Czech Artists: Up From the Underground : East Bloc: Artists, long the subjects of persecution in Czechoslovakia, have been in the vanguard of efforts for democratic change. They continue to lead the charge.

Standing like a bridge between the banks of the Vltava river and the shore of an island, Manes, a box-like three-story building constructed in the early ‘30s Bauhaus style was designed as a gathering place for artists before World War II to meet and show their work. In Prague, buildings for the arts are often named for historical figures, and Manes took its name from Josef Manes, a 19th-Century Czechoslovak painter.

After the war, and especially since the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, Manes became the bastion and the symbol of the powerful Czechoslovak state artists union, an organization loyal to the country’s Communist Party, which had a monopoly over public exhibition, commissions and jobs in the visual arts.

But this fall, when artists seized the building and occupied it, they scored a major political victory as well as a triumph for creative freedom. The seizure also reflects the important role played by a wide range of artists in helping to bring about the tumultuous changes that have shaken this country over the last month.

On Nov. 18, the Friday morning after the historic night when thousands of student demonstrators were chased and beaten by police in Prague’s Wenceslas Square, artists began gathering at Manes. First, they removed an exhibition of paintings by a party approved artist and installed a huge show of photographs of police clubbing demonstrators.

The following day, a network to support the newly declared student strike was created. By Monday, 15,000 artists had converged on the building. They formed a new independent committee of Czechoslovak artists to revamp completely the way visual arts had been controlled by the government, and to provide a support structure for the newly formed Civic Forum. Playwright Vaclav Havel is leading the opposition coalition, which over the last three weeks has become the principal organization vying with the Communist Party for power.

Since last week, Manes has become an important headquarters for Havel’s presidential campaign, with a staff composed entirely of visual artists.

Artists themselves admit they’re dumbfounded at the speed and efficiency of their takeover of the building. But the occupation of Manes is far from an isolated incident--film makers, actors, art students and writers have also taken over buildings in Prague that before Nov. 17 were bastions of officialdom.

The artists see their presence, working and sleeping in their places of work, as another, albeit dramatic stage, in what has been a long effort by artists to create small spaces of creative independence while helping sustain a broader spirit of support for democratic change, a position that artists and writers have been identified with historically in Czechoslovakia.

Leaning back in his chair, in what had been a dining room for elite party artists at Manes, 34-year-old sculptor Stefan Milkov looked up at one of the two remaining works of party art in the building, a heavily painted canvas of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in a style that might be described as gift-shop primitive. Milkov wears a crudely made badge in the red, white and blue colors of the Czechoslovak flag that reads: “Visual Artists * Civic Forum, 1968-1989.”

“The union of artists up to now has had the same structure as the Communist Party,” says Milkov. “So membership was determined not by merit but by political acceptability. If we were going to change the structure of society, we also had to change the structure of the artists association.”

Over the past several years, independent visual artists, most of them around 30 years old, have been trying to chip away at the power of the official union.

Milkov and a small group of other Prague artists, however, had not waited until students lay injured on the streets in November to act on that goal. More than two years ago, Milkov, whose wood and earthenware sculptures look like three-dimensional renderings of Philip Guston’s late cartoonish paintings, joined with eight other painters, sculptors and printmakers to show their works that had failed to meet the standards of the official union. They were joined by their “manager,” then 27-year old Vaclav Marhoul, an impish film production manager by profession, with uncanny instincts for promotion that he applies in a breakneck English acquired, he says, from American movies. Marhoul’s calling card is a facsimile of a Marlboro cigarette logo that bears his own name. The group adopted the name Turdohlavi, or Hardheaded, and so far its determination has paid off.

Hardheaded’s first group show opened around Christmas of 1987, a time of year when the cold and snow keep most people in Prague at home. Still, more than 4,000 visitors stood in line in sub-freezing temperatures outside a suburban workers’ hall far from the center of Prague to see oil paintings using folk imagery by artist Jiri David, bright graffiti-inspired acrylics by Stanislav Divis and elongated surreal woodcarvings of birds by Frantisek Skala.

“Before that,” explains Marhoul, the shows organizer, “people could see this work only in private flats or studios. But until this time, nobody had mounted an exhibition like ours. We were the first ones in 20 years to arrange a group show outside the supervision of the union. Our members had already been seen in individual shows, but those were just for the small community that follows contemporary art.”

Hardheaded’s second and latest exhibition last September was a far greater success, Marhoul says, because the group was somehow able to find a place in central Prague and a small publicity budget. It also didn’t hurt the show to receive a lukewarm review from the national party newspaper, Rude Pravo.

“It wasn’t a bad review, but it wasn’t so positive,” says Marhoul. “I call it anti-publicity, because when a Communist newspaper says something isn’t good, the next day a lot of people will come to see it. “

While their efforts to show work independently were a political affront to the official artists union, there’s not much in the work of Hardheaded’s members that could be described as political, with the possible exception of Jiri David’s fanciful depiction of traditional Czech symbols--heraldic signs, decorative folk patterns, crosses and maps of Czechoslovakia.

Among the members of Hardheaded, the experience of the Soviet-led invasion of 1968 also varies. The family of Zenek Lhotsky, who makes minimalist metal bas-reliefs, suffered greatly. Both his parents lost their jobs because of their political involvement. The other artists in the group have faint memories of the crushing of the Dubcek regime that presided over the liberalizations of the 1968 Prague Spring.

In fact, says David, Hardheaded organized a politically independent group of artists two years ago, in part, to separate itself from the emerging political underground opposition taking shape among young artists, writers and film makers.

“We want to be different,” David explains. “We felt that the political underground was created as a reaction to the Party’s monopoly of power over the arts. But not all the artists in the underground were good artists. Some of them were getting attention and recognition only because they were in the underground. In some ways, that was nearly the same standard as in the official establishment, with politics, rather than art, being the standard.”

All the same, Hardheaded’s exhibitions have expanded what one Czech writer calls the “gray zone” of permitted but officially unsanctioned public arts events. The emergence of that “gray zone” marked an opening for artists, some of whom had been banned from all public activities since Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague in August of 1968.

Circumstances had turned even bleaker for artists in 1976, when members of two rock bands, the Plastic People of the Universe and DG-307, were arrested, tried and imprisoned for what the government called “anti-Soviet activities and hooliganism.”

The following year, Czechoslovak intellectuals, artists and writers, led by playwright Havel, issued a document called Charter 77, which declared its signers’ support for the rock musicians. The public release of the charter triggered a severe wave of repression against its signers, but the core group of those signers, who suffered harassment and in some cases prison, now form the leadership of Civic Forum.

The persecution of the group succeeded in silencing and isolating most of the writers among them. Novelist Milan Kundera left the country. With less overt political content, however, visual arts have been subject to less scrutiny, and although painters, sculptors and other visual artists have not thrived in post-1968 Czechoslovakia, others beside the members of Hardheaded have carved out some autonomous space to make and show their works.

In August, after long negotiations with the official artists union, and with pressure from a persistent minority of independent-minded union members, critic and curator Zdenka Gabalova was able to arrange the exhibition Dialogue/Prague/Los Angeles in the centrally located Gallery Mladych, which had been reserved for officially sanctioned art. Thousands came to see the work of such Los Angeles artists as Barbara Benish, Deborah Lawrence, Christian Mounger and David Wells.

For many of those same visitors, it was also a chance to see the ominous surreal figurative paintings of artist Vladimir Kokolia. Dialogue/Prague/Los Angeles got a favorable review from the party paper, Rude Pravo. That surprisingly did not hurt the show’s popularity. While the exhibition followed no political line, intellectuals in Prague viewed it as an implicit rejection of the government’s efforts to isolate Czech artists from the outside world. The show comes to Los Angeles in June.

As artists sensed new possibilities for performing freely in some areas over the past years, more have been emerging from internal invisibility and even returning from abroad. Recently singer Karel Kreyl, a 1968 activist, came back to Czechoslovakia to give two sold-out concerts.

Art critic Zdenka Gabalova, who is 35, was astonished at Kreyl’s popularity even among young audiences who could not possibly have seen him sing before. “But people who were one or two years old when the Russian tanks rolled in,” said Gabalova, “still somehow have a memory of ’68. People in their early 20s packed in to see Karel Kreyl and they all sang his songs with him. It was amazing that the young people all knew the words. My generation knew these words by heart, so we sang along, but apparently the words were in the young people as well as in me.”

Actors, many of whom worked for official television and films for the last 20 years, are also linking audiences with the broad movement for free expression. Some independent artists see these performers as former cowards who have come out into the open, now that all but a few police have disappeared from Prague’s crowded streets. But Paul Wilson, a Canadian journalist and translator who played with the Plastic People of the Universe in the mid-’70s before he was expelled from the country, sees them more positively.

“Over the last year or two, as band players found their way back to the stage, these actors are the ones who have gradually pushed back the limits of tolerance,” says Wilson, who is now in Prague. “By last year, the stage in Czechoslovakia had already become a lively forum. In the theaters, and in the little independent magazines that have been tolerated, artists and writers have succeeded in sparking something that has actually caught fire.”

For Gabalova, there are deeper roots to the efforts by painters, artists and writers to defy the regime on the cultural plain. “It’s been a tradition for several centuries here for artists and writers to lead the fight for national independence,” she says.

“The first president of Czechoslovakia, Thomas Masaryk, who took office in 1918, was a university professor, so it was this stratum of intellectuals and artists, who were always very active. It’s always been like this, also through the wartime occupation by Nazi Germany. In 1968, it was again the intellectuals and artists who provided the spark of upheaval.”

These days, those visual artists can barely keep up with the demand at Manes for campaign posters of Havel, whose shy, grinning face looks a bit like Jimmy Carter with a mustache.

FAMU, the film academy down the street, is another hotbed of activity, with a small detachment of occupying students guarding the grounds, and the rest running around the streets with video cameras and showing those images on monitors placed at street corners where hundreds gather to watch scenes of police beatings, Havel speeches and Communist leaders’ resignations.

Still, even amid the atmosphere of euphoria and good humor, artists are looking past the events of the moment toward every day life in a country that won’t require them to struggle constantly with a repressive government. (Most still coyly deny that the political changes so far are irreversible, although they behave as if they are.)

Poet and former rock singer Jachym Topol, who edits the formerly underground literary magazine Revolver Review, might have some reason to caution. At his desk in the sparse unfurnished office of the Independent Press Service, where an aphorism daubed on a poster by a poet with the nom d’plume Hombre reads, “Today is the 7th anniversary of my release from prison--I was there for seven years.” Topol recalls that until recently, he and his brother, a rock musician, were carefully watched by the police. Their father, playwright Josef Topol, hadn’t until recently seen any of his work on the stage in Czechoslovakia for two decades.

Almost nostalgically, 27-year-old Jachym Topol admits that the end of communism is the end of the artists’ underground. He says he’s already getting offers to work for Communist publishing houses who want a more professional look for their products.

“We were fighting like gangsters for years,” says Topol, who like many opposition figures supported himself working at night as a furnace stoker. Czechoslovak dissidents all refer to this kind of job by the same name: dog work. Most of them did these jobs for years. Some still do.

“I should tell you that now, while I hope everything will be legal and free, it was very romantic,” says Topol.

Sunday, as he watched a live telecast from Wenceslas Square of Havel’s announcement of a new Cabinet that included a Charter 77 signer as foreign minister, Topol recalled the humor of the past decade, under a government that not too long ago took copies of Pravda off the Prague newsstands when the Soviet paper published speeches by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev calling for political reform.

Topol believes that the role of the artist in Czechoslovakia is something like that of the Viking bard, “not a poet who is sitting at home and just writing. For him, it was necessary to be with the troops. He was something between the journalist and the poet. He had to be in the first line of battle. Here, it’s very much the same thing, and it’s been that way since the ‘50s.”

If his political burdens get lighter, as he expects them to, Topol plans to continue writing lyrics for his brother’s rock band, Dog Soldiers. But the 27-year-old won’t go back to performing rock music. “I’m too young to die,” he says, “But I’m too old to rock ‘n’ roll.”

In a more open Czechoslovakia, Topol expects his literary magazine to have a more promising future. Not only does he plan to continue publishing young Czechoslovak writers plus translations of Sam Sheppard, Richard Ford and Elie Weisel, but he intends to remain controversial by bringing Henry Miller and Celine into print.

As for the independent artists in the Hardheaded group, they’re hoping for exhibitions in Western Europe and especially in New York. That way, they say, they won’t have to be classified as artists from Eastern Europe. Hardheaded manager Marhoul admits that they’ve been isolated from artists in the rest of the world. “For us now,” he says, “artists will have no excuses to make about oppression. We have to prove that we are good artists, and we have to prove that only through art. That’s better for us.”

To poet Jachym Topol, who celebrated the passage of Husak and the naming of dissidents to a new Cabinet by repeating “I must be dreaming,” there’s a more sobering prospect to a free Czechoslovakia. “We’ve been publishing all these great American writers for free, as an underground magazine,” he said. “When writers find out that we can publish legally, we’ll have to pay for the rights to their work. Where am I going to get the money?”