Bratislava, 06.12.2007 - 02.03.2008




Curator: Ivan Jančár, manažér - Zuzana Böhmerová
Place: Mirbach Palace

The story of Slovak graphic art of the 20th century may be characterised as a fascinating journey packed with
individual life-stories, a kind of “intimate mirror”, reflecting an era of contradictions and their mutual interactions. In spite of and against great odds, the creativity and internal freedom of Slovak artists affected the evolution of this topic. Many artists exceeded the barriers of time and space, while others rather sank into their private world, in order to create an image or message of their very own inner-world. While some of these artists successfully integrated into the context of the European and Non-European fine arts, many of them discovered new forms of graphic thinking merely in the intimate environments of their ateliers, without pertinent (and in many cases desired and necessary) broad confrontation; others yet gained the recognition they deserved at the end of their lives.

The 20th century was a period full of turnovers, tensions and paradoxes. Unlike in the 19th century, when the artist was perceived to be an ideal depicter of an objectifiable truth of the spirit, situated beyond event reality, artists of the 20th century discovered the relativity of their personal statements (e.g. by experimenting with imaging means, by testing new gestures in statements communicating their inner world, as well as by reflecting the definition of the subject in objectifiable categories, such as space, area, colour, movement, light effects, haptic quality and change).

For more than half of those long 100 years, the possibilities of free artistic expression were very restricted in Slovakia, but as we can see, both periods - the period of freedom, as well as the period of oppression – produced real artistic personalities.
Slovak graphic art gradually crystallised into a specific phenomenon. Here we can find stories of courage, humbleness, desire for freedom, but also stories of silent meditation, solitaire screams, introspective stories without significant ambitions or those broaching the sunnier aspects of life at the time, albeit (from the historical point of view) for a short time. Slovak graphic art saw its peaks and falls. However we may see it, we simply cannot deny its significance in context of the development of fine arts. From our present point of view, many of its forms could seem conservative to us, while others remain virtually timeless. All of them were created in a specific time, in specific circumstances and conditions, with particular connections and in a particular environment.

It was not easy to select the authors for this publication. The original intention of selecting just the most relevant authors seemed rather insufficient to us from the aspect of the comprehensive development of this issue - as if lacking an integral statement. There were so many questions to ask.
What about choosing solely graphics as a dominant medium or only including important artists making graphics just marginally?
To what a degree should we extend the list of graphic artists? Where should we set the tiny separation line between the use of inspirational sources and individual creative contribution?
Where is the separation line between art and non-art? This aforementioned separation line is actually hard to set and for the authors of this publication it also meant (in many aspects at least) some depersonalisation in order to catch all important aspects and follow this development without interruption, while orienting it by their selection to the 21st century. This is also one of the merits of graphic art in Slovakia in the last century.
The Slovak science of fine-arts approached the processing of the history of our arts from various aspects, each of them bearing several dangers. The search for an unambiguous development model of our arts always turned out to be rather problematic, i.e. from the aspect of seeking the national myth, rational structures, style-changes in arts, the definition of individual circles or generations or the close connection and influence of a particular environment and particular time.
The search for direct connections to topical tendencies of a particular time, and the resulting imitation, successful application or development of their respective methods also proved equally problematic. Other media with a more continuous development (such as painting) failed to develop an unambiguous approach - in fine arts, it was even harder to define. This approach is one of the very fields showing an uneven and ambiguous development. Especially in the first decades of the twentieth century, where we can define entire circles in painting, very few artists did graphic art or they did it just marginally. Certain periods were typical for seeking native inspirations and in other cases the authors directly joined the current tendencies in European fine arts. This is the very reason why we have finally decided not to prefer any of the aforementioned aspects - but cover them thoroughly one by one and in different periods, depending on the significance of their effects for graphic arts of their respective place and period. In many cases, solitary
personalities affected the fate and orientation of our graphic art more than entire groups, but even their work showed certain ties to the previous movements. In evaluating our art, we note marked catching-up and keeping-apace with current trends resonating throughout the entire 20th century. But was this always the case with the Slovak graphic art?

When conceptualizing this publication, we have tried to choose works of higher significance in the context of those authors, most reflective of Slovak graphic art of their respective period. For this reason, but especially due to the limited extent of this publication, we have finally decided not to include exlibris works and postage stamps, constituting specific fields of graphics, which deserve to be dealt with separately.
Within the personal characterisations of the individual authors we have tried to comprise their life and work comprehensively and to point also at aspects being mutually interlinked with their graphic works. Their artistic work was preceded by intensive labour with numerous primary sources, in comparison, evaluation and processing of the historical connections. Also important was our continuous communication with still-living authors, who completed and amended facts wrongfully taken from previous sources. Some of their
observations were even as yet unrecorded thus far, at least in this form and this extent.

Ivan Jančár, curator

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