Jiří Seifert (5 September 1932 – 25 July 1999) was a Czech sculptor, medalist and restorer. Following the Soviet invasion in 1968 and during subsequent normalization, Seifert was persecuted and barred from exhibiting his work. Seifert was member of Fédération internationale de la médaille d'art (FIDEM) and in 1990s chairmen of the Mánes Union of Fine Arts and chairmen of the honorary committee of european sculptors in Sankt Margarethen im Burgenland.Pavliňák P (ed.), SČSVU, 2004, p. 316
Life
Jiří Seifert was born on on 5 September 1932 in Prague. He was the son of a high school professor and a teacher. After his birth, the family moved from Prague to Turnov, where his father got a job at the grammar school as a teacher of geography and gymnastics. He was forced to enlist for labor during the war, after the communist coup in February 1948 he lost his job and worked at a secondary school in Jablonec nad Nisou. Jiří spent the war years in Mělník with his grandparents, where he learned to swim in the Elbe River and then took up this sport competitively. In 1949, he became the Junior Czechoslovak swimming champion. In addition, he took up climbing in the sandstone rocks around Turnov and the direct physical contact with the stone strongly influenced his later sculptural work. He became friends with the sculptor and mountaineer Valerián Karoušek, the younger son of a Turnov merchant in whose house the Seiferts lived.
After graduating from the Real Gymnasium (1945–1947) in 1947–1951, he studied jewellery making at the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Jablonec nad Nisou (prof. V. Vorlíček, V. Pokorný). In 1951, he passed the entrance examination to the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, but was rejected for political reasons and spent the next year working as a road construction worker. He was not admitted to the studio of Prof. Bedřich Stefan at the Academy of Applied Arts until the following year (1952). On the recommendation of his professor, during the holidays of 1956 he completed an apprenticeship with the stonemason and sculptor Otakar Velinský. The school was relatively independent during the period of the most rigid Stalinism, thanks to the rector Adolf Hoffmeister. The head of the studio, Bedřich Stefan, protected the students from political issues. Stefan belonged to the pre-war avant-garde and had unquestionable authority. He was open to the individual needs of his students, but at the same time consistently ensured perfect mastery of his craft. He commissioned his pupils to model animals or ancient elements and allowed them to collaborate with architects and participate in small commissions for utilitarian objects. The drawing of the nude from a live model was led by Prof. Jan Bauch.Hlaváčková J, Kratochvílová M, 2019, p. 37
During his studies and then during his stay in Řevnice, Jiří Seifert became friends with a number of artists, especially from the circle of Wagner's studio and the later UB 12 group ([Kmentová, Zoubek, Janoušek, Janoušková), and Adriena Šimotová, Jiří John, Václav Boštík, architect Otto Rothmayer and theologian Zdeněk Bonaventura Bouše. Since their joint exhibition in 1966, he also repeatedly visited Bohuslav Reynek.Hlaváčková J, Kratochvílová M, 2019, pp. 178-180
After graduation in 1958, he started a one-year internship at the ZUKOV foundry. In 1959 he married art historian () and moved with her to Liberec, where Seifertová took up the post of director of the Regional Gallery. In 1962 their daughter Barbora was born. Jiří Seifert and his wife were active organizers of the local cultural scene and the founding members of Group 7 (1959), with which Seifert exhibited until 1969. His circle of friends in Liberec included the painter Vladimír Komárek, the photographer and art historian Čestmír Krátký, and the artist and founder of actor´s Studio Ypsilon Jan Schmid; he also had close contacts with architects from the SIAL studio.
In 1962 he travelled to Lebanon and visited the ancient monuments there. The following year he travelled to Holland, where he was strongly attracted by the sculptural work of Hans Arp. He took part in the Liberec exhibitions Sculpture 64, Sculpture in the Open Air (1966), and Sculpture and the City (1969), the Biennale internationale des jeunes artistes in Paris (1966), and the exhibition of Czech sculpture in the Musée Rodin, Paris (1968). With the arch. Miroslav Masák's team, he collaborated on the design of the relaxation spa Teplice-Šanov, which was presented at the Biennial of Youth in Mexico City (1968) and won the jury prize.Hlaváčková J, Kratochvílová M, 2019, p. 187
In 1969, he had the opportunity to work at a symposium of European sculptors in Sankt Margarethen im Burgenland. The Austrian sculptor Karl Prantl, who organized the symposium and was a recognized moral authority, became Seifert's friend. He influenced Seifert's further work and his way of working with stone towards simplicity and compactness of form,Hlaváčková J, Kratochvílová M, 2019, p. 176 as well as his reflections on the spiritual message of the work and the space that the sculpture conquers.
After his personal commitment against the August occupation in 1968 and after he installed Calvary and the Plague Column at the exhibition Sculpture and the City (1969) in Liberec and created the monumental Bell Tower for Jan Palach in Sankt Margarethen im Burgenland, he lost the opportunity to exhibit for a long time. At the same time, Hana Seifert was dismissed from her job at the Regional Gallery in Liberec during the purges in senior positions, and in 1970 they both moved to the house of Seifert's grandparents in Řevnice.
In the following years, Seifert restored a collection of ancient casts for Charles University in the dissolved monastery in Hostinné, worked briefly as an assistant in modelling at the Czech Technical University in Prague (1972–1973) and won some commissions for architecture. He last travelled abroad in 1972 to Târgu Jiu, Romania, for a meeting of the informal association of European sculptors from Sankt Margarethen im Burgenland. In 1978 he had to surrender his passport as a "person hostile to the socialist establishment".
In 1985–1986 he worked on a copy of the Gothic reliefs from the tympanum of the Church of Our Lady before Týn in Prague, which replaced the original in the Lapidarium of the National Museum.
In 1986 he participated at the sculpture symposium in Přední Kopanina.Malá O, NEČVU, p. 726, Academia 1995 It was not until 1987 that he received permission to travel to Switzerland and to the sculpture symposium in Triavno, Bulgaria. After 1989 he participated in the restoration of the Mánes Union of Fine Arts and, together with Olbram Zoubek, in the founding of a new art association, the Union of Visual Artists, where he was elected vice president. A trip to Greece and Crete, which he took with his wife in 1991, brought a number of impulses for his further work. He participated in sculpture symposia in Hořice (1991), Germany and Italy (1991–1992). His retrospective at the Museum in Bochum (1992) placed Seifert, after years of isolation, once again in the context of world sculpture.Hlaváčková J, Kratochvílová M, 2019, p. 136 In Fanano, Italy, he won first prize for his sculptures made of local limestone (1992).Hlaváčková J, Kratochvílová M, 2019, p. 188 In the 1990s, he participated in a number of sculpture symposia, even four in 1995 (Banská Štiavnica, Klenová, Milevsko and České Budějovice).
Since 1969, he was a member of the Fédération internationale de la médaille d'art (FIDEM) and was regularly invited to exhibitions of this association in Prague, Cologne, Kraków, Budapest, Lisbon, Florence, Stockholm and the United States. Since 1992, after the fall of the communist regime, he worked as an external teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the studio of restoration of sculptures. In 1995 and again in 1997 he was elected chairman of the Mánes Union of Fine Arts.
His last original sculpture came from a symposium in Klášter-Hradiště in 1997, where he was already seriously ill.Hlaváčková J, Kratochvílová M, 2019, p. 139 At the end of the 1990s, due to deteriorating health, he was unable to work with sculptural material and Jaroslav Řehna participated in the realization of his larger projects. This collaboration resulted in a fountain in Kounic Palace in Prague (completed 2003) and a courtyard with water features in the Czech Centre in Paris (1995-1997).Hlaváčková J, Kratochvílová M, 2019, pp. 143–144
Seifert has died on 25 July 1999 in Řevnice, at the age of 67.Boris Jirků, In memoriam Jiří Seifert, Ateliér 19, 1999
Work Seifert's sculptural work has its antecedents in nature and draws inspiration from the ancient roots of human civilization. His relationship with the material was passionateMiroslava Hajek, catalogue ČMVU 2001 and his bodily contact with stone and wood is sometimes recorded in relief as fingerprints or footprints (Bed, 1973, Footprints, 1984). The turn to very personal subjects in the early 1970s can be seen as a kind of defensive reaction in the context of the rapid decline of society after the Soviet occupation and during the period of normalization. The chamber works from this period humanise and populate the space of the home, giving it the hallmark of Seifert's personality and at the same time relieving people of fear and anxiety (Shelf with Curtain and Skull, 1976, Table with Hat and Package, 1979).Petr Spielmann, O sochách ze dřeva a kamene / On sculptures of wood and stone, Výtvarné umění, 1992, no. 2, p. 58-60 The ban on exhibiting also meant the loss of the necessary corrective of professional criticism, and the sculptor himself later admitted that he had made some mistakes.Jiří Seifert, in: Hlaváčková J, Kratochvílová M, 2019, p. 102
Restoration work in the collection of ancient casts at the Institute for Classical Archaeology of Charles University in Hostinné was reflected in his works through the need to enrich his own sculptures with tactility, sensuality of surface and more subtle modelling. The definitive transition from sandstone to the finer texture of harder marble allowed for a change in formal range and deepened the direct connection to classical sculpture. It is manifested, for example, in the many variations of drapery, or in the fluting, which survived as a stylized remnant of the depiction of movement but in Seifert's conception became an element of content and ethics.Hlaváčková J, Kratochvílová M, 2019, pp. 26-27
1958–1970 Seifert's diploma work was a brass jewellery box with cut agate. At that time, he was mainly engaged in graphic art and drawing, and at the first exhibition of Group 7 he also presented oil paintings and jewellery. Seifert's figurative sculptures in polychrome plaster and wood from the late 1950s have not survived. At the same time he created several intimate bird sculptures in hornwork but soon began working in wood, sandstone and slate. He was introduced to slate right out of high school as a road construction worker and then used it throughout his life to create jewelry, plaquettes and medals. His sculptures in sandstone are at first softly modelled figures (Reclining, before 1963), whose generally metaphorical basis is related to the search for organic and natural form in stone and also represents Seifert's distinction from 1950s realism. Sculptures with symbolic content, such as Monument of Monuments (1965), referring to the fate of monuments removed by the communist regime, also have an abstract organic form (exhibited in Musée Rodin, Paris in 1968).