Alén Diviš

Alén Diviš , actually Karel Diviš (born April 26, 1900 at the Blato farm ; † November 15, 1956 in Prague ) was a Czech painter and illustrator who was known for his melancholy style of painting. He spent most of his life abroad.

Exhibition in the Rudolfinum Gallery

Life

Diviš moved to Prague with his family in 1911. There he briefly attended painting classes at the University of Applied Arts. In the early 1920s, Diviš concentrated intensively on art, especially cubism . In the summer of 1926 he moved to Paris to devote himself entirely to art. In Paris he attended lectures by František Kupka and researched cubism, expressionism and classicism . He made new friends in the French artist community and made friends there with other Czechs, such as Bohuslav Martinů . He began to travel further abroad; Excursions to Spain, South Africa and the Netherlands followed. The first exhibition of his works took place in 1932 at the Van Leer Gallery, Paris.

In 1939, as a reaction to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Diviš became increasingly political and, with other expatriates , he founded the "House of Czechoslovak Culture". When France entered World War II, Diviš and other members of the organization were arrested and charged with espionage. The reason for the arrest is unclear, perhaps their “sympathies for communism” aroused suspicion, or it may have been their unusually pleased reaction to the outbreak of war in hopes for the liberation of Czechoslovakia. Diviš was imprisoned for the next six months in La Santé prison , one of the toughest prisons in France. The gloomy mood, the inscriptions and graffiti on the cell walls inspired his later artistic visions. The espionage charges were dropped, but Diviš spent a year and a half in concentration and internment camps in France, Morocco and Martinique before his release .

In the early 1940s, Diviš finally found asylum in New York, where he pursued his art until after the war. His art focused primarily on his time in prison and used graffiti from the cell wall, dreams and hallucinations that came to him in the dark isolation as a template for the images , reminiscent of Art brut or Outsider Art. He worked on several in parallel Simultaneously, he also painted landscapes of South Africa, which he had toured before the war. In the United States, Diviš was able to establish connections with the local Czech community and found his friend Martinů again. Although his work received some attention in New York, he was unable to hold an exhibition.

Web links

• The melancholic genius of Alen Divis. Retrieved August 9, 2012 . 
• Exhibition at Galerie Rudolfinum 2005. Accessed on August 9, 2012 .