Otakar Slavík (18 December 1931 – 3 November 2010) was a Czech painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He is considered one of the most important colourists in Czech art.Karel Miler, Images of Miraculous Color, in: Otakar Slavík, National Gallery 1991-1992, p. 19 He was a signatory of Charter 77.
Life Otakar Slavík was born into a tailor's family in Hrochův Týnec. He spent his childhood there and graduated from the Stadtschule. After the war he apprenticed for one year in a porcelain factory in Klášterec nad Ohří and then moved to the ceramics school in Bechyně (1946-1948). From 1948 to 1952 he studied sculpture at the Secondary Industrial School of Stone and Sculpture in Hořice. After graduation (1952) he was not accepted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and therefore began to study art at the Faculty of Education of Comenius University in Bratislava (prof. Eugen Nevan). From there, he transferred in 1953 to the Faculty of Education at Charles University for the newly opened professorship of painting and drawing for secondary schools (prof. Karel Lidický, Martin Salcman).
Martin Salcman, who had studied with Jan Preisler and was friends with František Kupka, introduced the sculptor Slavík to painting and influenced his work for life with his method of teaching, by emphasis on considering the relationships between visual elements and by pointing out the relative validity of their values. As a teacher, he made a significant impact on completely different painters - his assistant Zdeněk Sýkora, Karel Malich, Vladislav Mirvald, Dalibor Chatrný and Otakar Slavík. Saltzman's pupils, each in their own original way, developed his method of painting. Since the school was outside the centre of communist party interest and control, Professor Salcman and his assistants Zdeněk Sýkora and Kamil Linhart could inform the students about contemporary world art.
After graduating in 1958, although he was still receiving a scholarship from the Fine Arts Fund for several years, Otakar Slavík decided to make a living by manual labour in order to do without the inevitable artistic compromises with the regime. For five years he worked as a stagehand at the National Theatre. After his dismissal from the theatre, he was employed in a prefabrication plant, as a wagon unloader, a mover and in other physically demanding professions. From the time of his studies, he was friendly especially with Zdeněk Sýkora, the circle around Václav Bartovský and Václav Boštík, but despite his lively nature, he remained isolated both privately and in his work. Classical music concerts played an important role in his life.
His first solo exhibition was in 1964 in the Small Gallery of the Park of Culture. Since the exhibition at Mánes Gallery in 1966, he became the subject of professional interest in connection with the emerging New Figuration. In the second half of the 1960s, he established himself as a painter and draughtsman, in 1967 he acquired his own studio and from 1968 he was able to devote himself exclusively to his painting. He was represented at numerous exhibitions in Czechoslovakia and abroad. In 1968, he participated as a guest in the exhibitions of the Křižovatka group, organized by Jiří Padrta under the title New sensitivity.
Slavík's second exhibition of paintings at the Václav Špála Gallery (1970), together with sculptures by Karel Nepraš, led to a rapprochement with artists around the Křižovnická School. Eugen Brikcius, Ivan and Věra Jirous, Dana Němcová and the philosopher Ivan Dubský became his new and lifelong friends.
Soon after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and the new consolidation of the communist regime, Otakar Slavík lost the opportunity to exhibit and returned to manual labour. In 1971, he took a job as a wagon driver for the newly established normalization Union of Czech Artists. The choice of this job not only corresponded to Slavík's strength of character and independence, it was also, in its absurdity, in line with the poetics of the Křižovnická School.
The shameful situation of the 1970s led him to be one of the first to sign Charter 77. The following year he suffered a severe myocardial infarction, which meant that it was impossible to continue to earn a living from manual labour. After signing Charter 77, he was expelled from the Artists' Fund and automatically lost his right to social security, the right to a studio and the option to buy paints from the Fund's shop, which was the only one in Prague that sold professional art supplies.
In 1980 he emigrated with his wife to Austria, where he was granted political asylum. Otakar Slavík became a member of the art association Vienna Künstlerhaus. Thanks to his wife's employment, for the first time in his life he had no financial worries and could devote himself to painting and his new-found great hobby, visiting galleries and museums. He made annual trips abroad to see art (London, Venice, Florence, Paris, Zurich, Madrid, Toledo). In 1985 he obtained Austrian citizenship. In addition to Vienna, he has exhibited in Switzerland, Germany, the United States and France. In 1988, he participated in the Expressiv exhibition in Vienna, Washington and New York, organized by Meda Mládková.
In 1989 he suffered another heart attack and had to undergo a very complicated heart operation. He returned to the Czech Republic with a large retrospective exhibition organized by the National and Central Bohemia Galleries in the premises of the Municipal Library in 1991. This was followed by exhibitions at Mánes Gallery, Bayer & Bayer Gallery, Prague Castle Ballroom, Via Art Gallery, Nová síň in Prague and in Kutná Hora. In 1992 he became a member of the Umělecká beseda. Slavík painted in Vienna and during his stays in Prague. His work was suddenly interrupted by his unexpected death in November 2010.Ještě ráno si šel koupit barvy, v noci pak slavný malíř Slavík zemřel / In the morning he went to buy paints, then at night the famous painter Slavík died, Lidovky, 7.11.2021
Awards 1987 Gold Medal of the Künstlerhaus Vienna 1992 Irene und Peter Ludwig Preis 1996 Prize of the Union of Visual Artists of the Czech Republic, Intersalon České Budějovice 2001 Goldene Lorbeer des Künstlerhauses, Vienna
Work Painting Slavík's development as a painter has a remarkable unity, coherence and logic, despite its significant changes and constant renewal.Sekera J, in: Otakar Slavík: Paintings of Women 1969, 1970 He depicts the figure or object as an impersonal shape, which he interprets by means of painting. The strength of this method lies in Slavík's extraordinary coloristic abilities, which enabled him to make from the figural composition at the same time a peculiar composition of colored surfaces, organized in intricately harmonious and discordant configurations.Valoch J, in: Otakar Slavík:: Drawings, 1991
The painter was influenced by his training in ceramics modelling in Bechyně and especially by sculpting in the stone masonry school in Hořice, which deepened his figurative sensibility for lifetime. The theme of his figures is the general existential situation of man, not any particular activity. Slavík's experience as a modeller and his fascination with painting are intertwined in them.Rous J, in: Otakar Slavík, 2009, p. 17 The position or situation of the figure is from the beginning the result of a process in which paint enters the space of the painting and becomes a shape.Miler K, in: Otakar Slavík: Paintings and Drawings, 1991, p. 25 (Slavík: "I do not paint the figure, it must come into being during the process of painting.")O. Slavík, in: Rous J, ed., Otakar Slavík, 2009, p. 14 The high pasty layers of colour are sometimes the result of overpainting and testify to his struggle for expression. He uses them to emphasize the saturation of the colouring and to add vibrancy. Beauty in his conception is not identical with grace or prettiness or the pursuit of a polished style. Even where a painting resembles a battlefield, it is the result of the elemental joy of painting.Zemina J, in: Otakar Slavík: Paintings and Drawings, 1991, pp. 6-7 According to Věra Jirousová, Slavík evaluated the aesthetic principles of the European tradition with the austerity of a Central European, and in his work the will to order and self-discipline clashes with the chaos that breeds all living things.Jirousová V, Otakar Slavík, Malba jako salto mortale (Painting as salto mortale), Ateliér No. 25, 1991, p. 1
Slavík's first paintings were influenced by French painting, especially Bonnard and Matisse. In Czech art he follows painters from the early 20th century, especially Jindřich Prucha, Jan Preisler and Bohumil KubištaZemina J, in: Otakar Slavík: Paintings and Drawings, 1991, p. 5 (Portrait of Miss Ulčová, 1955). The bitter confrontation of the romantic concept of art with the reality of Slavík's life as a stagehand gave rise to a series of flying ballerinas, figures in spasmodic motion during a dive across the stage, along with another theme, the life of worn-out workers, stagehands and beer drinkers (Flying Ballerina, 1962, Stagehand 1958). The dark colouring points to existential experience and the loss of romantic illusions (Man with a Beer, 1964). The atmosphere of the painting Café in the Municipal House (1959), where Slavík retreated in between work, depicts the alienation of a lonely man.
Around the mid-1960s, he abandoned his previous way of painting. The colours of some of his paintings are muted and the brush touches become isolated in the form of small spots of colour (Standing, 1964). In the second half of the 1960s, he composed his paintings mainly or exclusively from discs of colour, sometimes in the form of a regular grid (Lying, 1966). Slavík's work is not merely about the optical arrangement of spots of colour, as in Seurat's work, but by various treatments of colour he seeks to build order in the image, as Cézanne did.Slavík O, in: Otakar Slavík, 1991, pp. 4-8 The painter consciously abandoned for a time the plasticity and depth of pictorial space and gave the coloured point a constructive role (Slavík: "The point, which is my starting point, is not only a building element, but also a certainty and freedom in its definition. Constructive tendencies are close to me").Slavík O, in: Petrová E, Opinion Poll on the New Figuration, Výtvarné umění (journal), 1970, pp. 480-495
Constructive tendencies affected many artists in the mid-1960s. The key word became anti-romanticism, associated with the suppression of subjectivity of expression and the purging of painting of illusions and symbols. The humanized geometry was signing on to the technical givens of civilization (called "second nature") and the new principles of painting were strict and precise, concrete, clear, factual illustrative and positive in relation to man.Sládečková T, 2009, pp. 29-36 Otakar Slavík exhibits with the Křižovatka group and representatives of the New Sensibility, but he remains a solitary artist who combines the most rigorous solutions with more traditional, but equally distinct approaches. He shared with a number of exhibitors an interest in the purely painterly qualities of the picture and the application of order in its composition, but his direction in terms of meaning was different and, like Alena Kučerová, he did not abandon figuration.Sládečková T, 2009, p. 40
The earliest abstracting shift, accompanied by the spatial isolation of artistic signs, is evident in the painting Dissection, which mirrors the artist's authentic experience and subsequent contemplation (Dissection, 1967).Kříž J, in: Otakar Slavík: Paintings 1962 – 1968, 1969