Prague Pictures Read online

  The studio was already equipped with photographic equipment, most of it antique pieces from the previous century, which Sudek found perfectly congenial; after all, he was himself a relic of the nineteenth century, if not an earlier era. In the late 1940s he found a camera, a Kodak panoramic, dating from 1894, which might have been made to his specifications, although it had only two shutter speeds. It was a big, awkward brute, but it was his brute, and he loved it, not least for the fact that it was two years older than he was. That even with only one arm he managed to haul it about the city and the countryside is a matter of some amazement, but haul it he did, taking some of his finest pictures, including the series 'Vanished Statues', 1952-1970, stark, austerely beautiful studies of crippled trees that he chanced upon in his rambling through the forests near where he was born. It is perhaps too obvious, given Sudek's poised reticence as an artist, to see in the many images he fixed of these maimed giants a composite, covert self-portrait.

  By the early 1950s he had mastered the technical difficulties of the panoramic camera. A problem that initially frustrated him was that the camera could take only one 10 x 30 cm strip of film at a time, and when it had been exposed he was forced to return to the darkroom to put in a new one. Bozena Rothmayerova, a textile artist and wife of Sudek's friend, the architect Otto Rothmayer, solved the problem for him by making a black sack that was large enough to accommodate man and camera; when he had taken his picture, he would kneel down on the spot, whether alone in the woods or among the crowds on a city street, crawl with his camera into the lightless sack and, working by touch, insert the new film. It is a pity there is no photograph of Sudek in his sack: it would be an apposite image of an artist whom some critics claim for the Surrealist camp, although his supposedly surreal photographs are surely too plainly playful and witty to be thus labelled.

  It was the Kodak that made possible one of his finest achievements, the volume Panoramic Prague, published in 1959. His other great portfolio, and his first published work, is the one he made of St Vitus's Cathedral, commissioned by the publishers Prace, which appeared in1928 to mark the - supposed - completion of reconstruction work on the building. The portfolio consisted of sixty sets of fifteen prints, all of them processed by Sudek himself. These photographs are among Sudek's most weighty architectural studies, surpassed only by the 'Contrasts' series of 1942, when he returned to photographing the cathedral, where, as we can see from his recording of it, renovation work was still in progress. By now he had adopted the difficult but immensely rewarding technique of contact printing, that is, making photographs direct from negatives to paper in the darkroom, with no possibility of correction. In 1940 he had chanced upon a large contact print of a statue in Chartres Cathedral taken at the turn of the century, and immediately recognised the possibilities of this way of working. Contact printing yielded effects that the method of enlarging could not - 'From that day onward,' he later said, T never made another enlargement.' In the pre-Kodak days, this change of work practice meant using large glass negatives, some of them up to 40 x 50 cm. The technique was both painstaking and time-consuming, and Sudek made very few prints from each negative - which, incidentally, is why the photographs the Professor wanted us to take to his son were so valuable.

  A wonderful account of Sudek at work is provided by his champion and chronicler, Kirschner, of Prague's Museum of Decorative Arts:

  When Sudek placed his heavy wooden view camera on his sturdy tripod, unwrapped his lenses from their pieces of cloth, selected the right one, inserted it in the camera, crept under the black cloth he called 'a nun', considered the composition and observed the light, adjusted the equipment, slid in the photographic plate and opened the aperture mechanically or by uncovering the small 'hat' from the lens, then as the light began to paint the picture on the negative, and only then, would he pronounce his magic sentence, 'A hudba hraje . . .' 'And the music plays . . .'

  Another celebratory witness is the photographer Sonja Bullaty, a survivor of the concentration camps who worked with him after the war - his 'apprentice-martyr', he called her - and who would mount a one-man show of his photographs at her gallery in New York in 1971. Observing that 'the whole of Sudek's life seemed to revolve around light', she goes on:

  I remember one time, in one of the Romanesque halls, deep below the spires of the cathedral - it was as dark as in the catacombs - with just a small window below street level inside the massive medieval walls. We set up the tripod and camera and then sat down on the floor and talked. Suddenly Sudek was up like lightning. A ray of sun had entered the darkness and both of us were waving cloths to raise mountains of ancient dust 'to see the light,' as Sudek said. Obviously he had known that the sun would reach here perhaps two or three times a year and he was waiting for it.

  She also recalls accompanying him to the city's old cemeteries, where Sudek took some of his most affecting and intensely felt pictures:

  I liked the early evenings when a mysterious sadness crept in and Sudek sat waiting for the last rays of the sun on an old gravestone. It was more familiar here for me, for during the Nazi occupation cemeteries were the only green spaces allowed to those wearing the Jewish star.

  Although Sudek is a great landscape artist, Prague was his prime subject. Vladimir Nabokov, speaking of Lolita, remarked on the task that he set himself in that novel of 'inventing' America. Readers may find this a startling claim, and an arrogant one, but this is only what all artists do, they invent reality, for that is the nature of art, that, in James's ringing affirmation, it 'makes life, makes interest, makes importance'. In the early days of Nazi occupation, when to be caught photographing anything that might be deemed sensitive, even landscapes, could lead to the gallows, Sudek virtually retreated into his studio; instead of restriction, what he found there was a kind of interior freedom. This was when he embarked on the two superb series, 'The Window of My Studio' (1940-1954) and 'A Walk in My Garden' (1940-1976). The window pictures in particular, many of them shot through misted-over panes, are masterly, at once mysterious and homely, evocative and enigmatic. And although these pictures might have been taken anywhere, they are somehow quintessential of Prague.

  Sudek was a kind of alchemist in this city of alchemists. Those who knew him recall with awe the magical atmosphere of the darkroom in his studio, where even in summer the air felt chilled, Kirschner notes, and 'where holes had been worn into the floor over the years, and rows of wood shelves overflowed with glass jars of chemicals. Sudek mixed all of his own developing solutions and fixatives himself for the photographs he alone printed. Stories abound about the mysteries of his darkroom, and his reliance on experience and instinct more than prescribed measurements in his work. Each print he produced is unique and cannot be duplicated.' The studio itself, crammed to the ceilings with papers, prints, pictures, books, clocks, candles, gramophone records, all sorts of precious objects - memorabilia, junk, the detritus of a lifetime inevitably conjures up the wonder-rooms of the fortress of where the obsessive Rudolf II stored his haphazard collection of treasures and trash, a vast jumbled barricade erected vainly against the encroaching death that he so feared. Indeed, there is one picture in the 'Labyrinths' series, taken in 1969, of a teetering mass of paper-rolls seen end-on, which might have been assembled by Arcimboldo himself, Rudolf's court painter, that 'ingegnosissimo pittor fantastico' and Surrealist avant la lettre who built his picture- portraits out of random objects piled together into grotesque jigsaw puzzles.

  The Czechoslovak state conferred a number of bombastic-sounding honours on Sudek - he was given the title 'Artist of Merit' in 1961 and awarded the 'Order of Work' in 1966 - but he had his critics within the system, who charged him with being aloof from common life, and accused him of being a romantic, an accusation to which he happily pleaded guilty. There were grumbles too that he concentrated overmuch on nature, and included too few people in his pictures11; he retorted that it took him so much time to set up his equipment that by the time he was ready to shoot, everyone a
round had disappeared. It is remarkable that work so delicate and sensuous, so luminous, could have been produced in such dark times. Sudek lived through two wars, the first of which he very nearly did not survive; at one end of his life he witnessed the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, at the other he experienced the Soviet invasion of 1968; in between, there was the 1948 communist takeover and the fall of a forty-year night. Yet even out of darkness he could make work that glowed - his nocturnal studies of Prague are among his finest achievements. He was a romantic in the best sense, in that through impeccable technique his work speaks directly to the spirit. All who knew him testify to his genuine simplicity, his diffidence, his sense of humour. He was a poor boy from the provinces, not well educated, as he admitted. The war damaged him, took his arm and left him with who knows what inner torments. He was not polished, he was not an intellectual. When he entered the Prague School of Graphic Arts, he told Sonja Bullaty, 'Professor Karel Novak was a noble gentleman, intelligent, you could tell right away, because he withstood my cursing and statements the way they stayed in my vocabulary from the war.' Yet he was not brutalised. After photography his greatest love was music - the Professor and Marta had warm memories of Sudek's Tuesday night 'concerts', when he would receive friends at his studio and play records for them on his homemade turntable - and he had a close affinity with the work of Janacek, whose birthplace, Hukvaldy, was the subject of his last book. Indeed, Janacek's is perhaps the art that his own most resembles, in its intensity and sense of yearning, its stark dynamics, its precise feeling for a homeland. Sudek's aesthetic was simple, and can be summed up in this statement from him, recorded by Bullaty: 'Discovery - that's important. First comes the discovery. Then follows the work. And then sometimes something remains from it.' Prague has more famous sons, but none of them, not even Kafka, managed to capture so movingly the essence of the place, its mystery and weary charm, its tragic beauty, its light and shadow, and that something in between, the peculiar, veiled radiance of this city on the Vltava.

  When I think back to those days, and nights, in Prague, I am not sure whether what I am summoning up are images from my memory, or from the photographs of Josef Sudek, so thoroughly has his work become for me an emblem of the place. I try to recall our leavetaking of the Professor and his wife; they lived in an anonymous apartment block on an unremarkable street to the west of Wenceslas Square, yet what I see is a scene straight out of one of Sudek's nocturnes, something like the view of Bridge on a snowy evening, or that lamp-lit cobbled square on Kampa Island, with the winter tree, and the Charles Bridge behind, and the city farther off, the light of the street lamp in the foreground all blurred and gauzy, as if seen through tears. At the door, Marta clutched G.'s hand in hers and bade her 'Say hello for me to California,' a greeting that sounded to our ears more like a farewell to an impossible dream. I do not think that Marta made it to America, in the end, although it is not impossible that she did. A couple of years ago we heard that the Professor had died. How quickly the past becomes the past! That night we walked in silence, the three of us, though the empty, frostbound streets back to our hotel. G. carried the photographs, rolled up tightly and concealed in a cardboard tube supposedly containing nothing more than a reproduction of a poster from the 1930s for an exhibition of formalist Czech art. Next morning, under a shower of sleet, we left the city by train. At the Austrian border we were held up for an hour while crossing guards went through the carriages with implements like giant versions of dentist's mirrors, searching under the seats and on the luggage racks for anyone who might have hidden there in an attempt to flee the country. My palms were damp: what if G. were to be made to open the cardboard tube and show its contents? But the guards were not interested in art. When we crossed to the Austrian side the first thing I saw was a hoarding of a half-naked woman advertising some degenerate Western luxury - Dior fashions or Mercedes motor cars - and something in me revelled instinctively, irresistibly, in the sight of what seemed such happy, hopeful, life-affirming colours, and I thought of the Professor, and Marta, and felt ashamed.

  1 Since I was a delegate, however unwilling, to the CSCE, I feel obliged, in the spirit of fairness, to report that the Americans, while smoother, more soft-spoken, and certainly better dressed than their Eastern Bloc rivals, had been brazenly hypocritical enough to include ostentatiously in their delegation, as a token - apt word - of the racial tolerance and care for indigenous peoples enjoyed in America, a pair of novelists of American Indian heritage. The home of the brave, indeed.

  2 Kafka and his favourite sister, Ottla, rented number 22 Zlata Ulicka in November 1916. Kafka had a room but not, it seems, a bed; on his days off from the insurance office he would work there all day, then have his supper, and walk down the Old Castle Steps at midnight and across the Manes Bridge to his flat in the Schonborn Palace in the Old Town. He was happy in Golden Lane: 'it is something special,' he wrote to his girlfriend Felice Bauer, 'to have one's own house, to lock the door to the world, not of the room, not of the flat, but of the house itself; to step out of the door of one's home straight into the snow of the quiet lane.' Conditions were primitive, but K. could always improvise. He arrived one day when the fire was out, he told Ottla, 'But then I took all the newspapers and manuscripts and, after a while, a very lovely fire was burning.' All the manuscripts . . .

  3 Kafka's attitude to his native city was made up of equal measures of love and hate. 'Prague doesn't let go,' he wrote to his friend Oskar Pollak in 1902. 'Either of us. This old crone has claws. We would have to set it on fire in two places, at and the Castle; only then might it be possible for us to get away. Perhaps you'll give it some consideration before carnival.'

  4 But I cannot refrain from reproducing the description of a dish I found on a menu in the Kepler Beer Restaurant in the Czech town of Kutna Hora not long ago: 'Filled chicken brest (sic) with banana in almond sauce with cream and griotce.' Serve me right for asking for an English-language menu. Griotce, by the way, is a cherry liqueur; I have never, so far as I know, tasted it.

  5 Another question not to be asked: does it strike the Czech ear oddly that one of their great national composers should be called Smetana, which means cream? But then, think of the Russians: ipasternak I am told, in English is 'parsnip'.

  6 But which looks to me more like a cheerful if not over-bright dog, like the dog of St Wenceslas which the short-story writer Jan Neruda says is depicted in a painting behind the cathedral's main altar, although I could not find it. And anyway, according to the history books, Wenceslas wasn't murdered in St Vitus's, or even in Prague, but in a town outside the city, Stara Boleslav.

  7 This is the phrase as translated in Ripellino/Marinelli's Magic Prague; Gustav Meyrink's The Golem is available in a somewhat capricious English translation by Mike Mitchell (London, 1995).

  8 Tangible indeed is the cubist lamppost in Jungmannovo a fascinating but frankly hideous object designed by Vratislav Hofman in 1913.

  9 Milan Kundera, in his novel Ignorance, is awed by these repeating loops:

  'The history of the Czechs in the twentieth century is graced with a remarkable mathematical beauty due to the triple repetition of the number twenty. In 1918, after several centuries, they achieved their independence and in 1938 they lost it.

  'In 1948 the Communist revolution, imported from Moscow, inaugurated the country's second twenty-year span; that one ended in 1968 when, enraged by the country's insolent self-emancipation, the Russians invaded with half a million soldiers.

  'The occupier took over in full force in the autumn of 1969 and then, to everyone's surprise, took off in autumn 1989 - quietly, politely, as did all the Communist regimes in Europe at that time: And that was the third twenty-year span.'

  10 The lines by Viktor Dyk are from the poem 'Zerae mluvV (The Land Speaks), translated by Justin Quinn:

  - li mne, nezahynu.

  -li mne, zahynes!

  (If you leave me, I will not die.

  If you leave me, you wil
l die!)

  11 In a conversation in Paris recently with Henri Cartier-Bresson and his wife, the photographer Martine Franck, I was told they found Sudek's work 'not human enough'.

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  THRESHOLD

  My brief history of the Czech Lands, downloaded from the Internet, opens by observing that the first inhabitants of the region were prehistoric fish. The anonymous author of this disconcertingly skittish document - why do I think it was written by a woman? - goes on to note that when the prehistoric oceans dried up, the fish were followed by dinosaurs, mammoths, and, in due course, Celts. The Celts, that mysterious but ubiquitous people, which some specialists claim never existed, arrived in the fourth century BC; the Roman name for the area, Boiohaemum, our Bohemia, is said to have derived from the Boii, one of the Celtic tribes. Presently this race of redheads was displaced by Germanic tribes from the west, and by Romans from the south, although the latter did not progress much beyond the Danube. Some centuries of apparent inactivity followed, for historians are largely silent on the period until the sixth century of our era, when the Slavs arrived, and occupied the left bank of the Vltava, above what is now Here, by the end of the ninth century, a citadel was established by the first of the , one ; this was the original seat of the Pfemysl dynasty and not, so the sometimes censorious Blue Guide scoffingly asserts, the fortress at Vysehrad, 'as legend would have us believe'. In the meantime, Italian, French, German and Jewish merchants had been setting themselves up on the opposite bank, in the area that is now Nove or New Town; it was connected to the Slavic quarter by a wooden bridge, and must have been a lively spot. In the later 960s the city was visited by Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub, a Spanish Jew dispatched from Cordoba by Caliph al-Hakam II as part of a diplomatic mission to the Emperor Otto I in Merseburg. The bookish but well-travelled Ibrahim, who would have known a thing or two about the cities of the earth, was impressed by Prague's moneyed cosmopolitanism.