Artwork of month
František Dlouhý Fénix, 1970

František Dlouhý
Fénix, 1970

oil, hardboard
57 x 45 cm

in exposition 
From the collections
Masaryk Square No. 24
Jihlava

František Dlouhý (20. 3. 1911 Stařeč u Třebíče – 22. 3. 2000 Uherské Hradiště) began to devote himself to painting at the instigation of his uncle, the well-known Třebíč photographer and painter Vinci Dlouhý, who became his teacher and under his guidance devoted himself to painting and photography. However, due to historical events and the forced deployment of F. Dlouhý in Berlin, this period did not last very long. He gradually returned to art as an autodidact only during the 1950s mainly by landscape painting, in which he gradually became masterful especially in the technique of dry pastel. In the 1960s his work gradually divided into two parallel lines - landscape paintings and imaginative, fanciful work.

September 2022

A representative of the imaginative line in his work is this smaller painting Fénix from 1970, which is an obvious reaction to the events of 1968, both from the point of view of the occupation of Czechoslovakia, but also to the tragedy in his personal life. In the painting, Dlouhý expresses his feelings in the hazy outlines of the burnt Phoenix, with only a few small, darkly smoldering foci, which promise to rise again from the ashes, just as he hopes to escape from the captivity of the occupier again, as well as his own rebirth.
The painting in darkened, depressing tones without any distinctive brush structures, in places rather drawing, is also made up of a fine-grained structure, which he achieved by disrupting individual layers with various chemicals. These experiments are characteristic not only for the fanciful work of Dlouhý, but for the whole of the 1960s and 1970s of Czech and foreign art. The inspiration and impulse for such work was surely also Dlouhý's extensive philosophical debates and exchange of views and experiences with artists and art historians of the art scene not only in Jihlava (for example, František Dörfl, Jindřich Boška, Ladislav Novák, Josef Bulant, Dalibor Chatrný, Jiří Valoch...), which took place in the grounds of the Regional Gallery of the Highlands in Jihlava, where he was employed at that time as an expert worker. Part of these debates was also listening to experimental works of electroacoustic music (for example, Vladimír Šrámek's Laughter on the Poem of Jiří Kolář or Geology, or How We Killed Papa Ladislav Novák), which also had a strong influence on the artists of that time, many even experimented with it.
Although Dlouhý did not have many options and did not get to his own work until later in life, his especially abstract work is imbued with the atmosphere of the 1960s and later fading and changes of moods in the 1970s, when a significant part of the artists submitted to the new regime and those who refused to cooperate with the regime remained on the margins of the artistic process. The mushroom spawn, however, which was fed by similar meetings and discussions as in the Jihlava gallery, inspired many other artists, who transformed it into a large and valued work. Modest artists like Dlouhý certainly were their inspiration, sometimes advisors, sometimes opponents and thus also valuable, irreplaceable articles in the whole breadth of Czech visual art.