Echoes of Surrealism, Lyrical and Gestural Abstraction (1950s)

Alongside the hard to categorise solitaires, several currents with different opinions and formalisms can be observed in the Czech unofficial sphere of fine art in the 1950s, including generational overlap. In simple terms, the oldest nonconformist artists developed their links with the pre-war avant-garde, of which, in view of the social reality, surrealism seemed particularly current. With the younger artists, we are predominantly confronted with various forms of figurative art based on the lessons of classical modernism, which have been remoulded into anxious forms.

Courageously and in a completely different direction, some loners started to enter the wide stream of lyrical or gestural abstraction at a time when abstract art in the Czech Republic was considered undesirable. Among these solitaires was Jan Kotík, who did not submit to official socialist realism in the 1950s but remained faithful to modern art. His canvas The King's Head of 1959 is an excellent example of the artistic transition from the Civilist themes of the forties and early fifties towards the distinctive form of gestural painting. The painting is full of the joy of free painting.

At the end of the 1950s, it was not very clear to the general public, but for today's art historians it is quite clear that there began to form a strong generation of young artists, who were still mostly studying at art colleges. They wanted to establish in the Czech environment what was already accepted in Western Europe as ‘informel’, an art that is more widely understood in the Czech context as structural abstraction.

Although, after the exposure of Stalin's personality cult in 1956, there was a gradual liberation of cultural policy, a society deprived of basic human freedoms was still ruled by the Communist Party, and thousands of political prisoners suffered in prison. From here comes the raw to brutal processing of the "skin" of most works, and in others, a distinct turn to spirituality.

In the spirit of raw, authentic reality, for example, was Aleš Veselý’s art at the turn of the 50s and 60s. In his work, brutal, rusted and destroyed elements began to appear with the heightened feelings of insecurity and danger in the severe political climate of the regime. We can see it in his work Painting-Object, which originated in the years 1960-1964. It carries a feeling of impassiveness and closedness, but also a belief in the destruction of limited space and its borders. Veselý here negates the two-dimensional painting surface by tearing it up and lifting it with a spring protruding into space creating a three-dimensional object. It violates the formal rules of classical painting and goes beyond the painting as a symbol of the established order towards motion - to life.