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The time she lived in she has captured for eternity on
her canvases and, thus, immortaly
overcame epochs and generations while she, as the last
crucial witness, watched and
recorded the disappearance of a world - the old village
world, the rural one - the farm
world where life went on for centuries before. To
overcome space and time does not
mean to be a mere witness, but also to possess the idea
and strength. Zuzka
Medved'ova sought for inner strength, she in fact sought
her own self in this space and
time, and did not do it in apstractions, unformalities
and other speculations. She has
never needed such artistic tricks.
They would never pass anyway, in those times and in that
old rural environment where
the measure of fine arts was the criteria - whether you
knew how to draw the village,
horses, wheat fields, peasants and the gentile - and in
such a manner that the peasants,
looking at her own portrait or any portrait, with
admiration said: As though she were
alive!
Zuzka Medved'ova was the first to reveal to the Slovaks
of the Lower country the value,
at-tractivness and magic of the art expression. Before
she ?ame no one believed that
weddings, harvest, or the act of spinning could be drawn,
and even if they did, they
could not comprehend the sense of such an effort, since
the village photographers by
that time did it simply with the help of a wooden box -
the camera. Everything that
happened aftenvards, with the relatively rapid
mechanization and chemization, belongs
to the adventure of the disappearance of lasting values,
the determinant of chaos, a
warning of the transienticity, a warning due to the
fading of the good, old, hard traditional
agriculture, the agriculture that had a soul.
Zuzka Medved'ova was needed in her time and in her
village, as Rome needed
Leonardo da Vinci when he gave to the Vatican the beauty
of the divine holyness. The
girl from the planes of Ba?ka, that grew in a peasant
household, under the branchy
poplars of the wide street of Petrovec, had prooved with
her works the rules of the
eastern religions - that divinity lies where we feel
good. With her art she prooved that
divine ones can walk not only on the 01ymp, but also
through the fields of Petrovec,
where luncheon, on a spread cloth, can become such a
ritual as was the Last supper.
The bread is broken and shared, and instead of the wine,
a jug of cold water from the
third well or from Trohaky. Conformity and harmony that
reflects from her paintings -as
testimony of the ending of a century, where the
interaction between man and animal was
of primary significance, the peasant and his horse -
appear as a unique chance for
someone to focus his attention on it at this actual
space.
Until the age of twenty she worked as any peasant woman
on her father's estate. And,
as she remembered later on, she worked gladly. It helped
her to get to know the fields
and field work. How else could she paint the harvest, the
harvester and his assistant, the
piling of wheat stacks into a haystack, the driving of
wheat stacks by horse-carts, with
crossbred wooden beams, that -overloaded - drag one
behind the other along the dusty
road.
She strolls through the rich wheat fields with love, so
that she could capture the heat of
the sun in the Lower land, while in bright full colours,
she tends to express the scent of
fertile soil, its fruits and the ?pirit of that nature.
She remained faithful to the realistic art
expression.
If it wasn't for Petrovec there would not have been a Zuzka
Medved'ova and vi?e versa.
If it wasn't for Zuzka Medved'ova, there would not have
been the Petrovec that its
inhabitants dream of, that they love and carry in their
hearts wherever they go. They
carry with them the path of Podhora, Kvadraty with the
huts, Klenovec, Luky, Bodon,
Kostolisko and the swamp of Dragovska. AH this Zuzka
Medved'ova knew so well and
put it on canvas truthfully. She dedicated her artistic
opus to the ethnographic motives
and folk style. Emotionally, she grew up with the Slovak
atmosphere in the Lower
country and dozens, even hundreds of drawings and
paint-ings confirm this, with the
theme of the Slovak, the peasant folk costume and customs
of Petrovec; these, on the
other hand, have a scientific significance in studying
the folklore of the milieu, and a
historical, and documentary character. Her most known and
monumental works -the
Slovak vedding in Petrovec - she painted before she went
to Prague to study, when she
was 23 years old - which tells us not just of her natural
talent for art, but of the ability to
notice that something special in everyday life, that we
often take for granted and
expected, not worthy of special attention or fame. Who
would, anyway, look at a Slovak
room that he had in his own house. Special feminine
intuition, her poetic soul and a
sincere yearning, enabled Zuzka Medved'ova to perceive
the unusual in the ordinary, to
see a holiday in everyday life, and in a modest home the
magnificence of a temple.
When she arrived in Prague, dressed in her folk clothing,
she was basically a develoed
personality, "shaped by the folk, cultural and
ethnical foundation of her hometown,
Petrovec. Her roots were there, and in spite of
everything, they remained there for ever
".*
Once she found herself, she did not long for the world
and the galleries of the world, as it
usually happens during the artistic formation of young
artists. Prague, Zagreb, Bratislava
could not keep her for long. Nostalgia for her hometown
was much stronger. She
returned to the inhabitants of Petrovec to warm-up her
soul, to paint the lilac and thus
await the on-coming spring, to greet the ripe wheat
fields, to point the portraits of
maidens from the neighbourhood in new dresses. But love
towards her homeland and
folk motives did not interfere with the respect she had
for historic themes and
personalities. This can be seen on the monumental
canvases where she had shown a
period of the national history in times of the Great
Morava.
She regards with respect the Slovak cultural workers and
creates a whole gallery of
portraits, studious ones and enriched with the soul: P.O.
Hviezdoslav, P. Dob?insky, T.
Vansova, B. S. Tim-rava and a lot of others. They are not
mere paintings with empty
eyes and expressionless faces, like masks without a soul.
Deep, sensitive looks, just an
inkling of a smile or another mood, un-cover the depth of
the soul in every portrait. A
refined and fragile portrait of a Japanese woman, the
girl in a Serbian folk costume, the
still life with an old book, a goblet and a quill - a
frequent motive of the old masters - the
Adriatic coast, seaside landscapes in different
variations reveal the broadness of
interests and a cosmopolitan feeling of Zuzka Medved'ova,
a wonderer whose nostalgia
for Wide street, the Racky area and the bridge over
Begej, was always stronger than the
blueness of the Adriatic sea and the coolness of the
hills in the bay. The eternal
separation between the blue sea and coolness of the hills
in the bay. The eternal
separation between the blue sea and the sea of corneobs,
the constant year to be
somewhere else, provokes her artistic feeling and
fantasy. Although of a refined breed,
she could not be broken down easily, not even during the
economic crash, the wartime,
and the postwar time - when the crisis and poverty
knocked on everyones, door. She
lived in modest flats and in her attic studio surmounted
ali obstacles. She wasn't of a
petty mind that fate could play around with. She did not
succumb to the degrading
influence of a small, or a big milieu. She always knew
what she wanted and did not
want, what she liked and disliked.
She never married, although - as her relatives say - she
had some life opportunities to
do so. She renounced the joys of family life, because she
was completely aware that her
first and greatest love - creative passion - cannot be
shared, separated or abandoned.
For, a sensitive person, a pleasant and sociable woman,
for a woman full of love, this
kind of a decision certainly wasn't easy.
Kindness never left her, but at the same time she did not
allow it to jeopardize her work,
because it was only in work that she found satisfaction
and peace. Her love for fields
and planes she guarded tili the end of her life.
While drawing the fields of Petrovec she could not but
notice another feature of this
environ-ment. Hop and hop growers, their outlines
apperaed on the horizon, cutting it off
with its well known vericals. Why she did not love them
will remain a secret for ever. The
rich hop growers from Petrovec and hop traders offered
her a share of their wealth so
that they could interest her, provoke her and bring her
to their fields, into the hopyards.
She did not care for it. Hop was a sort of a fate plant
for many honourable families and
households. It could bring a fortune or lead to disaster.
For a sensitive painters' soul the
gamble seemed to be too hard.
She did not just paint a landscape, a peasant and his
field, she first felt it, lived it and
only then could she transmit these feelings on canvas. At
the same time not a single
field poppy could pass her, not one weed, a bentover
black locust, or a curvy and bumpy
field path. Ali of this belongs to the environment, to
the homeland, and for Zuzka
Medved'ova and her artistic realiza-tion - that she
always returned to - to acquire love
and renew spiritual strength.
Folk simplicity and the rusticality is often comprehended
too easily in the environment
where the fine arts ari?e. The bondage between Zuzka
Medved'ova and Petrovec is
given once and for ali as dominant, on every folk style
painting it is conspicuously
evident as the will of her legacy remarkably points out.
The vivacious colours of still life with the flowers, the
portraits of maidens that breathe
with youth, the ripe fruits of the harvest, the field
poppy, will enchant us every time with
the same strength and force us to go back to her work
always, just as she returned from
the world to us, to this world - home, to Petrovec.
Petrovec respects her and loves her
just as she loved Petrovec. Love is repayed by love.
Hatalova, K: Lvricke dielo Zuzky Medved'ovej,
Vytvarnfctvo, fotografia, film Bratislava, 1975, ?. 3.
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