World Fine Art Professionals and thir Key-Pieces, 484 - Mila Doleželová

World Fine Art Professionals and thir Key-Pieces, 484 – Mila Doleželová
The historic town of Telč in South Bohemia is the pearl of the Renaissance in the Czech Republic. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The Dominican monastery houses the work of Míla Doleželová. Most of her paintings are about the life of the Roma. The faces with the big eyes are very typical of the painter.
Doleželová was inspired in her work by Byzantine icons and oriental art. She was called the Painter of the Big Eyes.

The Roma
Míla Doleželová, in full Bohumila Doleželová, lived from 1922 to 1993, she was born in Prostějov. She lived and died in Vysočina, where she left behind a monumental oeuvre consisting of frescoes, about 600 oil paintings, book illustrations, drawings and graphics. Also well-known are her illustrations for Tales of Ancient India and gypsy fairy tales, which appeared under the title Singing Violins. Gypsies, or rather, the Roma, are her subject. She often painted them with big eyes.

At the age of 14 she started to study to be a milliner. After her training she worked in Prostějov and Pilsen, where she survived the war together with her aunt. In 1945 she entered the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague, but left after a year of study. In 1946 she was admitted to the second year of the AVU. She often worked in the studio of V. Pukla. She completed her studies in 1950 and worked as a university lecturer at the AVU for the next four years. From 1954 she painted mainly with oil paint. In 1957 she did ethnographic research on the life of the Roma in Eastern Slovakia.

Summers in Klatovec
She left the AVU at her own request and from 1957 lived with Jiří Mareš, her future husband (she married him in 1958), and her mother in a former brick factory near the village of Jihlávka. In 1961 they all moved to the small village of Klatovec near Javořice, in the central Highlands. During this period she and her husband faced great material hardship. Doleželová found herself in the solitude of Vysočina; there was no water or electricity in the house.

Mila did not sit back and do nothing, she worked like a madman. She got her first exhibitions, and many artists visited both painters (Doleželová and her husband Mareš) in Klatovec. The Roma became the central theme of her work. In 1967 she was admitted to the Association of Fine Artists of the Highlands. The turning point came after a group exhibition at Galeria Vysočiny in Jihlava (1966), where a Mexican painting dealer visited the exhibition and bought almost all the work that was hanging there. In 1967 she also sold 25 paintings to interested people in America. This was followed by invitations for exhibitions in Miami, Florida (1967), Chicago (1969) and Mexico (1971).

Telč and a Turn to Religious Themes
In 1972, she and her husband bought a house in Telč (today there is a memorial plaque on the house). At that time, Doleželová focused on religious themes. In 1978, she received a commission for a cycle of paintings of the Stations of the Cross for a Slavic church, but the cycle was not installed and is now in a private collection. In the last phase of her life, all her loved ones died. She worked in the house in Telč until her death, and spent her last years in complete solitude. In 1978, her mother, who had lived with both painters until then, died; in January 1984, her husband Jiří Mareš, many years younger, died (at the age of 52). The loss of her husband hit Doleželová very hard, she stopped working for several months and isolated herself from people. She died on December 30, 1993.

The National Gallery in Prague was not interested in her collection of works, nor did the Brno Museum of Roma Culture, so Doleželová left all her works and those of her husband to the Dominicans. They fulfilled her wish and for three years there was a permanent gallery of her paintings in the Dominican monastery in Jihlava. The rest of the work is exhibited in the Dominican monastery in Jablonné in Podještědí. The largest owner of Míla Doležalová’s works is the company PSJ, a.s.

Thanks to Kees van Teeffelen and Sylvia Kohlmann who discovered this painter during their holiday in the Czech Republic in 2024.
Image 8: Míla Doleželová

 

https://www.miladolezelova.eu/en
https://inzaken.eu/2024/07/29/mila-dolezelova-schilderes-van-de-roma/