1980 - 1989

Paris 1979. I see two unforgettable exhibitions. The Pablo Picasso retrospective and the photography of Diane Arbus.
The photographs of Diane Arbus are a ravishing depiction of human destiny. Often in terrifying nakedness. An old woman tenderly holds in her lap a monkey dressed in child's clothes. In Central Park, New York, Arbus photographs a small boy who tenaciously grips a toy - a hand grenade. His face is contorted in a cruelly hysterical grimace. In my picture I turn the child into an old man and paint him naked. Mental and de facto striptease. It was this photograph by Arbus that led me to create my anti-war cycle, Illusion and Reality. Shortly afterwards, in a second-hand bookshop in Prague, I find a photograph of a standing infantry soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army. He is in full combat dress, and proudly leans on his rifle, but there is fear in his eyes. I wonder about his fate. Did he survive? Was he wounded? I think of the paralysed left hand of my grandad.

 

There is a remnant of garden behind the village. There are three ancient apple trees standing there. Despite their age they bear apples that are now almost never grown; maiden apples and keg apples. Not long ago there was still an old pear-tree. From time to time stormy winds blew down one of íts branches, They created the dramatic design of a crown with many empty spaces. As if it had been marked by the tirne throu;gh which we have lived. As a child I used to walk around this tree by the footpath. I have a living memory of walking here with my father. Every time that I corne to visit my mother I stop at this place. It is strange how only there can I perceive life in its full context and the miracle, that the chain of human life has reached as far as me. How did did they live, those people who were heee before me? What were their longings, hopes, and aims? I ask what message has been comununicated to me?

I have lived for a long time in oppressive times and it was natural to depict them. I have been concerned with warning themes since the 1960s: Soldier and Warmonger, Battle under a Cloud, The Face on the Platform, A Cruel Game for a Man, Illusion and Reality; Apocalyptic Genetics. Nor is evil retreating today; I can see so much of it around me that to depict more of it would dull our senses. After all, in comparison with photographs of the wall in China where severed human heads are nailed, the most ambitious warning surrealistic collage is a mere toy. I end my work on warníng themes with the píctures the Plague Columns in the cycle Appassionata Humana.But how can one mature into luminous life after the long period of oppression which has been the lot of our generation?