"It is worth thinking about what the sculptor can and cannot do:
Vingler can safely capture the psychology of animals.
He can extract from them the fatality of life and death.
He can extract from them seriousness and gaiety, sadness and joy, ridiculousness and tragedy. (…)
He can grasp the truth of all details in large curves, softly merging into each other. The basis of his expression is the curve, projected into the ground plan, into the spatial composition and into the outline."
Jiří Mašín: Vincenc Vingler, Sculptures and Drawings of Animals, Václav Špála Gallery, Prague 1963.
So we know what the sculptor Vincenc Vingler is capable of. According to the text by Jiří Mašín, who was a kind of a main curator for the artist Vincenc Vingler, what the sculptor lacked was the effort to be interesting at all costs. This is also agreed upon by later curators of the large exhibition in Troja in 2012 and the authors of the texts of the related catalogue, which was an attempt to re-insert Vincenc Vingler into the context of Czech art of the second half of the 20th century.
So who was Vincenc Vingler? Vincenc Vingler (real name František Josef Vingler, 1911–1981), a solitaire who dedicated his life to the marginal topic of animal sculpture. For him, this became the subject of careful investigation of animal psychology, morphology and movement. Careful study of animals and their depiction in various cultures and times led him to an almost Moorish-style morphology, a tight and unique form consisting of smooth curves, carefully observed movements, which might be similar to the observational talent demonstrated in the art of some natural and ancient peoples, and are no less ingenious in the conciseness of form and simplification of shape. In the catalogue for the aforementioned exhibition in Troja in 2012, Jan Wollner speaks of “Vingler’s ambiguous position”, most likely (unintentionally) caused by Jan Patočka’s review of Herbert Read’s book: The Art of Sculpture, in which animal sculpture is perceived as something marginal (note: despite the fact that animal sculpture is among the oldest forms of sculpture). Animal sculpture was also supposed to be a marginal area because figurative (human) sculpture allows one to become aware of one’s own body and its relationship to space through sculpture. Wollner claims that in several places in both books there was an unintentional condemnation of animal themes within sculpture. This condemnation of one genre, together with the fact that the most highly regarded historian of domestic sculpture at the time, Petr Wittlich, works with these theories – and does not mention Vincenc Vingler anywhere, Wollner considers these reasons for the “ambiguity” of the person and work of Vincenc Vingler. On the one hand, he exhibited at major international exhibitions (1946 in Paris, 1954 participation in the Milan Triennial, he was also represented by two outdoor sculptures at the Expo in Brussels in 1957 and in the 1960s he held a number of solo exhibitions abroad). On the other hand, he did not participate in group exhibitions in Czech, and his work was studied during his lifetime by only a few art historians, with whom he was mostly connected by friendly relations (J. Mašín, J. Šetlík, J. Kotalík) and who understood Vingler's dedication to one theme and appreciated its sincerity. However, the subsequent generation of art historians – for various reasons – more or less ignored him. That is, until the exhibition in 2012 at the Troja Castle, which drew attention to the quality of Vingler's works and managed to fulfill the goal it had set itself: to integrate Vingler's work into the context of Czech sculpture of the second half of the 20th century.
The sculpture Cormorant, which is the work of the month of March, exists in several casts (another cast is owned by the National Gallery in Prague). Since Vingler's first solo exhibition in the Ars gallery in Melantrich, it has been one of the significant works with which he opened his exhibitions. It was purchased for the Jihlava gallery in 1959. In addition to the cormorant sculpture in the OGV collections, Vincenc Vingler has an interesting connection with Jihlava: In 1943, he was the author of the set for Carlo Goldoni's play The Servant of Two Masters, which was performed in the 1943/1944 season. Several photographs from this play have survived and are stored in the Jihlava city archive.
Lucie Nováčková
Reading:
Jiří Mašín: Vincenc Vingler: Animal Sculptures, 1957.
Jiří Mašín: Vincenc Vingler, Animal Sculptures and Drawings, Václav Špála Gallery, Prague 1963.
Olga Malá, Jan Wollner and Jiří Kotalík: Vincenc Vingler, (ed. Markéta Vinglerová, Olga Malá), Prague 2012.
Jiří Flíček: 20 years of the Horácký Theatre, Havlíčkův Brod, 1960.
Thanks to Petr Dvořák from OA Jihlava.