The painter Pavel Brázda is an artist of indomitable will who, despite decades of persecution by the communist regime, did not surrender his right to artistic creation, even though he was unable to exhibit his work publicly for most of his life. Unlike other artists from what was known as the unofficial sphere, he did not belong to any of the circles of well known artists that emerged at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. His large corpus of paintings – as well as that of his wife, the painter Věra Nováková – developed in isolation, without external stimuli or interference, not only because of the fraught political situation, but also the artist’s personal preferences. The silent seclusion of the studio suited Brázda’s uncompromising and reclusive nature and enabled him to offer distinctive witness to the reality of totalitarianism, something reflected in the firm grip of his style. Both Brázda and Nováková belong to a sphere of artists that existed not only outside the official, but also outside the unofficial art circles, and their discovery and belated emergence on the art scene thus only took place after the Velvet Revolution during the 1990s.
Brázda’s path to fine art was a natural outgrowth of his intellectual family background. He grew up surrounded by images of Czech interwar modernism, had a broad cultural overview and family ties to the Čapek brothers. Had Czechoslovakia not been a totalitarian regime, he would no doubt have found himself amongst the cultural elite. Instead, along with Věra Nováková and other students, he was expelled from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1949, where he had been a student at the studio led by Vladimír Sychra. This outcome of political vetting had a profound effect on his future direction and approach to life. Brázda avoided a lifetime of manual labour by studying at the Vyšší škola uměleckého průmyslu (High School of Applied Arts), which opened up the possibility of freelancing. In his case this meant mostly providing illustrations for specialist literature (from medical texts to natural science).
It was during the difficult period of the late 1940s and early 1950s that Brázda created several works of art that became emblematic of his work and carry a universally valid, existential testimony of what it is to live in an unfree country, embodied in the artist’s highly individualistic style. While his early work, produced under the banner of a movement he invented known as hominism and inspired by Group 42, found its source in social feeling and empathy with the poorest on the margins of society (e.g. his painting Ulička u nádraží / Alley by the Station, 1943–1954), he eventually moved toward a more universal and intransigently personal testimony. The well known works Obluda čeká, obluda má čas / The Monster Waits, The Monster Has Time (1949–1950) and the post-surrealist vision 5 minut před koncem světa / 5 Minutes Until the End of the World (1945–1953) reveal not only his precision in the sphere of veristic painting, but above all the absurdity, burden and cruelty of the times and life in general.
During the 1950s, Brázda briefly transformed phantasmagoric visions based on a collage-like way of working, in which a jumble of symbols, references, fragments and oddities meet in one place, into a complete counterpoint under the influence of naive art in several stylised, idyllic paintings featuring the joyful motifs of sun, harvest and nature. Examples include Dobromil a Dobromila (Postel je tvůj kostel) / Dobromil and Dobromila (Bed is Your Church) of 1953 and Žně plné slunce / Harvest Full of Sun from the year before. The return to objective reality demonstrated in a series of realist drawings and paintings depicting the artist’s immediate surroundings, as in the case of the portrait of his wife entitled Věra s brýlemi / Vera with Glasses (1955) and Zpustlé továrny / The Deserted Factory, culminated in the painting Chodící krabice / Walking Box (1954), in which a stylised banal event encounters the factuality of depiction and reveals the direction Brázda will take in the future.
Throughout the 1950s, a distinctive style evolved at the centre of which remains humankind and lived, immediate reality, to which Brázda adds a grotesque irony that points to the transience of existence in an absurd world and the futility of human endeavour. Man becomes the main subject matter of the series of astronauts, motorcycle racers and the anti-war cycle Válka proti lidem / War Against Men (1956–1959). It was during this period that Brázda’s style was consolidated, a style characterised by simplification, geometrisation of the subject, flatness, and a vibrant colour scheme. This style, developed while working on the Racers series, became rooted in his work, matured, and after a period of experimentation with new materials in the 1960s and the recycling of techniques acquired during the normalisation period, finally returned in the series Lidská komedie / Human Comedy, created in the last decade of Brázda’s life using a computer. Hundreds of micro-stories ensuing from Brázda’s observations of reality thus filled the halls of the Municipal House from floor to ceiling in 2013.
In the more relaxed climate of the 1960s, Brázda, now in his forties, was for the first time able to present his works in public in the company of dozens of others, first at an exhibition in Bratislava organised on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1965, and then at the 1st Prague Salon in 1967. However, his painting Podobizna otce / Father’s Likeness and two other works did not cause a stir among the many other works on show. He and his wife had their first solo exhibition a few years later, in 1976 at the Nerudovka Theatre. This emergence out of anonymity and inclusion on the art scene at that time only really began during the 1980s. In 1988, Brázda exhibited at the Salon of Prague Artists, though by that time he was an established feature of the unofficial Czech art scene. Among the first to recognise his importance were artists associated with the journal Revolver Revue. Another who appreciated Brázda’s contribution and unconventional approach was Milan Knížák, who in 2000 included his paintings in the permanent exhibition of Czech post-war art at the National Gallery. In 2006, a retrospective exhibition was organised at the same venue and a first monograph on the artist published.
