Artwives: Eva Švankmajerová, Dorothea Tanning & Lee Krasner

As I’ve been working on the new paintings for last few weeks, I have been reminded of what it is like to be a stereotypical artist – the one whose mood swings, bursts of anger and despair are barely sufferable for anyone in the vicinity. Somehow painting is a much more intense type of work for me than writing, and I often feel emotionally and physically exhausted at the end of the day. And then I started wondering – what about couples where both people are full-time artists? A scary vision of piles of unwashed plates and escalating tantrums comes to mind. But those couples do exist and as a matter of fact, there have been quite a few famous duos. The problem is, the artwives in those couples don’t necessarily exist in the public awareness. They might be great artists themselves but somehow it’s their husband who gets to be in the spotlight.

Having recently watched for the second time a superb film by the Czech surrealist master, Jan Švankmajer, The Conspirators of Pleasure, I then went on to reading fragments of his journal from 1999. The following bit made me smile:

Eva [the director’s late wife] spends whole days painting. She is finishing a large series of alchemistical paintings Mutus liber. I consider it to be one of her pivotal works. She doesn’t go out, and her whole time is divided between creative euphoria which she experiences next to her ladder and falling into despair in which everything around her, including herself, is repudiated and condemned. In her “lighter” moments, she yearns for revenge.

I didn’t know much about Eva, apart from the fact that I always saw her name in the end credits. All I knew was that she was a set designer and often worked on her husband’s films. I decided to find out more, and also look up some other artwives.

Artwives: Eva Švankmajerová

Eva Švankmajerová (née Dvorakova) was a painter, ceramic and puppetry artist, and a writer, author of Baradla Cave which recently got translated into English. Having grown up in socialist Czechoslovakia, plastered with images of female tractor drivers and other symbols of communism, from early on Eva tackled the issue of gender stereotypes in her art. In Christopher Masters’ obituary in 2005, we can read that her “Emancipation Cycle parodied such paintings as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe by replacing the female characters with men;” and that later in the 1980s “she constructed a grotesque head from propaganda photographs of female labourers.” She was part of the Czech Surrealist group (one critic later said that she was one of the most widely known Surrealist painters of our time) and many of her paintings and sculptures were laden with eroticism and Freudian s