Václav Vokolek: Jan Moštěk

Czech
36 pages, 16 x 22 cm
exhibition catalogue Jan Moštekpublished by Ecquo and Divus, 2001
graphic design and preparation for printing Divusvy
printed by Unitisk
photographs by Stanislav Marušák
The paintings come from private collections.

"Preface: About a painter who expected a letter that never came

This will be about a painter who once wrote to me to send him a certain sum of money with which he could buy a house in the woods so that he could paint like Courbet. It will be about a painter who wrote a great prose work About a painter who wanted to paint like Gauguin. It will be about the painter who waited all his life for a letter that never came. It will be about a painter who renounced his own work, which no one cared about. It will be about a painter who, despite the cruel adversity of fate, painted many remarkable pictures. It will be about a painter nobody knows. It will be about Jan Moštěk...
I have heard a curious story from his youth. It is not only charming in itself, it is not only purely literary, as if cut out of Moštěk's prose, but it is also more than symbolic, fateful. That one tragicomic story could affect a whole life? After reading Jan Moštek's prose, we have to agree. His heroes, be it Josef Mánes, Vincent van Gogh or detective Tom Šark, are dragged through life like a horse-drawn carriage through absurd, embarrassing and highly comical incidents. And they resist them, show them off in a convex mirror, perhaps even sneer at them themselves, but they also take them unprecedentedly seriously. As their destiny. Destiny. And he is here as an eccentric director who pays attention only to details. It would seem that he misses the whole, but that may not be true. ""He had no choice but to sell invisible images to the people," wrote Jan Moštěk.
But let's go back to an old story. The young man, looking confident in the photograph, decided to become a painter. Not a painter of rooms, as he was trained to be. That's easy to say, his relatives objected, and the objection was choral, for he had only fifteen siblings. To be a painter does not mean just painting pictures, that would be easy, it also means fame, perhaps even wealth, it means tinkering with inspiration, winning and losing, embracing the muses on a well-defined area of canvas. What can a young man make of all this? To intrusive questions he was said to have answered: ""I'm waiting for a letter. Then I'll be famous..."
He didn't. Perhaps the longed-for letter is lost somewhere, or his address is mixed up, or perhaps it will be found and delivered with apologies. From a certain moment, known only to Jan Moschek, he no longer waited for the letter. Suddenly he knew that no letter mattered. He no longer waited for anything. He even stopped painting. And just at that moment, the long-awaited letter was on its way. What did it say? The letter's secrecy obliges us to keep silent, but we'll break it. Rather than a letter, it's a message.
Dear Jane Moschek, you are a painter. A real painter. Not one who merely whitewashes the speckled dwellings of his fellow men. The little bit of your work that we have discovered is enough to prove your talent. Those less than three dozen paintings could hang in any gallery and not bring you shame. There's a lot hidden in them. Just like your prose. Because you're a writer too, Jane Moschek. You've published a book that has found a whole circle of admirers. So you've lived to see... 
Too late? We're afraid not. You know that better than anyone. It's never too late. Or is it always late? How did you write that about Josef Manes? ""Each individual carries this boulder on his back. If the boulders were visible, all we would see are huge boulders with people bending under them. Everyone is resisting what you are resisting, because even if you are a genius, there is human weakness in you..." 
Ironically, this letter came back unopened. The addressee has since died. He's still waiting. But the possibilities of the post office are terribly limited...

II.
When judging Jan Moštek's paintings, we must get rid of all literariness and approach them quite professionally. They are a real discovery. They are a surprise. They are not just the work of a gifted self-taught artist, a remarkable proof of the activity of an insider, but a real painting, moreover, one that can be placed in a contemporary context. Once and for all, it is necessary to correct the only published opinion: that Jan Moštěk is not a naive painter!
A fragment of the work places Jan Moštěk's paintings in the traditional line of Czech Expressionism, how not to recall Jan Bauch, whose urgent message is a relay passed on from generation to generation. His landscape paintings in particular are based on the lyrical form of the predatory current. A comparison with Grigori Musatov's landscape paintings of the 1930s is suggested here. I fear, however, that Moštěk has never seen these paintings. Not even in his dreams. I therefore venture an even more curious connection. Some of the paintings seem to have come out of the studio of the postmodern Philip Guston. What? Who? We don't know such a person in Volfiřov.

Not only the nervous handwriting is admirable, but also the compositional certainty and clear originality. What would many a master give for all this! Moštěk's variability is also interesting; it is hard to say how it has evolved, because the dates of the paintings, as well as their titles, elude us. The technical variety is also remarkable. Jan Moštěk not only mastered the technique of tempera and oil painting, but his numerous watercolours are equally virtuoso. In the few that have survived, the whole range of possibilities offered by this difficult and risky technique is hidden. From the Chinese austerity of Winter Landscape, to expressive urban scenes and portraits, to decorative patches of struggling roosters. Hokusai's name is on our tongues, but to say it...
A few Heads have survived, perhaps part of a larger series. They exude much of Rouault's tragic expressiveness. There is some possibility of real influence here, as Moschek worked with several painters of the Old Rhenish circle after the war. But such a conception of human heads could also be found in the paintings of the new figuration of the 1960s or in the postmodern figuration of the 1980s, for example in the monumental cycle of Baselitz's Heads. All these comparisons squeak, but I do so deliberately. The possibility of classification is, after all, a certain proof of professionalism. But what all influenced Jan Moštek's work will fortunately remain a permanent mystery. 

III.
The exhibition of Jan Moštek's paintings will not only be a discovery of an unknown painter, i.e. a surprise, but also a fair repayment of the debt we have and feel towards the disgraced artist. Not a very fair repayment. The exhibition presents only a randomly discovered fragment of an admittedly larger work, but we can assume that all its forms are represented. At the same time, however, we must bear in mind the fact that Jan Moštěk has always hidden many a trump card up his sleeve. Surprises are therefore possible. After his unexpected and sudden death, everything returns to where I have kept Moštěk's work for years. To the realm of legends, conjectures and charming mystifications.The author did not participate in the exhibition in the slightest and even distanced himself from it in writing. This was typical of him. "He didn't give a damn about making friends with people, he knew that distance from them was a better document of knowledge than any friendship with them. We know them better when we don't talk to them, for they seem truer at a distance.""

Bathing, tempera, 64 x 53 cm
Untitled, tempera, 28 x 35 cm
Untitled, watercolour, 39 x 24 cm