At that time, I was living in Brno. I remember waiting at that small round table in the café of the Moravian Museum, before meeting the art historian Martina Pachmanová. So as not to spend any money, I had ordered nothing. It was drizzling. Filip, who was just two years old, was at home with my mother. She had come to visit us, to help me with him, while giving me space to take care of my own affairs.
What followed were two hours full of exuberance. I was honoured and excited to be able to learn directly from her all the significant details about this artist whom I was only just discovering. I felt as though I were entering a secret world when she gave me her manuscript, “Milada Marešová — Painter of the New Objectivity1”, as research material for my project Dans Ma Rue, which I was working on.
As we talked, I began to understand her own enthusiasm. She wanted the story to be told. She lived with the desire to make Milada Marešová’s works known in all the major museums, an artist particularly innovative in her observation of what cannot be seen. I asked her questions, and I had the feeling that her account was leading me into a crack in the history already written. Her answers were filled with the rare generosity of those who have been trying, for years, to repair an omission. With her, I discovered an artist almost unknown today, even though she left behind a vast and deeply affecting body of work.
After a grant in Paris in the 1920s, and her entry into František Kupka’s circle, she lived between Prague and Paris, obsessively drawing the people whom modernity preferred not to look at too closely: workers, exhausted women, suburban residents, the marginalised and outsiders, people of colour, and those who were unintegrated, isolated, abandoned.
It was not the Paris of the heroic avant-garde. It was not Picasso’s Paris.
It was a tired, vulnerable and living Paris.
Martina Pachmanová herself had discovered Marešová through the work of the woman who had preceded her, Dr Jiřina Hockeová: “The only specialist to have taken a more systematic interest in Marešová’s work in the past was Dr Jiřina Hockeová, an art historian and curator in Brno. Between 1985 and 1986, she organised an exhibition of her paintings and drawings at the Brno House of Arts. And it was precisely the small catalogue published on the occasion of this exhibition that, a little more than eight years earlier, gave me the first impulse to discover a body of work to which surveys of Czech modern art had given no place2.”
I like to think here of a history of rediscovery. Hockeová devoted the 1985 exhibition to Marešová, while the artist was still alive. Two decades later, Martina Pachmanová, who had devoted her research to Czech women artists, in turn organised, in 2008, a major exhibition devoted to Milada Marešová at the Moravian Gallery in Brno. It had all begun with Hockeová’s small catalogue, which had aroused her curiosity about an artist almost absent from the history of Czech modernism and had prompted her to look further.
And then, almost two decades later again — me! I lived in the Czech Republic for eleven months on a doctoral research grant. I was also working on Dans Ma Rue; I was at that stage of my project when I was travelling to gather the stories of women artists whose existence I was still unaware of. I travelled through Eastern Europe, and therefore the Czech Republic. I was not looking for any particular artist. I was studying the phenomenon — these Czech artists and their lives. What they had kept with them. What had been essential to them. I was trying to identify all this by living there, by studying their clothes, the way their children played, what struck them most, history, folklore, women poets.
By continuing to dig, I found the 2008 exhibition and, there it was, this genealogical circle of rediscovery took shape. That is how I discovered Milada Marešová. What led me to take an interest in that 2008 exhibition, in Pachmanová’s text and therefore in Marešová was something much more rudimentary. When I do research, I analyse and search like wild animals. I am guided by scent. I let myself be guided. Where my skin reacts, I stop. I stopped in front of her paintings of people in the metro and of the outskirts.
I have always fed on the curiosity to understand life. My art has each time been built from series of questions — initially addressed to myself, after which I took notes, observed and moved forward.
In recent years, I have focused on my project Dans Ma Rue, an art installation–archive that brings to light the urban mnemonics of Paris, composed of different superimposed layers of history. The culmination of its formation was the well-known artistic avant-garde of the early twentieth century, and my study focuses on this period.
Life was difficult for the poor of Paris. Increasingly pushed out to the outskirts by the city’s urban transformations, workers, emigrants and their vulnerable families inhabited a Paris very different from the romantic image painted in art history. In the art world, women remained marginalised within a universe dominated by the male figure of the bohemian “artist”: most often muses or confined to secondary roles in the studio, their access to the status of creator remained limited, both socially and institutionally. Ironically, their image nevertheless became central to — modernity — la Parisienne3 — the visual symbol of the city, embodying the muse, the prostitute or the desired woman, but rarely a subject endowed with a voice of her own. “People speak through them, people speak about them, but they are rarely heard4.” Many women thus remained buried in forgotten archives, untranslated diaries or collections that were rarely exhibited5. Their condition was precisely that of the marginality that Milada Marešová captured so well in her paintings. Invisible and unaccepted, these women nevertheless dared, because therein lay their only chances of existing.
Migrant Artist and Urban Memory
It is precisely this deliberate approach that became the voice, energy and context for the genesis of my project.
I came to Paris with my son when he was a year and a half old. I worked nights in the Romanian studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts. During the day, I juggled playgrounds, museums and cafés where I had various professional appointments. He was in his pushchair, and I took advantage of the long journeys between our destinations to photograph the buildings; afterwards, I thought about them constantly, drew and redrew them, changed their context to transform them into collage materials — silhouettes of fantastical buildings that spoke to me.
The old studios of Montmartre, where past and present still coexist; those overcrowded rooms; the same streets crossed by different generations.
A multitude of questions came to mind: who lived there? What happened on this street? I then began frantically reading every newspaper I could find. At first, I read articles about the great artists, but mainly because they allowed me to discover their lovers, then their lovers’ female friends — a whole world to which I would otherwise never have had access.
Very quickly, my brain became a clearly defined map. I never saw the streets of Paris in the same way again. The streets had become the sites of all those many events I had read so much about. Belleville was not simply Belleville, but the place where, on that sloping pavement descending from the working-class heights towards the illuminated boulevards of République, Édith Piaf was born.
Most cases were insufficiently documented, so my research continued through meetings with women art historians, as well as journeys to their countries of origin.
And that is how I found myself at the café of the Moravian Museum in Brno, talking with the art historian Martina Pachmanová about Milada Marešová.
I was fascinated to discover how her work abounds with emotions in another world — a world that people were not accustomed to seeing in the painting of that period. I immediately remembered what I had seen and felt from the moment I arrived in this city. Her works gave me the strange sensation of recognising this Paris.
Perhaps this is what Pachmanová identifies in Marešová as that “strange inner disposition, sad, melancholic and very pessimistic,” so different from the optimism of avant-garde circles and yet profoundly an “expression of her time.” Through it, Pachmanová writes, Marešová expressed the contradictory feelings of modern man, who desires freedom while fearing it, who seeks to grasp reality objectively without ever ceasing to dream and who, amid the tumult of the metropolis, sinks into solitude6.
I had met “women of the night” who walked the streets of Paris. I had listened to their stories enough to understand that their marginality had nothing to do with exoticism or romanticism. There are very distinct smells, freezing rooms, like that damp cold that smells of mould, exhaustion, violence, an unexpected tenderness and a profound form of survival. Perhaps for that reason alone, Milada’s paintings did not seem historical to me. On the contrary, they seemed familiar. The effect was to make me feel less alone in this dimension of the city that I knew: people searching through rubbish bins, tired bodies in the metro, underground inhabitants, the homeless, the solitudes that cling to the walls of the city before the shop windows light up in the morning — all this landscape still exists today, like her painting, as though time had stood still.
And because I already knew it, I immediately fell in love with her way of looking at the world.
To understand her beyond her work, Martina Pachmanová interviewed Jan Mareš, the artist’s nephew, for whom she had been “almost like a second mother.” In the family, she was called “Milinka.”
For the first time, behind all these texts, exhibitions and paintings, someone who had known her appeared.
Jan Mareš’s words brought to light the source of everything that had drawn me so obsessively to her work. The familiarity, the feeling that another being in this world sees what I see too. There is certainly something recognisably Eastern European here: the patriarchal and conservative family within which community, gentleness and love nevertheless coexist, and where freedom sometimes ends up growing precisely out of this contradiction.
“Grandfather Mareš [...] behaved in a very patriarchal manner. He was very strict with his children. Milada remembered, for example, that one day, when she and her sister returned from a party in Hluboká only at nightfall, he did not hesitate to call them ‘vagabonds.’ When Milada grew up and began studying art, she led — as often happens — a rather bohemian life, very far removed from her father’s idea of a ‘proper’ life. Despite this, their relationship was very good7.”
She never married and never had children.
“Their mother told her daughters that they might never marry and that there was nothing wrong with that because, in her view, a single woman was always necessary in a family. [...] Milada and Boleslava both contributed significantly to the harmony and unity of the family, while also bringing to it a great spirit of freedom8.”
Marešová — a painter of belonging without submission, of conservatism without immobility, of independence without the need to proclaim it.
I like to present Marešová as an accomplished observer of human beings, who consumed modernity without embracing it, herself wildly drawn to lives from other worlds, to older people.
Pachmanová delved deeply into this understanding: “At the beginning of the 1930s, another important theme appeared with unusual force in Marešová’s work — female old age. In old age, which Western society and culture had made taboo for centuries and for which they had substituted the ideal of youth, Marešová sought the imprint of life experience, wisdom, but also, surprisingly, beauty. Women whose faces had been furrowed with deep wrinkles by fate and whose hands had twisted in rheumatic spasms attracted the artist precisely because this was a forbidden subject, one that revealed the hypocrisy of social morality. [...] In this context, the old woman was a doubly subversive figure. Not only did she undermine one of the fundamental myths of femininity, but she was also an unpleasant reminder of everything that modern society sought at all costs to repress and that disturbed its ideological integrity9.”
“Although she was not drawn to the artistic avant-garde, she followed what was happening in its circles, both on the local scene and elsewhere. She never commented on it very much, however — at least, as far as I remember. She rarely allowed herself to be influenced by the trends of her time, and I think she even defended herself, partly consciously, against outside influences. Avant-garde experimentation perhaps seemed too elitist to her, whereas she wanted, through her paintings, to address a broader public. She also sometimes spoke about the way these experiments encouraged imitation and were diluted by all kinds of epigones. That was probably what she wanted to avoid. It was no doubt also one of the reasons why she never identified with any of the labels others used for her work, whether New Objectivity or naïvism. Among the modernists, she admired Picasso, for example. She also liked Le Douanier Rousseau. But her unattainable model and source of inspiration remained the old master Hieronymus Bosch10.”
Milada Marešová herself said: “I paint out of inner necessity and for my own pleasure, but also to sell my works and give pleasure to others11.”
The desire to know
“The desire to know,” Jan Mareš replies when asked what drove her to travel. At over sixty, Marešová was still going to places “where life was pulsating”: the Beatles, the hippies, Carnaby Street, flower power, lovers and prostitutes. I too left, moved and travelled with that same desire to know. Not only places, but people, ways of living, of looking and of building a life12.
I remember how, when my son was in nursery school, on the way home, at Ourcq metro station, I would see people whose features resembled those depicted by Milada Marešová. Her paintings spoke to me from everywhere, from different corners of the city. They speak to me today, but in another way — of familiarity, like a silent embrace — from the hands that prepared coffees to those who delivered flowers to supermarket checkouts, and more besides.
Dans Ma Rue: Subjective Archive and Feminist Rewriting
I juggle between Milada and myself, between the historical and the contemporary, between the almost non-existent place once granted to women as creators, and a society that still does not accept a single mother who dares to exist solely as an independent artist — not as something normal, but as “an immense form of courage” that, deep down, the system does not know how to accommodate and to which it still responds with this question: why don’t you simply get a part-time job when you are already working all the time?
I play at gathering the history of the city’s streets into a bouquet of flowers entitled Dans Ma Rue. As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay observes: “The archive is not simply a repository of the past, but a political space of the present13.”
Dans Ma Rue already exists through hundreds of sketches, personal archives and other thoughts scattered across paper, like these. Through them, we have become fellow artists, wandering sisters in Paris, carrying dreams greater than anything that could ever fit into a description.
By gathering and carrying with me the voices of countless artists across different temporalities, I am simultaneously trying to learn for myself what it means to be a woman, a mother and an emigrant artist.
I have become a hunter of scents moving across eras, which remain impregnated in the wooden structures, doors, beams and windows of façades that have been towers, hotels, brothels, studios, cafés, pharmacies, homes or hospitals — places where life has unfolded and continues to unfold, where debates, loves, reflections and agonies have coexisted. It is precisely out of the desire to preserve all these living things that the installation Dans Ma Rue is constructed from thin wooden beams on which I draw fragments of façades, subsequently covered with textures: collected textiles, sewn and painted in the form of a collective diary.
Sometimes, I have the impression that it is not I who am searching for Milada Marešová through Paris, but that she continues to look at me through the city’s inhabitants. Through the woman asleep on the metro. Through the workers who emerge in the morning from the Arab shops on rue d’Aubervilliers. Through the hands of cashiers, exhausted young women, those who wash the pavements before the city wakes.
Milada’s Paris has never disappeared.
It is simply that we have been taught not to look at it.
1 Martina Pachmanová, Milada Marešová — Painter of the New Objectivity, unpublished manuscript consulted as part of this research.
2 PACHMANOVÁ, Martina, Milada Marešová – malířka nové věcnosti, Arbor vitae, Řevnice, 2008, p. 9.
3 JOHNSON, Julie Anne, Conflicted Selves: Women, Art, & Paris 1880–1914, doctoral dissertation, Queen’s University, Canada, 2008, pp. 88–89.
4 This reflection is situated within a feminist historiography of art developed notably by Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock and other feminist art historians of the twentieth century.
5 Pachmanová places Marešová within a Parisian context in which several women artists were already shifting the representation of women away from the nude and the muse towards women’s lived, non-mythologised identity; she considers that this shift would subsequently become one of the essential themes of Marešová’s work.
6 PACHMANOVÁ, Martina, Milada Marešová – malířka nové věcnosti, Arbor vitae, Řevnice, 2008, p. 35.
7 Ibid., pp. 151–158.
8 Ibid.
9 In 1930, Bedřich Václavek condemned New Objectivity as a form of retreat from the avant-garde, describing it as an “aesthetic parallel to the consolidation of the old order.” He regarded these tendencies as “the conformist expression of individualistic bourgeois society” and as a “retreat from the consequences of development towards an earlier stage.” VÁCLAVEK, Bedřich, “‘Nová věcnost’ estetickou paralelou konsolidace starého řádu,” in Avantgarda známá a neznámá, vol. 3, Svoboda, Prague, 1970, pp. 276–278.
10 PACHMANOVÁ, Martina, Milada Marešová – malířka nové věcnosti, Arbor vitae, Řevnice, 2008, pp. 151–158.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., pp. 151–158.
13 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, London, Verso, 2019.
This text is interwoven with reflections drawn from my doctoral research “Text-Image in Media Environment” (2019–2024), in which several chapters explored early twentieth-century Paris, the artistic avant-gardes and feminist perspectives on art history.
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