Opening 4/11 2022 at 17.00 h
You were a fountain pen and I was killed at CherkasyMiSch
The exhibition Milada Schmidtová (1922–2015) Girl with Two Shadows in Olomouc presents for the first time one of the most enigmatic figures of Czech art of the second half of the 20th century. She is known in the Czech cultural consciousness only as the face from the remarkable portraits of her fateful lover, the painter Václav Chad (1923–1945), from the end of the Second World War. Her own fate, like that of many other women artists, was not kind to her. Milada was the daughter of Czechoslovak legionary Hugo Schmidt and illiterate Russian Natalia Lavrentyevna Maslikova, later a world-famous naive painter. During the Second World War she studied at the Bata Business School in wartime Zlín and it was here that she also met the students of the School of Art: Cap, Kafka, Hudeček and Chad. She soon became their muse and femme fatale because of her mesmerizing beauty, intelligence and magical attraction. Today, her War Cycle is one of the most important works of the second wave of European surrealism. At the end of the war, Milada joined the illegal Communist Party and helped the partisan movement. After Chad’s violent death, she moved to Prague, worked for the E. F. Burian Theatre D46 and organized exhibitions in Prague and Paris. After the communist takeover in 1948, all her efforts to maintain the Zlín circuit gradually failed, as did her studies and eventually her marriage. Milada settled at Vysočina Region and lived as a hermit in a hunting lodge by a pond in almost perfect isolation. Over the course of more than seventy years, she created a fascinating figurative work that would soon change the history of Czech post-war art. After her first retrospective exhibition in Zlín (2017), she is about to be presented at the Prague City Gallery. Milada Schmidtová will thus surely join the ranks of the great women of Czech post-war art (Adriena Šimotová, sisters Jitka and Květa Válovy, Ludmila Padrtová, Eva Kmentová, etc.). Rub Gallery will present her complete War Cycle from a private collection in Zlín, a sample of post-war work from a private collection in Bystřice nad Pernštějnem and from the Rub Gallery collection, and also Milada as the fascinating muse of her artist friends (Miroslav Šimorda, Otakar Hudeček, Jan Kostlán, Václav Chad).
In cooperation with Václav Chad Gallery, Zlín
Special thanks to: Čestmír Vančura, Miroslava Ptáčková, the Kadlíček family, Bystřice nad Pernštejnem
Photogallery by Zdeněk Sodoma.
Photogallery by Miroslav Urban.
