“Seven things about…” health workers who are artists
By Vladimíra Büngerová, curator of the Modern and Contemporary Art Collections
Did you know that there were health workers among our artists? In the time of pandemic, we will surely agree that the principal heroes of these days are the doctors and the entire body of medical personnel. We have expressed our respect and gratitude in various ways — during the first weeks of quarantine by applause from the windows, which almost made us action artists. By recalling the fates of certain artists whose lives (and art) were connected with the medical environment, we would like to pay homage to all the front-line health workers. The artists you may read about here either directly practised the physician’s profession, studied medicine, or worked in the health service; art was a love of theirs which grew into exhibitions, and in high-quality forms became part of gallery collections and indeed of art history.
1/ Ján Koniarek (1878–1952), the founder of modern Slovak sculpture, lived under the name Jovan Koniarik in Munich after his studies, and before World War I worked as a secondary school teacher of drawing in Serbia (Čačak, later Belgrade). After the outbreak of the First Balkan War(1912–1913) he became actively involved, working in a hospital as a “bodyman”, a Red Cross medical attendant. For his activity he was awarded the Order of the Serbian Red Cross and the Cross of Mercy. Koniarik’s activity as a health worker is recorded in several photographs from his personal holding, deposited in the archive of the Slovak National Gallery. In one of them we see the artist dressed in white, attentively observing a surgical intervention with other medical personnel. Other photographs record the presence of soldiers in the hospital; on one of them Koniarik wrote: “This is one of my poor wretches”.
2/ Was his brief medical experience expressed in Koniarik’s work? In sculpture which focuses on figural works, a detailed knowledge of the human body, harmony of anatomy, movement and right proportions, becomes essential. Several of Koniarik’s realistic memorial works and monuments (for example, the exceptional monument to those fallen in World War I in Trnava), which our gallery collection contains mainly in the form of sketches and models, testify to the fact that the modelling emerged from an intimate knowledge of anatomy and the functioning of the body in action; these acquirements of his could only have been enhanced by his medical experience. In works for chamber presentation and also on a larger scale, the sculptor managed in bravura fashion to transfer his ideas of the human being to the material; via facial expression and bodily composition he managed to portray powerful human emotions such as pain, fear, sadness, and the misery of the wounded, suffering and dying.
3/ Continuing in the ranks of sculptors, we will recall the fates of another artist — Rudolf Pribiš (1913–1984). After completing his secondary schooling in Trenčin, Pribiš resolved to study medicine at the Faculty of Medicine in Prague. Eventually, roughly three years later, he abandoned the idea of becoming a doctor, which certainly must have involved a difficult personal decision, and definitively chose the way of the artist. His first steps were towards acquiring technique (studying to be a drawing teacher). He studied sculpture at the Academy of Art in Prague with Professor Otakar Španiel. Pribiš was obliged to conclude his studies prematurely by the closure of the Czech universities in 1939. He moved to Bratislava, where he continued his study of drawing and later was involved in the Slovak National Uprising. In the prewar and particularly in the postwar years, Pribiš created numerous works in chamber and monumental sculpture. He was among the principal representatives of socialist realism, taking a smooth academic neo-classicism as his point of departure. His brief medical intermezzo was reflected in the themes of several reliefs and their variants (At the Doctor, a detail on an interior door at Slavín; Woman at the Doctor; In Hospital, Operation).
Let us take a closer look at his early gypsum relief Operation (1943), which he created approximately at the age of thirty. Here he realistically communicates a scene being played out in an operating theatre. Portraying an operation is one of the attractive and much-used artistic themes; we may recall the famous painting by Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, 1632. Pribiš portrayed the scene matter-of-factly, with an understanding of the tasks of all concerned and a thoroughly planned composition, rationally, in documentary style without even a tiny flavouring of drama. His relief comes out of a personally-experienced real knowledge of the setting, the surgical performance and the individual functions of doctors and health workers. He had no need of live models and did not even avail of photographs; the work was shaped by his own memories of the study of medicine, to which he frequently returned, perhaps with nostalgia, during the practice of art.
4/ Medical doctor Pavol Breier sen. (1921–2014) worked in the Faculty Hospital on Mickiewicz Street in Bratislava, where for many hears he was head of the Infections Clinic. Writers, musicians, actors, politicians and visual artists used to call upon him in the hospital, not only for medical advice but to have some conversation. He liked to photograph them at visits and in discussions, and from this came a series of black-and-white non-posed photographs of many notable Slovaks (A. Dubček, D. Tatarka, A. Ferdinanda, J. Pántik, P. Hložník, among others). Photography was a major passion of his; he practised it intensively in the course of his medical work. Breier moved in artistic circles, regularly visiting exhibitions and concerts; for him the world of art had a magnetic pull. Many artistic notabilities were his friends, and out of these connections came photographic and memoir books, of which individual examples were dedicated to Dominik Tatarka, Vincent Hložník, etc.
5/ A further remarkable element in Breier’s work is another series of photographic portraits of notables, different from those captured sitting in his hospital surgery on the couch, with the typical screen in the background. This is a series of black-and-white photographs entitled As I Saw Him(1960–1980), where he immortalised world and Czechoslovak public figures with a shot created from a television screen. In the static screen-processed image he captured an inimitable expression on faces which, though he did actually see them, he had never had the opportunity to encounter personally. The series makes an impact by theatricality of gestures, contemplative forms, sometimes even expressive grimaces, and also the ephemerality, haziness, liquidity of the images of great actors, musicians and conductors. As one of the first in Slovak art, he used experimental photographic work with a mobile image; later this was creatively extended by, for example, the Slovak artist Jana Želibská and many others.
6/ One of those artists who spent part of his life in a white coat was the photographer Igor Grossmann (1924–2013). He was born into a family of pharmacists in Žilina, and his family tradition naturally preordained his considerations of his future profession. During the war he graduated in pharmacy from the Medical Faculty of Comenius University in Bratislava. Until the second half of the 1960s he worked as a master pharmacist. Grossmann first encountered the charm of the photographic record probably as a boy of nine. From his early childhood he gradually developed this interest, doing photography alongside his pharmaceutical profession. On the strength of successful exhibitions and notices and new challenges, when aged more than forty he decided for an artist’s career and definitively abandoned pharmacy, so as to concentrate exclusively on photographic work. Art history acknowledges Grossmann’s ability to capture the fleeting moment and its uniqueness, and to highlight the artistic aspect of the photographic record.
7/ The scope of Grossmann’s work was extensive, taking in documentary photography, portraits, scenes from the world of children, the Slovak village, reportage, advertising and experimental photography. He has left us a powerful legacy in his images of the old world, portraits of village grannies and grandads from the environs of Žilina, Považie, Liptov, and Orava. It is not the social or ethnographic dimension that predominates here, but rather an adoration of humanity, humility and simplicity, which he recorded with his friendly gaze in an old world that was still pure and unspoilt, but slowly vanishing.
