Ferdinand Hložník — Harvest on SP, Threshing on SP

Ferdinand Hložník, who worked mainly in the second half of the 20th century, belongs to the generation marked by the Second World War. When it broke out, the author was only 18 years old. A similar life and artistic experience connected him not only with his older brother Vincent Hložník, but also with other artists such as Orest Dubay, Ladislav Guderna, Viliam Chmel, Ervín Semian or Jozef Šturdík, with whom he joined the 29th August Group, founded in 1958 at the initiative of Štefan Bednár of 1909 Generation. He devoted himself mainly to painting and drawing, but also to illustration. His work underwent a certain ideological and formal development. At the beginning of his artistic formation he was influenced by the work of Cyprián Majerník, but also by the cubism of Pablo Picasso. After the period of socialist realism in the early 1960s, he turned to abstraction with an emphasis on the structure and colour of painting, thus approaching the language of informel. This period of the artist’s oeuvre is considered one of his most significant. In the 1970s, the themes of war and the Slovak National Uprising appeared in his work, and he also devoted himself to landscape painting. Later, he was dominated by imaginary figurative paintings, expressive stylization and surrealistic artistic expression. 

The presented paintings Harvest on the SP and Threshing on the SP come from the significant year of 1950, as they thematically correspond to the advent of the new socialist-realist doctrine. The abbreviation in the title SP stands for State Property, a type of collectively managed agricultural cooperative that was being established in the 1950s. In the time-space of the period, this is a new phenomenon referring to the forced collectivisation, when independent peasants were forced to join collectively managed cooperatives. Hložník’s works say nothing about the dramas that accompanied this violence; for his part, it is rather an obligatory ride, a kind of sensory transcription of what he saw, which manifests itself in the same format, technique and simple composition. The author depicts peasants at harvest work with typical attributes such as a tractor, a harvesting machine, a threshing machine for threshing grain. It is likely that these paintings were commissioned by the state as part of the so-called task work. These were events where the Union of Slovak (or Czech) Artists announced ideological themes (one of the main ones was socialist agriculture) and artists could apply and receive a scholarship. Many artists saw this as pragmatic, but it was a way for the new ideology to buy artists. Evidence that these paintings were also a state scholarship could be found in the fact that Hložník participated in the exhibition Art Harvest (1950) in Prague, which was organized by the Union of Czechoslovak Artists as a national exhibition. This was held to present the results of the aforementioned works. Both of Hložník’s works entered the collection of the Nitra Gallery by purchase in 1970.