Nightmares and visions
Memories of prison haunt this legendary artist's work
 | | Divis's post-prison work is characterized by primitivistic lines and images of isolation and despair. |
By Kristin Barendsen
For The Prague Post
March 2, 2005
Graveyard crosses and cell bars, one-eyed floating chimeras, a crucified skeleton: Czech painter Alen Divis (1900-56) dwells on these images not to shock viewers but to reveal his own haunted inner landscape. Divis's life was something of a horror story. Three years spent in prison and in concentration camps during World War II left him with chronic physical and mental illness. His paintings, now at the Rudolfinum in the largest-ever exhibition of his work, skillfully render the world of hallucinations and nightmares and delve into existential questions.
When World War II began, Divis, who was living and painting in Paris, was accused of spying and thrown into prison along with several artist friends. He spent several months in solitary confinement, where according to exhibition notes he suffered from "severe rheumatism, oppressive mania and recurring fixed chimeras that haunted him until his death." Still, Divis found some small escape by drawing these nightmares on the walls of his cell.
After time in prison, Divis was shuffled from one concentration camp to the next — a total of six in France, Morocco and Martinique. Finally he escaped to the United States, where he was granted asylum and spent five years living in Manhattan's Czech quarter.
Divis's experience behind bars radically affected both his psyche and his art. In New York, he began to work obsessively to impart the feeling of his prison experience, developing a primitive style that is wholly original.
In Memory of a Prison Cell Wall, the shared title of two pieces, Divis uses gouache and sand to recreate the texture of concrete and its cracks and stains. With black paint on a gray background, he re-creates the graffiti of other convicts alongside his own doodled dreams of Paris and nightmares of ghosts and skeletons. Perhaps Divis's most extraordinary works, these paintings and several others like them impart his feelings of isolation and despair and yet embody the hope that comes from creating art under such dire circumstances.
Here Divis takes the language of graffiti — symbols, minimalist figures, scrawled words in French — for his artistic signature. Most of his later paintings use the same fundamentals: a monochromatic background with drawn or etched primitivistic lines. Figures retain a ghostlike, ethereal, two-dimensional quality. Symbols recur, especially rows of graveyard crosses, cell bars and nooses. There are echoes of Surrealism, Cubism and Expressionism in the work, but Divis's style is his own.
The Prisoner's Christ is a shocking crucifixion scene in which Christ's face is large, bug-eyed, masklike, while his body is almost a stick figure with arms askew at odd angles. Over the canvas are scrawled words in French: "He who doesn't take the cross and follow me isn't worthy of me." These themes of suffering and punishment reappear throughout Divis's work, as does this skeletonlike body shape.
In his later New York paintings, Divis is unrelentingly dark. His visions are abstract shapes, not quite creatures, floating in sky or water. Or they are people without heads, faces or bodies — even a bearded lady with hair of snakes. When there are hints of the erotic in these paintings, they are shadowy, joyless. His landscapes are barren deserts, and even the flowers he paints look dead.
Alen Divis
at Galerie Rudolfinum. Ends April 24. Alsovo nabr. 12, Prague 1-Old Town. Open Tues.-Sun. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. |
Divis returned to Czechoslovakia in 1947 and held two solo shows in Prague to wide acclaim. But after the communist coup in 1948, he was forced to withdraw into isolation. During these years Divis took inspiration from literature: charcoal illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe's horror stories, oil and tempera renderings of spooky ballads by 19th-century Czech poet Karel Jaromir Erben. The show closes with drawings of passages from the Bible. It seems that toward the end of his life, Divis was looking for redemption and solace in religion.
Divis thoroughly explored the dark side of his own psyche and created a powerful means of expressing it. His work is characteristically Czech in its darkness and existentialism, although it is missing the humor that so often adds balance in Czech art. But given Divis's history, viewers can't really fault him for not laughing too heartily. Rather, we are moved to empathize with his difficult life and appreciate that he was able to transform his private torture into work that is both fascinating and compelling.
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