|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
Reviving a lost master Surrealist photographer Vilem Kriz is bought back from the basement of history Wednesday, October 13, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ By D.K. ROW, special to The Oregonian At S.K. Josefsberg Studio in Northwest Portland, a retrospective is under way that plays to the old curatorial adage: The best artists aren't justly recognized until some years after their death. Five years after the death of Czech photographer Vilem Kriz, Steven Josefsberg has hung a retrospective of Kriz's work that promises to be the first step in re-assessing the fascinating career of the surrealist photographer. Born in Prague in 1921, Kriz died in 1994 in Berkeley, Calif., his reputation a curious footnote in the annals of photography. The show, which opens Thursday, features more than 40 works from Kriz's career, which began in Prague in the late '30s under the tutelage of the legendary Czech surrealist Jaromir Funke and ended in creative isolation a continent away in the late '80s. The show is a massive undertaking and the latest stellar exhibition by a gallery that has already unveiled historic first-time (for Portland) shows by Andr Kertsz, Dieter Appelt and Jacques-Henri Lartigue, among many others. For his part, Josefsberg has pulled out all the stops, and not only in the spendy designs used to frame Kriz's prints. It is a rare occasion that a gallery finances catalogs of a show because of the sheer expense. But Josefsberg has not only done it, but also upped the ante with an 80-page catalog produced locally by Press-22 and with an essay by Rod Slemmons, former Seattle Art Museum curator. If all of this sounds extravagant, it's intended. Josefsberg has declared the exhibition the most ambitious in the history of his gallery. And one meant to bring critical justice, he says, to an artist whose reputation has "fallen through the cracks of history." Indeed, though his work is in the permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kriz is far from cemented in history like Funke and other Czech peers such as Frantisek Drtikol and Jan Saudek. Stormy gallery relations, a move to America, and a creative block all helped stall Kriz's reputation. Like much of artistic Prague of the 1930s, Kriz was steeped in the philosophy of the surrealist movement, its deep probing of the unconscious and unsettling fusion of the real and the fantastic. But for Kriz, surrealism was more a technical approach to taking pictures than a means of portraying often disturbing images of an alternative and distorted reality. In 1946, after a short stint as a newspaper correspondent, Kriz moved to Paris, where he would take the dandified Czech penchant for morbid, shadowy images and transform it into a less-mannered creative vision. Walking the grim corners and dead-end streets of a bombed-out Paris, Kriz took picture after picture of decaying stone facades, architectural ruins, torn posters and battered street signs and detritus. While most surrealists were concerned with what was happening in dreams, Kriz was looking outside the mind and into the surrounding reality, capturing in deep honey-gold-toned prints a city almost petrified in lost time. Kriz wasn't so much turning reality into dreams as finding the dreaminess in reality, as in one picture of stone gargoyle relics perched high above the Parisian nightscape, their outlines so electrically tinted that stone is seemingly turning into flesh. Though Paris was where Kriz flourished as an artist, he was also penniless. Broke, he moved to America with his wife and son in 1952, eventually settling in Berkeley. Unmoored by the move and by his new city's beatnik milieu and mundane iconography, Kriz was, unbelievably, creatively silent for most of the next 15 years. It wasn't until the late 1960s that Kriz broke out with his final prolonged artistic period. But, instead of walking the city streets, Kriz was instead in his back yard concocting, at times, conventionally surrealistic work. One, which would become one of the period's more recognizable works, shows a sardine tin slowly opening to reveal an eye inside. Though familiar with Kriz, Josefsberg didn't grasp the scope of his work until an ex-student of Kriz's, photographer Tom Kearcher, asked Josefsberg to visit Kriz's widow, Jarmila, with the intention of having Josefsberg become Kriz's commercial representative. After a few meetings, an agreement was reached. Three and a half years later, Josefsberg estimates that he's cataloged half of the 2,000-odd works in Kriz's estate. But, cataloging aside, what's most important, says Josefsberg, is to bring Kriz out of the basement of history and into the main room of the public eye, and to let the people -- and the critics -- decide how far up the ladder he will climb.
|
 |
