PhDr. Jana Wittlichová on Jiří Altmann in the catalog of the exhibition in Malá Gallery at Manes in 1974.

growing object just as the artist is and that is why they have understood each other for millennia. Not even the present times’ synthetic materials and experimental techniques, inventive procedures and sophisticated art parlance are able to abandon the use of wood. An architect comes back to it to bring close to the people the irreplaceable feeling of home, a sculptor to transform an image in his mind to a living form, a graphic artist, to give his prints a clear and distinct voice. If you ask Jiří Altmann when he combined his work with wood, he will go back as far as the times of his studies. He dedicated and expressed his love for wood by completing his studies at the Academy of Arts in 1966 under the tutorship of professor Tittelbach by creating prints on the theme of Francois Villon’s poems. Altmann’s relationship with woodcarving lies in his passion for handcraft, and the joy that it brings him by direct handling of the material. Trying to learn and master the chosen technique in full in an environment of long tradition dating back centuries took him for two years to Germany, the country of Dürer and Guttenberg. He worked in the printing works in Essen, where he clarified in his mind both poles of the graphic art – the free production and illustration, and their mutual interconnection. A fundamental structure of Altmann’s woodcarving, his plastic form motive and intense drama, as well as black and white contrasts is a literary text, but communicated through the visual art in a pure symbolic form and visual metaphor cycles. The history of woodcarving is based on a cyclical expression; Altmann respects this because it allows him to develop a story at several levels and from several visual angles. Such is the cycle of Villon’s poems, of the Alexander Blok’s verses, Boccaccio’s Decameron and the balladic number of prints on the theme of the Lidice tragedy. Quite unique is the cycle, which the artist titled graphic beginnings and ends, in which an unfinished sequence of events cover reflections and insights, questions and answers, in such a way as the life and time bring it to the artist. Recently the artist has been put in front of a task of dealing with current topics, including civil and factual issues covered by the cycle RODINA (FAMILY). It inhibits the artist’s exaggerated expression and binds woodcarving compositional relaxation; this conflict appears to bring out the issue of the future direction of the graphic artist’s work.

 

Jana Wittlichová 1974