also a metaphorical exit from the cloister of his studio and, after many years in isolation, the beginning of his return to cultural life, which included an exhibition at the Mánes Gallery in Prague a year later.
The year 1958 was a milestone. Winning the Gold Prize at Expo 58 in Brussels confirmed his artistic qualities and opened the door for him to return to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He arrived back at the school at the same time as his friend from Group 42, Jiří Kotalík, and the painter Jan Horník. Souček was “summoned” to be head of the special studio of figurative painting and worked at the art school for the next twenty years, during which time he influenced several generations of future painters. Among his pupils were Bedřich Dlouhý, Zbyšek Sion, Milan Kunc and Tomáš Měšt’ánek.
The 1960s in Souček’s work witnessed the development of the themes described earlier and were marked by a spirit of significant overproduction. Precise work with paint and bravura modelling were replaced by nervous strokes and gestural painting. The composition, which formerly had been fashioned by means of individual figural scenes, is now made up mainly of a rhythm of verticals and horizontals; the darkened colours have been replaced by brighter tones. The theme of the female nude and the symbolic theme of Don Quixote are added to variations and replicas of obsessive motifs.
During the course of the 1970s, in addition to painting cycles such as Lidice (1974) or Osvobození / Liberation (1974–1975), Souček also created several monumental works for public space, such as the mosaic Kladno Scenery (1973) for the United Steelworks House of Culture in Kladno, and artworks for the buildings of the Czechoslovak embassies in Athens and Cairo. For Souček, the 1970s marked the peak of his social capital, which was crowned in 1974 by his winning the highest award of the time, the title of National Artist, and four years later the position of chairman of the new Union of Czech Artists. The accumulation of Souček’s functions contributes to the feeling and image of an artist who agreed with and actively participated in the cultural and political scene during the period known as normalisation. It must be admitted, however, that during the 1970s he was one of the liberal-minded teachers at the conservative Academy. He represented the type of artist for whom membership of the Communist Party and Union of Czech Artists and holding other official positions was not a matter of personal gain, but of sincere faith, innate altruism, and a desire for a socially just society.
