Czech surrealist Dusan Marek hits controversy and obscenity ban after arrival with his brother Voitre in Adelaide in 1948
Dušan Marek (at left in a photgraphic self portrait in 1971 after his return to Adelaide) and his two-sided work Equator and Perpetuum Mobile, completed during the 1948 voyage with brother Voitre to Australia, and then Adelaide. The work was one of two banned as obscene after an 1949 exhibition organised by the Adelaide branch of the Contemporary Art Society.
Main image courtesy Art Gallery of South Australia
Czechoslovakian brothers Dušan and Voitre Marek made an explosive entry into the South Australian art scene in 1949, with Dušan suffering a ban for obscenity slapped on a painting he’d completed the year before on the voyage to Australia and eventually Adelaide.
Dušan continued to bring a surge of ideas to Australian art as a painter, filmmaker, jewellery maker and sculptor, plus teacher of painting and film, but the initial Adelaide contact left scars he carried for the rest of his life.
Marek was born in 1926 in Bitouchov, a small village in northern Bohemia. Elder brother, Voitre, a sculptor, introduced young Dušan to a life-long commitment to surrealist art. Dušan became immersed in Prague surrealism and graduated from its school of fine arts in 1948 – the year of the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia,
Dusan and Voitre fled their homeland on political grounds, escaping to a refugee camp in Germany. They travelled to Australia in 1948 on the SS Charleton Sovereign, a long and delayed voyage. The delays resulted in a memorable artworks by Voitre and Dušan, most notably Dušan's two-sided painting, Equator and Perpetuum Mobile. Equator celebrated crossing of equator and was created using paints and materials from his time in Dillenberg refugee camp. It was painted on wooden gaming table stripped of its felt covering.
Arriving in Sydney, the Marek brothers were transferred to the immigration and training centre at Bathurst, New South Wales, where Voitre reunited with his fiancé Vera Podperova and Dušan met Helena Jakubova, who became his wife.
The Mareks chose to settle in late 1948 in Adelaide, recommended by a camp administrator as the “city of churches” that they thought must resemble Prague. Dušan, contracted to work for the state governmen and took a job with South Australian Railways. After a few weeks, both brothers were able to negotiate with their skills as jewellers and found work with Sheppard’s Jewellers in Adelaide.
Dušan and Voitre began exhibiting their art shortly after moving to Adelaide, most prominently in the 1949 exhibition organised by the Adelaide branch of the Contemporary Art Society. Despite the exhibition’s eclectic theme, two works by Dušan were declared obscene, causing controversy and hostility from art society committee members and the Adelaide press.
Marek’s entry into the Adelaide art world had been too late for the forward-looking and heady days of the early 1940s when the original Contemporary Art Society had been formed by Adelaide artists such as Douglas Roberts, David Dallwitz, Ivor Francis, Jeffrey Smart and Ruth Tuck whose first exhibition in 1942 included works with surrealist tendencies and, although controversial, the artists, united by the experience, considered it a success.
By 1949, the Ern Malley poetry affair and the William Dobell trial in 1944 saw a swing towards extreme middle-class conservatism in the Adelaide art world and Australia generally. Nor did it help Marek being a migrant with imperfect English. To be a surrealist in post-war Australia was tantamount to being communist – the ideology that had caused Marek to flee his homeland.
Marek in a 1949 Adelaide press interview said that “art cannot speak through nice social forms. It must not fear to speak plainly … I want my pictures to make people think and try and see things as I see them". He even took out advertising space in The Advertiser proclaiming: “Man is not privacy. Break the mirror to see who I am. Empty yourself to see what you are”.
In anger, Marek left Adelaide in 1951, spending time Tasmania, but soon moving to Sydney, where he lived until 1954, and then New Guinea – before returning to Adelaide.
