A Friendship on the Island of Utopia
Arnold Peter Weisz-Kubínčan and Miloš Alexander Bazovský
Prepared by Aurel Hrabušický, curator of the modern and contemporary art collections
In recent years two extensive exhibitions by Arnold Peter Weisz-Kubínčan were held, in the Bratislava City Gallery and the Slovak National Gallery. Both of them presented a great number of hitherto unknown or unseen works, and viewers were enabled to appreciate to the full what an important artist this was. Not that there was any question here of an unknown talent being discovered: his works had appeared in practically all reviews of modern visual art in Slovakia, and his Kôň (Horse, 1937) had become nothing short of iconic. And yet he had not been thought of as a key artist, but rather as a complementary figure, adding to the panorama of modern art in Slovakia.
Recently, however, Weisz-Kubínčan has appeared not via his works but in person, recorded in a number of photographs by M. A. Bazovský at the SNG exhibition Fotograf Bazovský (Bazovský, the Photographer). Weisz-Kubínčan died prematurely, in a concentration camp (where and how is not known), some time near the end of the year 1944. During World War II he had concealed himself more, but even prior to that he had not appeared much in public, and so until recently only a few of his photographs were known. We knew the painter’s image rather from his self-portraits: by contrast, he produced a great number of those, and indeed one can say that another artist in 20th century Slovakia so obsessed with capturing the image of his countenance would be difficult to find. As framed in his own self-interpretation, his self-portraits show the artist as a man at the limits of his strength, at the borderline of existence. In some ways they were anticipatory, seeming to prefigure what was yet to come. A man living in a state of permanent threat, finding himself on the threshold of non-existence — which would actually be the reality before too long.
1. Bazovský Photographs Weisz-Kubínčan
By its very nature, photography as a medium holds fast to reality, and so the numerous images of A. P. Weisz-Kubínčan (APWK) recorded by Bazovský provide an image of the artist that is altogether different from his self-portraits. Instead of a man who is locked into some sort of existential vacuum, we see an artist moving about in the real world, caught in the exercise of his profession, so to speak. And with the local community looking on. The painter here is not in the privacy of his studio: literally, he is executing a “public work” in the general view, giving a kind of involuntary public performance. However, the public following his art is mainly composed of barefoot young fellows from the nearby village; curious, and sometimes perplexed, they gape over the painter’s shoulders at the half-done canvas and, all unknowingly, they are witnesses of the genesis of an artwork. These shots reveal an almost unknown aspect of art practice as it was then: painting in public was one of the few sensations which villagers in those times could experience, and at the same time, the painters could relish their few minutes of fame. Weisz-Kubínčan with his image and his field “gear”, and in his indispensable knee-breeches, made an especially exotic impression in that milieu. Presumably Bazovský too was aware of this contrast, and maybe he was having plenty of fun with his camera. To all appearances in the record of this live performance, Weisz-Kubínčan willingly and intelligently played his role of the painter at work with his palette.
Bazovský as photographer was above all a documentarist. Most frequently he recorded motifs which later appeared in his paintings in a different form. In his negatives, however, one also finds shots of specific situations and people which did not make their way onto his paintings. And Weisz-Kubínčan most frequently of all. At the very least, this proves that they spent a great deal of time together on painterly and other rambles. Apart from that, Weisz evidently must have fascinated Bazovský as a physical (and in a peculiar way photogenic) type. A modern painter to the depths of his being, Bazovský was inclined to avoid portraits, but he approached his task quite inventively as a photographic portraitist in APWK’s case. He created diverse variants of portrayal, whether of an isolated figure or of a person finding himself in a variety of settings and situations. In one winter scene, possibly a delayed action shot, he himself is standing next to him. The two men, roughly of the same age, dressed somewhat as tourists or friends on an outing, could scarcely be more different. Bazovský was as usual dapper; Weisz-Kubínčan seemed to want to be as inconspicuous as possible, but with his appearance that was a difficult thing to manage.
Bazovský’s shots of Weisz-Kubínčan were probably taken during the second half of the 1930s. If they had never come into being, then probably we would only have hazy, formless ideas about how his friend behaved or appeared, what visual impression he made, what personal features were outwardly manifested in his physical form. Besides Bazovský’s shots, there are very few other pictorial documents of his life.
2. Self-portraits by APWK
Later, in the years of the wartime Slovak state, it was presumably not desired that his person should be photographed or made at all visible. The artist, however, continued to explore his hidden face. The condition of the soul, which no photograph can portray, shines forth through the outward, scarcely recognisable form. Weisz-Kubínčan was not able to paint that many self-portraits, but evidently he was sketching them until the last moment. Many of them may be found in “the artist’s heavy luggage”, whose contents were recently made public in the eponymous exhibition in SNG; they are drawn in ordinary ink, Indian ink and pencil, in dense lineation, but that notwithstanding, with an exceptionally concentrated draughtsman’s concision. The crowded lines cross over one another, seeming to reflect the artist’s inner world in their struggle. But one portrait sketch stands out from the others, not least because his normally angular facial features, carved with pencil or pen, are on this occasion softened by a fluid watercolour. The artist’s face appears in directly frontal view, his eyes stare fixedly before him, and although as usual his appearance is one of deep disquiet, at this moment his face has smoothened and become translucent, and he himself seems to be removed from it all. A suffering in the highest degree personal has taken on a more general, more impersonal character.
For personal urgency and emotional intensity, Arnold Weisz-Kubínčan’s self-portraits have no equivalent in modern Slovak art. Part of the reason, no doubt, is that no other artist in Slovakia had such a long-term and extreme experience of being socially “offside”. Only when some artists outgrew the age-old concept of the self-portrait, based on capturing one’s likeness; when they looked at themselves impersonally, translocating their own likeness, projecting it onto the outside, and unifying the newly-structured outer world with the inner (Stano Filko), or when they trans-embodied themselves, so to speak, or doubled their existence (Július Koller) — only then did they achieve comparable results.
APWK thought of his condition as permanent, and that stimulated him to make constant attempts to come to terms with it, to give it substantial form, and thus ritually, even for a while, to render it harmless. But the feeling of long-term, indeed permanent, existential insecurity, which climaxed during the Second World War years in real physical menace, was not evoked only by external stimuli, however pressing. It was at the foundation of his personality, as with van Gogh and many others, and the specific circumstances of his existence merely reinforced this feeling. Almost every person feels existential distress from time to time, and from the nature of things an artist is less able to rely on the ordinary existential securities and guarantees, since his work does not have a clearly defined object or professional content (unless those are dictated from above). Apart from which, the artist is a kind of spokesperson of human society, interpreting its feelings, moods, expectations and desires, and offering them in a concentrated, more general and momentous form, with which mankind self-identifies.
3. Ahasuerus
Even in Slovak art, which for long existed in a kind of pre-critical state, from time to time there were individual figures who perceived their existence at least as something not commonplace. Unsurprisingly, it was in the more developed literature that personifications of this condition appeared earliest (beginning probably with “strange Janko”, the self-identification of Janko Kráľ). One poet, the communist Laco Novomeský, on occasion saw himself as Ahasuerus, “eternal Jew on the banks of the rivers of Babylon”, or as the saint beyond the village: “the saint beyond the village, / in it he’s not welcomed, / that is you, / that is you”. For him, it was one and the same. That is how art functions — the artist spontaneously gives utterance to the state of things as they are, in a double significance and nonetheless clearly, without regard for his own political or other conviction. The artist is truthful, almost against his will.
When Bazovský’s prematurely deceased friend Zolo Palugyay painted his tramp Ahasuerus in 1927, it was still in the style of Secession expressionism (Palugyay himself went rambling in the Tatras and got lost, and his remains were found only a year later). Since this is an isolated composition in his work, it is questionable whether the artist saw himself in that symbolic figure. However, we may think of Bazovský’s well-known and frequently reproduced work Tinker or Ahasuerus (1948) as a crypto-portrait (since we know that Bazovský did not do self-portraits). It was produced in the period of rupture after February 1948, when the Communist Party began to lead our society, from which further consequences followed. The work may be understood also as an indirect response to that ongoing and irrevocable process. Evidently, in the painter this intensified a feeling which had existed in him for a very long time. On the threshold of fifty, he had a more powerful sense of being a pariah than ever before. An alternative title for the painting is Tinker — and tinkers in our art often incarnated the rovers, day-labourers, peregrinatory journeymen, who are always on the move and practically nowhere and never are at home. Bazovského semi-figure does not have a clear demarcation of type: if he was meant to be a tinker, he does not have the craft attributes. All one can see is a crude walking stick and a sunburnt moustachioed face under a dark hat, which might also belong to gypsies or other wandering musicians, tradesmen, rovers, and other vagabonds. His face has specific features, which is rare in Bazovský’s painting: often his figures are faceless, or with the facial features barely indicated. This face is half-averted, eyes closed; the tinker/Ahasuerus wants spurns his surroundings, he wants nothing to do with the uncertainly traced background (a factory chimney?) — probably much like Bazovský just then.
There is one other circumstance here: the idea of the painting of Ahasuerus might have been evoked in Bazovský by memories of his dead friend. Once, in an interview with Andrej Mráz, he remarked among that the things that interested him was “the sadness of our fates”. Perhaps this was one of them.
4. Weisz-Kubínčan’s Orava and Bazovský’s Slovakia
APWK’s artistic trajectory prior to 1935 is not well known. During the first half of the 1920s he experienced the exuberant artistic atmosphere of Berlin, at the climax of expressionism. But he did not remain in that great centre of art; he returned to Orava, to Dolný Kubín, where he had grown up, and tried to establish himself in the Slovak cultural setting. In his own words, “the life and rhythm of our Orava enchanted (me)”, and indeed it seemed to him that “our Orava made (me) a painter”. He became a programmatic painter of “Slovak motifs”, even though, as he saw it, this was a question not of his programme but his need. This unambiguous artistic orientation, indeed, as one might say, this conscious thematic asceticism, was unique in the community from which he came. Evidently it was connected with the fact that Martin had been the artistic centre of Slovakia for many decades (Bratislava was still only beginning to be an alternative), and from Dolný Kubín to Martin was not far. Weisz-Kubínčan began to make acquaintance with representatives of culture there, and even though he had not properly mastered the Slovak language, he became a welcome participant in artistic debates. Alongside Bazovský, here one would encounter Janko Alexy, Milan Thomka-Mitrovský, Fraňo Štefunko, and literary figures also: Andrej Mráz, Theo H. Florin and Ľudo Ondrejov (paradoxically, afterwards an Aryaniser). Many people helped him to establish himself and to acquire clients and book illustration commissions from Matica slovenská.
In 1934 he moved to Martin, closer to his friends and working opportunities, and in the following year he had his first solo exhibition in the then Jewish House, which was opened by “Master Bazovský”. There followed a series of exhibitions, the last of which was, for a change, in the Catholic House in Žilina (1937). In a short time that would no longer be possible, but thus far there was nothing to indicate this.
While indeed he undertook the “artistic interpretation of the Slovak mountains and people”, Arnold Weisz-Kubínčan did so in a manner that differed notably from what they had been accustomed to in Martin. From Germany he had imported (like no other artist in Slovakia) the authentic apparatus of expressionism, and for the most part he applied this in a thoroughgoing way to Slovak themes. The archaic Slovak world suddenly faced the onset of “the new wildness”. Accustomed to “the Slovak style”, the public hesitated for a moment, but nonetheless eventually gave “the well-known Orava expressionist” a perfectly good reception. Anonymous critics even wrote that his paintings “breathe with a Slovak spirit” and his work “is characterised by a Slovak soul, mood and fragrance”. Such concepts were difficult to grasp or to verify, but they were signals that Weisz-Kubínčan had made himself at home here as an artist, and that full recognition was merely a matter of time. In reality, though, there was little time remaining.
While the most progressive of the artists who were striving programmatically for a Slovak modernism, Fulla and Galanda, were living in Bratislava, among the Martin group of artists the closest to Weisz-Kubínčan was Bazovský. If in certain of APWK’s works there is evident influence, or rather fleeting inspiration, from Bazovský (and also indeed from Alexy and even Benka, who was still living in Prague at that time), his own impact on Bazovský’s work, or more precisely the effect of a long-term artistic coexistence, was apparent earlier and more indirectly. What one notices immediately is their differing approaches to similar themes which both of them encountered and observed on their rambles.
We do not know precisely how APWK made his entry on the Martin scene. There is not much information on what he presented at his series of solo exhibitions, and his paintings for the most part are undated. From what we know, one might say that he made a quick and impressive conquest. In the Martin group of artists, irrespective of their more or less programmatic Slovak-ness, what prevailed was at best a mix or alloy, an amalgam of already familiar modernist trends, but without the original urgency. More important was the theme, more or less Slovak, which justified and sanctified this amalgam.
Weisz-Kubínčan approached this from the opposite end, as it were: his idea of “artistic interpretation of the Slovak mountains and people” was based on the application of an unambiguously honed expressionist style. In his rendering the dreamy, picturesque and somewhat melancholy Slovak moods were dramatically sharpened; the “Slovak atmosphere” was no longer just “somewhat rugged” (Mikuláš Galanda) but charged with the criss-crossing, jagged, broken lines of lightning-bolts. No melancholy — rather (as in the Slovak anthem) “over Tatra lightning flashes, / thunders wildly beat”.
Weisz-Kubínčan had read the basic expressionist programme right through. Probably the most helpful works for his purposes were by artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or Ludwig Meidner, with their bladed and broken-off lines and cut-through shapes. As rendered by APWK, this style was sometimes still further escalated: individual bundles of broken lines crossed over one another and overlapped with such intensity that they dissolved the shapes of objects. Weisz-Kubínčan thus reaches the limit of abstraction, but he does not cross it — we do manage to identify something, though that is not the important thing. What is important for this artist is “full, animated, dramatic and forceful expression”. A wild painterly calligraphy in Gothic Schwabach, with whiplashes of colour, almost entirely absorbs the original theme. If the painter succeeded at this, it was because in contrast to many of his colleagues both past and present, he was well able to judge the kind of painting format where this demanding approach would work. He therefore chose small formats, enabling him to avoid unresponsive places in the painting.
Indeed, even By the Fire, with its seemingly pacific theme, changes to a painterly drama and a celebration of painting simultaneously. A group of figures is sitting or lounging by the fire; we can clearly distinguish three (there may be more), and in the background, scarcely outlined, is an animal contour — dog, calf? A sketchy landscape, probably some kind of tree, and maybe a wooden cottage in the upper corner. We do not even make out the fire: the reclining shepherd is glowing redder than the place where the fire should be.
We do not know which of APWK’s paintings Bazovský had a chance to see because, like his own, they are undated. We may surmise, however, that thanks to APWK’s inspiring example and their discussions, Bazovský resolved to accelerated his own painterly development and sought more intensively for his own personal expression. He rid himself of the vestiges of descriptiveness, and more and more he constructed the painting as an autonomous painterly assembly of objective signs, ever less dependent on reality. Even though he is known as a painter of a symbolically imaginative landscape of the foothills, during the 1930s landscape as a genre had not played any substantial part in his work. It was only one part of a set of typical iconographic signs of the Slovak world including, besides traditional elements of Slovak village life, a series of telegraph poles (for Bazovský a constant motif) and a steam locomotive on a railway track, all of this hierarchically arranged on the vertical axis. Bazovský saw Slovakia, in contrast for example to Fulla, vertically and perpendicularly, and as we know, the impression is celebratory, elevating, even sublime. His composite set of signs, which somewhat resemble hieroglyphic inscriptions, come across as an apotheosis of Slovakia. The artist hitherto has not seen the contradictions of civilisation: on the contrary, he perceives the diverse elements harmonically, as parts of an integral Slovak world. Except that we are on the threshold of war, and before long Bazovský himself will see things entirely differently.
Overall, his artistic opinion is much more moderate, but while APWK essentially does not depart from the framing optical integrity of the slice of reality, and at the same time he escalates its non-illusive painterly transcription sometimes to outright extremes, Bazovský on the other hand is more compromising in his artistic utterance. But more and more he seeks an autonomous assembly of the pictorial signs that express his idea (progressively more visionary) of the theme. In the representative painting Slovakia, however, he is still only at the beginning of this journey, and APWK would never see the mature results.
5. Divine Bullocks
APWK’s painting style may be seen well in Opposite, dated (probably not by the author) to 1943. It might therefore have been one of his last paintings. A man is leading a bullock, which is resisting him and can only be controlled with might and main. We may see this as a symbolic scene, typical of the painter’s view of the world or expressing his personal disposition: instead of the usual peacefully grazing herd of cows, we see a terrified beast which the herdsman controls only with an extreme effort, reflected in the furrows on his face. The style of crowded and jagged lines, reminiscent of zigzagging lightnings, extends from the face as epicentre to the full extent of the painting. The Gothicising broken lines of the landscape in the background seem to have come through an earthquake. With his struggling beast the herdsman changes to a rebellious Job, whose fate is inscribed on his face.
Bazovský, needless to say, also painted herdsmen — with a bull (Bull from Malatiná, 1949) and with an ox (Detva Ox, 1948–1950). More distinctive, however, are his compositions with cows, which in contrast to the common notion sometimes appear as mysterious and even magical animals, evoking respect; they seem to represent a certain kind of existence whose meaning remains inaccessible to the human being. Island (1941) already fully exemplifies the later period of Bazovský’s work. The pictorial composition, which was perhaps inspired rather by Czech colleagues (Jan Zrzavý, Josef Čapek) than by Slovaks, consists only of four determining elements — signs that enable the viewer to focus on the core of the painter’s message. That, however, remains something of an enigma: a herdswoman/farmer’s wife and her animal are on a small island, where apart from them there is only an empty barge, evidently not designed for them. Both figures are firmly locked together; they stand side by side as if supporting each other, craning frontally into the space or surface like a totem, without any expression whatever. The empty barge seems to indicate a possibility of connection, but not for both. The island separates them from the surrounding world, in 1941 more dangerous than ever before.
6. Horse Power
We have mentioned what is probably Weisz-Kubínčan’s best-known painting Horse (1937), a favourite presumably because, in contrast to the majority of his other works, it exemplifies not the dark “new wildness” of expressionism but rather its soft variant: wildness is lost, but the movement and dynamism remain. It is a rare specimen of a special kind of poeticising expressionism. Images of horses evoked in this painter, as in many other artists, joy, a sense of freedom, unconstraint, vital forces released. To him, however, these feelings were more precious than to others, because (like hunting, which he engaged in from time to time with a manifest enthusiasm) they were a kind of recreation time afforded to him in the incessant battle for survival. He painted many pictures with this theme, but probably those which make the most immediate and unfettered impact are the watercolour sketches of galloping horses. In the present case these are miniature studies of diverse stages of movement, caught by just a few brushstrokes and nonetheless concentrated. The various watercolours used, and their translucency, sustain the relaxed and airy impression of these works.
Bazovský’s small horses, most frequently solitary draught animals, notably stay on the ground more, unmoving, captured rather in a moment of stasis or rest. His painting Orange Horse (1938) catches one’s interest, less for the theme than for the sharp colour contrast, with a shining non-illusive colour which Bazovský was probably using for the first time with this intensity. The animal stands motionless, but its colouring indicates the amassed energy. Pious Mare, painted some years later, comes across altogether differently (possibly because it was produced during the period of the Slovak state). A harnessed white mare, without a wagon, stands devotedly in front of a church. The painting’s material inventory is humble: outlines of the church tower, groups of trees, and a solitary telegraph pole in the distance (Bazovský’s leitmotif), are merely sketched. Together with the title, however, they testify to the atmosphere in society as it was then. The apotheosis of Slovakia has been lost somewhere.
7. For a Journey
From the individual object requisites, Bazovský gradually created generalising shape-signs; he searched for their diverse variants in formal abbreviations and thereby enabled them to have a multi-significant impact. A similar objective sign might represent an island, as we have seen, or again a ferry or a raft. Always it was a solid element amidst the mobile force of water, certainty in impermanence, though the certainty might be fragile. It is notorious that the ferryman’s profession on the upper part of the river Váh presented manifest risks. On the other hand, the ferries floating in this picturesque, still somewhat wild countryside represented a visually attractive theme, frequently used by artists and photographers.
In 1939 the artist painted Blessing (Rafters), where he combined this motif with the impressive figure of the angel giving a blessing, that Guardian Angel whom Ľudo Fulla had brought from the Middle Ages right into modern painting, and somewhat later Bazovský also (Christmas, 1936). The above-mentioned painting was evidently preceded by the tempera sketch Blessing of the Rafters, which focused on the core of the scene, its indispensable, decisive elements: the young family on the raft, the father steering, and the mother, who is evidently bending towards a child in a field-worker’s portable cradle. The raft is short and the living space there is minimal, but in contrast to the painting, in the sketch the angel in yellow-gold garments is brought much lower, till he almost touches the head of the raftsman — partly thanks to the pronounced brushstroke of bright-yellow on the garment, the protective gesture here is more striking, as if more effectual.
Again, someone is preparing for a journey (according to the appended title it should be a sick person, but who knows?) in Transportation of the Sick, one of APWK’s last canvases. As was customary with him, the theme emerged only obscurely from the agitated painting surface. A man and woman are helping to secure a litter where a figure is lying, whom evidently they have to transport somewhere. The setting is indistinctly indicated: we can make out some kind of trees or rather structured grids of branches and pine needles; the dark-blue colour that dominates a large part of the surface can mean anything at all. The figure lying on the litter is the darkest element, without human features or any marks of life. Over its dusky outline the half-figure of Christ suddenly rises from the dark-blue surface, fleetingly sketched in rough strokes of the brush with a blood-red colour predominating — suffering without any relief. As if it were accompanying the lifeless figure on its journey, which is perhaps its last. Whether also with a hope of salvation, the painting in no way suggests.
Epilogue
In the 20th century, if someone in Slovakia strove for artistic independence, generally it did not turn out well for him. And especially when that happened during the years of the Slovak state. With racial persecution added to all of this, the result was inevitable. From the Autumn of 1944 no one heard anything of A. P. Weisz-Kubínčan alive. While Bazovský was not threatened by anything similar, from that Autumn he had serious health problems, lasting for almost two years. During that time he produced no creative work, and even when the war ended he had no peace. Before and after February 1948 he had to face diverse insinuations, including even that he had informed on Weisz-Kubínčan, resulting in the latter being taken to a concentration camp. The perfect paradox.
Their brief friendship had no chance for survival in a society divided by prejudices, which the war had further deepened. Equally, one cannot prove that they were mutually in some way artistically inspired or influenced. But real artists do not need that. The presence of the other is enough, the stimuli which the second person offers, the living example of otherness. An unviable proposition at that time, but it would be a reality at some time in the future.
