Bedřich Dlouhý

Bedřich Dlouhý (born 2 August 1932) is a Czech painter and an Emeritus Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

Life
Bedřich Dlouhý's family moved from Plzeň to Most, and after the annexation of Sudetenland in 1938, settled in Prague. His father, formerly a newspaper editor, was arrested at the beginning of the German occupation and executed in 1941. In 1947 Bedřich Dlouhý became a trainee at Upak-Krutý ceramics manufacturer, before studying at the State Vocational Ceramics School (1949–1952), where he met Karel Nepraš.

Dlouhý then studied painting in Miloslav Holý's studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1952–1957). In 1957 he was expelled for political reasons and sent to North Bohemia, where he worked as a labourer. A year later, at Professor Holý's request, Dlouhý was allowed to return to the Academy, and finished his studies in Karel Souček's studio (1959).

Alongside Karel Nepraš, Jan Koblasa and Rudolf Komorous, Bedřich Dlouhý was a founding member of the Club (1954) and a later of the group called The Šmidras (1957). In the dangerous years of Stalinist repression in the 1950s, Bedřich Dlouhý and his friends from The Šmidras organised various non-art and pataphysical projects such as the Malmuzherciáda exhibition (1954), a collective absurdist novel called Moroa – A Tale of Great Woe, starting their own brass band and the Palette of the Motherland Ice Hockey Club (1962), a production of the play The Incendiary's Daughter, and a special event at the Reduta jazz club to commemorate the naïve poet Václav Svoboda Plumlovský, while during their mandatory Marxism lessons at the Academy they would draw humorous pictures. Dlouhý graduated in portrait and figure painting in 1959. He was conscripted in 1960, and on returning to Prague he found his first studio in Žižkov, where in 1962 he held a private exhibition of his work.

In 1965 Dlouhý was awarded one of the six main prizes at the IVe Biennale Internationale des Jeunes Artistes de Paris, allowing him to spend half a year studying in France. The exhibition by five Czech artists at the Biennale was described as an important discovery. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Dlouhý fell ill and ceased painting till 1970. In 1972 he married Vlasta Bláhová (born 1945), an economist and artist. During the normalization era he was not allowed to exhibit his art, and he worked instead as an external designer for Trade Organization Artcentrum and occasionally as a graphic artist for exhibition organisers.

In 1981 Dlouhý, Hugo Demartini and Theodor Pištěk organised a get-together and one-day exhibition for artists, critics and friends at Dlouhý's country retreat, former millhouse in Netvořice. On his 50th birthday in 1983 he had his first opportunity to show his work in Prague, at Galerie Vincence Kramáře; the exhibition broke visitor records and was widely reviewed in the press.

In 1987 he was a founding member of the group The Odd Ones, with whom he continued to exhibit until 1992. In 1990 he was appointed to a professorship of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

Bedřich Dlouhý lives and works in Prague. In 2020 he had a large retrospective exhibition of his work at Prague City Gallery.

Awards

 * 1965 Main prize for painting, Quatrième Biennale de Paris
 * 1990 grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, USA
 * 1996 Gold Medal of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (for teaching and contribution to Academy reform)
 * 1998 Medal for Art, by the European Circle of Friends of Franz Kafka in Prague

Work
The 1950s left their mark on Bedřich Dlouhý's drawings from the Academy and his early paintings, which have a specific and bleak sense of humour and an aesthetic that defined itself in opposition not to official art (which he thought ridiculous and unworthy of attention), but to the other pressures the communist regime brought to bear (The Romantics' Promenade, 1958). In the early 1960s his entire generation turned to Art Informel, with its radical abstraction, anti-aesthetic expressive painting and unconventional materials.

Dlouhý exhibited his Art Informel works (1960–1962) in his studio in 1962. Rather than structural abstract expressionism, these paintings (e.g. Red Landscape) resemble “inner landscapes”, as defined by Mikuláš Medek's work at this time. Dlouhý included small objects in his existential Art Informel paintings, which blended irony with black humour (Wall, 1960; Pressure Test, 1962–1963).

Prints and film posters
Primarily in the late 1950s Bedřich Dlouhý produced small editions of drypoint prints (Execution, from the War cycle, 1958). He would periodically return to printmaking later, for instance in a print he made for the Club of the Friends of the New Group (Home, 2001).

In the 1960s he also designed film posters. It was well paid work that offered a measure of artistic freedom. By 1971 he had come up with 23 designs (Fellini's 8½, Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour, Kurosawa's Rashomon, The Pink Panther, Antonioni's Red Desert, etc.), and he was considered one of the world's top film poster artists. In 2010 Dlouhý's collected posters were exhibited in the foyer of the Světozor cinema in Prague.

Appraisal
In a 2002 catalogue Alena Potůčková summed up Bedřich Dlouhý and his work: ''The mature artist has left his peers behind, wanting only to be himself. He is lonely, and full of scepticism, and he questions the sense of what he is doing. He tests his skills; he submits himself to demanding examinations; he places obstacles in the way of his own talent. He strives for some grand testimony. He cares nothing for fashions, currents, trends. He wants to create beauty through pain. He wants his painting to become part of the great tradition that came before him. Essentially he cares about nothing else''.

Collections

 * Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
 * Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris
 * Museum of Design, Zürich
 * National Gallery in Prague
 * Moravian Gallery in Brno
 * Museum Kampa, Prague
 * Museum Montanelli, Prague
 * Regional galleries in the Czech Republic
 * Private collections home and abroad

Important exhibitions

 * 1965 Alternative attuali 2, Castello Spagnolo, L'Aquila
 * 1965 IV. Biennale de Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
 * 1965 Jeune avant-garde tchécoslovaque, Galerie Lambert, Paris
 * 1966 Comparaisons, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
 * 1966 Tschechoslowakische Kunst der Gegenwart, Akademie der Künste, Berlin
 * 1966 Nouvelle génération tchécoslovaque, Galerie Maya, Brussels
 * 1967 Tjeckoslovakisk nutidskonst, Göteborg, Lund, Örebro, Varnamo, Norrköping, Nyköping, Hälsingborg, Stockholm
 * 1968 Šmidrové / The Šmidras, The Václav Špála Gallery, Prague
 * 1969 Art tchécoslovaque, Maison des Jeunes et de la Culture, Orléans
 * 1969 Tschechische Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts, Ausstellungsräume Berlin 12
 * 1969 L´art tchèque actuel, Renault Champs-Élysées, Paris
 * 1969 Arte contemporanea in Cecoslovacchia, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM), Roma
 * 1969 Nová figurace / New Figuration, Mánes, Prague