This year marks its 100th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, tournaments and other accompanying activities and chess marathons are held around the world to promote this popular royal game.
It is played on 64 squares with 16 pieces of different importance, where by moving them within the rules, the player tries to eliminate the opponent's king from the game. If there is a situation where there is no valid move for a player to make, but the player's king is not attacked, the game ends in a stalemate, a draw. Checkmate is game over if a player's king is threatened and there is no move for the player to respond to the situation and the player loses.

The work of Věra Šenkýřová (born on October 29, 1927 in Brno) represents two players engaged in a game, when one is preparing to move rooks, thereby provoking further moves, gradually leading to the end of the game. A small charcoal drawing, very well executed, on closer examination contains an unexpected tension that seems to reflect the author's life story, which at the moment we can only imagine due to the lack of information. From the available information, we managed to put together the following chessboard, on which the author's life story takes place: Věra Šenkýřová was born as the only child of Maria and Jaroslav Šenkýř in Brno. Jaroslav Šenkýř was the director of the gymnasium in Litovel at least until 1946, after which he is listed as a professor of the real gymnasium in Brno. Věra Šenkýřová graduated from the Girls' Real Gymnasium in Brno with a high school diploma (1938–1946), from 1946 she was admitted to the AVU, where she first studied at the general school of V. Sychra in the preparation of K. Minář. From 1949, she transferred to the school of painting and conservation techniques of professor B. Slánský, where in 1952 she finished her studies with her final work – the restoration of the statue of virgin Mary, a baroque gilded relief in Vimperk. Three works in the collection of the Jihlava gallery date from 1954, two with nature and this one with a figurative motif. In 1958, Věra Šenkýřová was included in the exhibition Art of Young Artists of Czechoslovakia – Paintings and Sculptures, which took place in the House of Arts of the City of Brno and in the House of the Lords of Poděbrady (now Kunštát) throughout the summer of 1958 and was later repeated in Prague. The exhibition sparked a debate in the Artistic work magazine, which spanned several issues: Issue 10 on the front page reprints Václav Formánek's opening speech, in which he highlights the "youth of the exhibition". Although it is written in the speech that this is "the first exhibition of young artists, which is held without any protective or patronizing interventions from authorities of the Soviet Union", however abART database, under the entry of Věra Šenkýřová, states that "some works for technical reasons were not exhibited", however, it is not possible to trace which works were involved. In the next, eleventh issue, there is an (unsigned) critique, which draws attention to the fact that at the exhibition we find artists "young in age, but the works do not correspond at all to the meaning we attach to this word", describes the exhibition as a "meeting of diverse groups" (Maj, Trasa , Galandovci, Matalovci). And it points out that the concept of novelty "must be understood as the artist's effort to eliminate the academic, conventional, accepted, enlarged, bourgeois and ultimately unexciting concept of reality for contemporary people"... In the subtext, the question arises as to whether the "new" meant a departure from the socialist realism, which is beginning to weaken in Czechoslovakia, or, on the contrary, a tendency towards it. The year is 1958, XI convention of Communist Party of Czechoslovakia takes place in June. We are in a time when XX. congress of the CPSU in Russia condemned the Stalinist crimes, in the period after the Hungarian uprising. But the Czech environment absorbed these shocks and continued to complete the construction of socialism. The subsequent criticism, published in issue 16, immediately mentions the conclusions of the congress and emphasizes the ideology of the works, condemns the commission's work because "artistic standards were overestimated" and the jury thus "loosened the ideological framework of the exhibition", condemns the works of, for example, Z. Sekal or J. Špála and demands consistency in ideological work. The last article dedicated to the exhibition in the 17th issue by V. Silovský directly draws attention to the fact that the works of socialist realism after 1948 caused embarrassment if they were to be evaluated from an artistic point of view, however, he sees this problem in the fact that works in this spirit were created rather as atomized commissions of individual artists, and if the artists persisted in this direction, this qualitative difference would disappear. This essentially concludes the debate on young art, which also included the exhibited work of Věra Šenkýřová (Green landscape, charcoal). As the name itself suggests, it was precisely the kind of realist conception that both recent ideologically oriented critics condemn. At the same time, apart from critics in the Artistic work magazine, the exhibition started the creation of the 1959 Movement, which was later banned by the Union, and the Bloc of creative groups in the fall of 1958, but that is another chapter. Věra Šenkýřová exhibited at another exhibition called Young Czechoslovak Artists at the VII. world festival of youth and students in Vienna in 1959... and then she disappeared. Three drawings with folklore motifs in the collection of the Moravian Gallery in Brno date from 1963, and after that date there is no more mention of her.

It seems that Věra Šenkýřová's chess game with the political variables of the time and her effort to stay aside and devote herself to non-political subjects in her free work was leading to a draw, which occurs if no stone is taken and no pawn is drawn for 50 moves in a row. The last dated work is a painting from 1977, offered for sale in one of the internet galleries and attributed to Věra Šenkýřová. She might still be alive. She would have been ninety-seven – and if any of our gallery followers have any news about her, we'd be more than grateful.

Lucie Nováčková, July 2024