Eva Švankmajerová: Collaboration and Individuation by Rosalyn Frances
Two minutes in to the documentary The Magic Art of Jan Švankmajer, the camera begins to roll through an eerie and darkened studio.[1] After brushing over puppets and skeletal ceramics, ominous in the darkness, a white spotlight comes to rest, with the ping of a bell, on a gleaming white jug. The camera ticks onward. In the next frame, another white jug, identical accepting a small bulge in its side, emerges. The camera is still moving. With the next click, the bulge is magnified, a mug bloats from a tear in the flesh of the vessel. In the final evocation, the jug has been ripped apart, the infantile mug curiously shining and perfect.
This is just one of the many ceramic works produced by the dynamic couple Eva Švankmajerová, née Dvořáková, (b.1940, d.2005) and Jan Švankmajer (b.1934), sculptures which, through the analogy of the humble vessel, convey themes of birth, sex and death. Meeting in 1958, and marrying in 1960, the couple would work together on at least nine films, from The Last Trick in 1964 to Lunacy in 2005, together receiving the Czech Lion Award (1994) for their work on the feature film Lekce Faust (The Lessons of Faust). Švankmajerová was art director and designer for these films, a role she also filled for other Czech directors including Juraj Herz, Vera Chytilová and Jiri Brdecka. Additionally, the couple’s artistic cooperation extended to multiple joint exhibitions and publishing together in the form of Samizdat (underground) publications.
This collaborative process mirrors the Czech surrealist group at large - which both artists formally joined in 1970, becoming integral members. As the academic Krystoff Fijalkowski has shown, activities, in particular surrealist parlour games, were a critical part of the group’s methodology and creative output.[2] Awareness of the couple’s collaboration in particular, however, has mitigated the clarity of their reception; Švankmajer’s greater international fame blunting critics’ sensitivity to Švankmajerová’s talents. The Gallery of Everything, which recently exhibited some of Svankmajerova’s works as part of the exhibition 20th Century Women (October 2021), puts it well; the artists’ “intense lifetime collaboration… made it difficult for many critics to view their work as individuated strands.”[3] In fact, aside from her collaborative production, Švankmajerová was a prodigiously versatile artist making everything from paintings to animation, ceramics, posters, poetry and prose. Several themes emerge from her art - morphology and the body, entrapment/ containment and folklore. She was also critical of traditional gender roles in both her visual art and writing. This comes across strongly in Naissance, in which over a series of frames, the vessel warps and decays as it prepares to birth the subject. It is clear that the viewer is intended to empathise with the mother-vessel and perhaps, controversially, even resent the child. The translator of her novel Baradla Cave, Gwendolyne Albert, concurrently notes "I don't think anyone could talk to Eva Švankmajerová for two minutes without her opinion of gender relations coming through in every aspect of the conversation, in the language she used. She was a terribly funny person.”[4]
Eva Švankmajerová, Naissance, date unknown, ceramic sculpture. Image source: Tumblr
The couple were aware of the extent to which their identities could become blurred in the public consciousness; sometimes they capitalised on this. Their collaborative ceramic experiments were often enigmatically listed under the nom de plume J.E. (Jan-Eva) or E.J. (Eva-Jan) Kostelec. The chosen name Kostelec means fortified church in Czech. It may refer to Eva Švankmajerová’s birthplace, Kostelec nad Černými lesy, a small town on the outskirts of Prague.[5] If this interpretation is correct, the use of Kostelec as a collective name bears witness to the strong sense of place in the artists’ work. This is especially marked in the art of Švankmajerová - her novel Jeskyne Baradla (1995) features a land formation, Baradla cave, which is also a living, breathing woman.[6] The nom de plume Kostelec would have also connoted institutional religion and traditional values for Czech viewers; the title thus creating an eclectic frisson with some of their more provocative works as discussed earlier.
Eva Švankmajerová, Pocta markýz de Sade, 1995, ceramic sculpture. Image source: Athanor
The sculpture above Pocta markýz de Sade/ Homage to Marquis de Sade, 1995, which Švankmajerová chose to list under her own name, is another of these ceramic experiments, most recently exhibited in the show Move Little Hands… “Move” (Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Dresden, November 2019 - March 2020).[7] As in Naissance the vessel serves as the sign for the human body. However, here, each vessel is an individual figure, rather than a stage in an animated progression. The circle of vases, with interconnected orifices, is provocative. This is enhanced by the inclusion of flecks of reddish paint circling the holes, alluding to blood and menstruation. Even though the vessels bear limited genuine resemblance to the human body, they “read” with clarity as human figures. The sculpture operates through analogy, a central principle of surrealist art making in Czechia - the Czech Surrealist magazine was named Analogon after this process. Much like Naissance, included within this work is an explicit critique of gender roles. In addition to the obvious allusion to libertine sexuality expounded in the title, all of the figures are ambiguously, fluidly gendered.
Eva Švankmajerová, Poster for Little Otik, 2000, oil paint and photo collage, image source: Worthpoint
Challenges to the normative family structure re-emerge in Švankmajerová’s beautiful film posters for Alice (1988) and Little Otik (2000) - she worked as art director and designer for both projects. In her poster for Little Otik (2000), black and white photo and paint are combined. The subject of the central photograph is the maternal protagonist breastfeeding Otik, a wooden creature dug up from the earth, which she adopts as her son. Švankmajerová’s characteristic soft ribbons of colour are used to create the bestial spectre of the creature ingesting his mother. The combination of monochrome photography and gestural paint usage evokes the boundary between the mundane and the supernatural (i.e. magically alive wooden baby) which is continually transgressed.
The idea of monstrous appetite is omnipresent in the film - Otik devours everything in sight, including the family cat. This has been interpreted in numerous ways, including in terms of rapacious capitalism after the fall of communism in Czechia.[8] However Švankmajerová’s decision to depict the creature ingesting the mother - whilst she simultaneously breastfeeds his former baby-self - should not be overlooked. In this, the artist gestures towards cannibalism of motherhood itself, which subsumes the mother to the maternal identity. Švankmajerová furthers this through the choice of photograph - the woman is represented as a perfect Raphaelesque Madonna, replete with hair covering and besotted expression. It is as if she is an icon rather than an individual.
Why has Švankmajerová been so neglected? The history of Communism in Czechia is one of the factors here. After the Prague Spring of 1968, and throughout the 70s and 80s, it was very difficult for Czech artists to stage public exhibitions and thus gain an international following. Then, after the fall of communism in 1989 in Czechia, the Czech Surrealists resumed exhibiting their work with a spate of shows in Paris and Czechia in 1990 and Hungary and Germany in 1991, followed by numerous other exhibitions including in Britain and the US. However, these two decades of disconnection, during some of her most productive creative years, will have had some limiting impact on the growth of her reputation. In addition, art-history moves at a notorious snail’s pace when it comes to expanding the canon beyond its traditional centres.
Language also provides a barrier to thorough recognition. Much of Švankmajerová’s abundant body of writing, including the novel she co-wrote with Vratislav Effenberger Biče svědomí/ The Whips of Consciousness, 2010, has yet to be translated. Czech is not a commonly learned second language, and this makes much of the writing of Czech surrealists inaccessible to western audiences. However, this can be overstated. Actually, very little has been written about Švankmajerová in Czechia either, she has not been the subject of a monograph or even a PhD thesis. Švankmajer, by contrast, is a darling of British film departments, proving that language is a hurdle that can be overcome when the will is there.
Artistic partnerships have been paid more attention in recent years. The exhibition at the Barbican, Modern Couples (October 2018 - January 2019), shed light on several fertile collaborations including erudite figures such as Picasso and Dora Maar, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore and Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington.[9] One of the overriding narratives of the exhibition was the frequency with which partnerships contained one famous and one less famous partner - figures such as Dora Maar are only beginning to catch up with the fame of their male counterparts. Perhaps Švankmajerová is a similar kind of figure, her artistic acknowledgement slowly birthed, like a ceramic vessel, into consciousness. As Harry Truman sardonically noted “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Nrn9xuYjc&t=204s
[2] Krzysztof Fijalkowski, “Invention, imagination, interpretation: Collective activity in the contemporary Czech and Slovak surrealist group,” Papers of Surrealism 3 (Spring 2005): 27-40. http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/index.html.
[3] https://mailchi.mp/gallevery.com/eva-svankmajerova-artist-focus?e=%5BUNIQID%5D
[4]https://english.radio.cz/remembering-eva-svankmajerova-through-a-weird-and-wonderful-surrealist-novella-8624702
[5] Kostelec nad Černými lesy literally translates as “Church among the Black Forests.”
[6] Eva Švankmajerová, Baradla Cave, trans. Gwendolyn Albert (Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2000).
[7] https://lipsiusbau.skd.museum/ausstellungen/move-little-hands-move/
[8] Dorothy Noyes, “Fairy-Tale Economics: Scarcity, Risk, Choice,” Narrative Culture , Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 1-26. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/narrcult.2.1.0001
[9] https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2018/event/modern-couples-art-intimacy-and-the-avant-garde