Emila Medková: A Female Photographer of Prague

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. The leader of the Czech surrealist group, Karel Teige, died of a heart attack in 1951 (the year Medková was introduced to the group), widely considered to be the consequence of a sustained and vicious campaign of intimidation by the Soviet press and police.

2. See, for example, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Michael Richardson, and Ian Walker, Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia: On the Needles of Days (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

3. Other publications in English include Krzysztof Fijalkowski, ‘Emila Medková: The Magic of Despair’, Tate Papers, no. 4 (October 2005); Karel Srp, Emila Medková (Prague: Torst, 2005); and Donna Roberts ‘Neither Wings Nor Stones: The Psychological Realism of Czech Women Surrealists’, Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism, ed. Patricia Allmer (Manchester: Prestel, 2009).

4. For example, on the status of feminism in the Soviet era, Susan Gal and Gail Kligman write: ‘In implementing the equality of its male and female subjects, socialist apparatus, including official women's organizations, manifested open intolerance towards feminism, regarded as a damaging “import” from the capitalist West.’ Gal and Kligman, Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5–6. They are among a number of scholars to emphasise how the historic disregard of feminism continued as a cultural norm long after 1989: ‘In East Central Europe, there appears, at first glance, to be very little explicitly feminist activity. On the contrary, the term “feminism” is treated with ridicule and derision in public forums, often by women as well as men. Feminism is not just controversial; it is stigmatised.’ Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender After Socialism: A Comparative Historical Essay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 98.

5. For a discussion on women surrealists, identity and self-depiction, see Whitney Chadwick (ed.) Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

6. Jaromír Funke and Ladislav Sutnar, Photography Sees the Surface, 1935. Facsimile ed. and trans. by Jindřich Toman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 2004), unpaginated.

7. Karen Marie Kapusta-Pofahl writes: ‘After taking power in 1948, the Communist Party drafted a new constitution which assured that “men and women will have the same position in the family and in society and they will have the same access to education, to all professions, offices, and ranks”.’ In ‘Legitimising Czech Gender Studies: Articulating Transnational Feminist Expertise in the “New Europe”’ (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2008), 52.

8. Gal and Kligman note that senior roles were not necessarily common or substantial: ‘socialist regimes were often characterised by contradictory goals in their policies towards women: They wanted workers as well as mothers, token leaders as well as quiescent typists.’ Reproducing Gender, 5–6.

9. Kapusta-Pofahl stresses that although in Czechoslovakia a Party-approved Union of Czechoslovak Women was formed to focus on ‘women's issues’ at work and home, under the auspices of the male-dominated organisational structure such groups had no impact on policy. The ideological lip-service to gender equality led to genuinely senior positions within neither the state nor the intellectual elite: ‘The increase in access to education and employment for women during the socialist era did not allow for a corresponding rise of an influential extra-governmental female intellectual elite like that of the interwar period.’ Kapusta-Pofahl, ‘Legitimising Czech Gender Studies, 53.

10. Srp, Emila Medková, 6.

11. Ibid.

12. See, for example, Mary Ann Caws and Rudolf Kuenzli (eds.), Surrealism and Women (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) and Whitney Chadwick, Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

13. Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds.), Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993). A further study in this vein could look at the significant examples of creative partnerships within the Czech surrealist movement, from Toyen and Štyrský, Medek and Medková, to Jan Švankmajer and Eva Švankmajerová.

14. Srp, Emila Medková, 14. Farová's interview was originally published in the Czech journal of photography, Československá fotografie, no. 8 (1976), accompanied by seven photographs from the 1970s.

15. André Breton, ‘Surrealist Situation of the Object’, 1935, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 266.

16. Vratislav Effenbeger, ‘Variants, Constants, and Dominants of Surrealism’, part 3, published in the Czech Surrealist periodical Analogon, 41–42 (2004): 28–29.

17. André Breton, Nadja (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1960), 112.

18. Effenberger, ‘Variants, Constants, and Dominants’, part 1, Analogon, vol. 38–39 (2003): 8.

19. Again, Medková's photographic training—not just as a surrealist—can be discerned here. In Photography Sees the Surface, for example, Václav Štech suggested in 1935 that photography ‘compensates for the loss of fantastic suggestions’. Funke and Sutnar, Photography Sees the Surface, unpaginated.

20. Bojana Pejíc, Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe. Exhibition catalogue, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (13 November 2009—14 February 2010) and Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (19 March—13 June 2010), 21.

21. Interview with Martina Pachmanová, Gender Check, http://www.erstestiftung.org/gender-check/czech-republic-martina-pachmanova/ (accessed March 15, 2015).

22. Pachmanová, ‘Silence About Feminism and “Femininity” as an Aesthetic Value: The Case of Jindřich Chalupecký's post-1968 Art Theory Regarding Women Artists’. n.paradoxa, 35 (January 2015): 84–90.

23. Other female artists would include the Czech experimental photographer Běla Kolářová (1923–2010), the Polish object-maker Alina Szapocznikow (1926–1973), the Czech sculptor Eva Kmentová (1928–1980) and the Slovakian sculptor, Maria Bartuszová (1936–1996). Pachmanová describes how a quasi-feminist dynamic developed from the 1960s: ‘The critique of modernist universalism—albeit hardly defined in such an explicit way – allowed them to reflect on both their bodily as well as psychic [sic] experiences of the external and inner world; that this “embodied” experience also brought out a more feminine character in their work comes as no surprise.’ Interview with Martina Pachmanová, Gender Check, http://www.erstestiftung.org/gender-check/czech-republic-martina-pachmanova.

24. For an account of surrealist experimental games, see Jan Švankmajer, Touching and Imagining: An Introduction to Tactile Art, ed. Cathryn Vasseleu, trans. Stanley Dalby (London: I.B. Taurus, 2013).

25. Martina Pachmanová briefly discusses an encounter between Medková and Kmentová, in which they realised the similarity in their use of the slit imagery and discussed the possibility of organising a women's art exhibition. See video of Pachmanová's conference paper ‘Eva Kmentová and the “Tradition” of Feminist Art’, Documents. Works. Interpretations. Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 15 May 2009. https://vimeo.com/12579445 (accessed 15 March 2015).

26. Keti Chukhrov, ‘In the Trap of Utopia's Sublime: Between Ideology and Subversion’. Gender Check, 32. Chukrov quotes Jo Anna Isaak, Feminism in Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 124.

27. Marsha Meskimmon, Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2003), 3.

28. Ibid., 4.

29. Ibid.

30. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity, and Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 124.

31. The Nazi governor of the Czech lands, Reinhard Heydrich, is said to have coined this phrase. Conversation between the authors and Bruno Solařik, 2008.