Exhibit’s Czech Art Bears a Hidden Message

Much of the Czechoslovakian art on display at the Valley College Art Gallery has a double meaning. Images of concentration camps, soldiers, guard dogs and watchtowers, for instance, can evoke World War II. But they also symbolize Czechoslovakia being turned into a concentration camp by the Soviet-led 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion.

The artists could never have gotten their message past censors without cloaking it in seemingly “appropriate, pro-Soviet” forms, said Henry F. Klein, chairman of the college’s art department and curator of the exhibit “Creativity in the Shadow of Political Oppression, Recent Czechoslovakian Art.”

All but one of the 62 prints, drawings and watercolors on display were produced before the November, 1989, “Velvet Revolution” that brought democracy to Czechoslovakia. Most of the art is “very, very politically charged,” Klein said.

The exhibit, which continues through Jan. 25, features the work of Jiri Anderle, Jiri Balcar, Albin Brunovsky, Jan Krejci and Oldrich Kulhanek, who have won international acclaim as graphic designers and illustrators.

The works are “technically stunning,” Klein said. Czechoslovakian artists receive more training in the graphic arts than do their North American counterparts, who are most often trained primarily as painters, said Klein, a professor of printmaking.

“Their drawing skills are astounding. There are very few people in this country that have this kind of skill,” Klein said.

Anderle, for instance, has won just about every prestigious international printmaking award and Brunovsky was chairman for 22 years of the Department of Book Illustration of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. That city has a distinguished graphic arts tradition dating back to the 15th Century. Most of the artists are now professors.

The works are taken from the Werksman Collection in Newport Beach and from the Jacques Baruch Gallery, a Chicago gallery that for the last 22 years has been “the major window to the West” for Czechoslovakian artists, Klein said.

The late Baruch, a Polish-born resistance fighter in World War II, and his wife, Anne, began in 1968 to serve as a lifeline to “forbidden” Czechoslovakian artists, sending money and supplies to them and at times smuggling their artwork out of the country, Klein said.

The government wanted artists to paint contented workers and “ladies in babushkas, holding their hammer and sickle, looking happy and dedicated,” Anne Baruch said.

“The forbidden artists could work in the privacy of their studios” but were prohibited from publicly showing their work, Baruch said. “There were no magazines, there was no opportunity to learn what was going on in the outside art world. They produced for art’s sake in the true sense of the word.”

Two of the artists whose works are on exhibit, Krejci and Kulhanek, were bolder in expressing anti-Soviet sentiment and were jailed for a month in 1971, then interrogated every two weeks for two years, Klein said.

Much of the work is sexually charged, featuring a great deal of nudity and sexually explicit imagery because “in a politically repressed society, there is a tendency to use sexual behavior” to release tension, Klein said.

Jerry Werksman, a Newport Beach attorney who with his wife, Betty, owns most of the works in the exhibit, said they “symbolize man’s ability to prevail artistically even in a totalitarian regime.”

Some Czechoslovaks viewing the exhibit have been deeply moved. But it also has proved meaningful to others with no firsthand experience of political repression.

A group of Pacoima High School students stared long and hard at “The Soldier Series,” a six-piece work by Anderle featuring photographs of World War I soldiers in uniform juxtaposed with larger prints of the same soldiers naked and vulnerable, their bodies bullet-ridden and bloody, eyes sorrowful, faces in shock, after experiencing the horrors of war.

The young men, mindful of war in the Persian Gulf, said the pictures hit uncomfortably close to home.

“Creativity in the Shadow of Political Oppression,” a collection of works by five artists, continues through Jan. 25 at Valley College Art Gallery, Art Building, 5800 Fulton Ave., Van Nuys, (818) 781-1200, Ext. 400. Open from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday through Friday and 7 to 9 p.m., Monday through Thursday, the gallery will be closed Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. day. Admission free.