COURAGE

connecting collections

Congratulations to President Vaclav Havel from Ivana and Pavel Tigrid, sent to him by fax on 5 October 1998, at 2:52pm. Pavel Tigrid and Václav Havel held a long-standing friendship that began in the spring of 1968 when Havel returned from the United States. They scheduled a short meeting in the transit area at Orly Airport in Paris, which then stretched into a whole week that Havel spent at the Tigrid House in Héricy near Paris. In this case, the encounter happened to be when pilots and air dispatchers went on strike at the airport. Tigrid even met Havel and his wife Olga briefly in 1969 when they visited him on his trip to France. After that, Václav Havel was deprived of his passport for a long time, about twenty years, leaving only telephone and written contact between Tigrid and Havel. And it was Havel, who invited Pavel Tigrid to Prague in December 1989 for his inauguration. Tigrid returned to his homeland after over forty years away to help build a democratic state.

Skirt, in Sorin Costina’s private collection, is a painting in oil on canvas. It is unsigned and undated, but is one of the well-known works of the artist Ion Grigorescu, at present the most well-known Romanian artist internationally. The painting is 32 cm in width and 58 cm in height. It was acquired on 20 April 1982 at an exhibition in Căminul Artei (Home of Art), the Union of Visual Artists gallery in Bucharest, at a price of 1,000 lei. At the time of its acquisition it was unframed. Its present frame was made from a rod of oak, at the suggestion of another contemporary artist of considerable fame in Romania, Paul Gherasim. It was brought to the collectors home by Ion Grigorescu himself, who stopped for a time in Brad in June 1982 on his way to a monastery in the region. Skirt may placed in the context of the artist’s visual experiments with the human body, a taboo theme in the communist period. It has been displayed in a number of thematic or solo exhibitions, including various Ion Grigorescu retrospectives, the most recent of which was hosted by the Museum of the Criş Land in Oradea in 2018.

This work and the Gvozden series were displayed for the first time in the salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1971. Gvozden is an invented character, a representative of the ‘guest workers’ – Yugoslavs who in the 1960s departed for temporary employment abroad, most frequently to Germany. Due to unsuccessful economic reforms, Yugoslav citizens in the mid-1960s were confronted with a rise in unemployment leading to the emigration of several hundred thousand Yugoslavs. As a result of the rapid growth of the German economy after the Second World War, West Germany needed to enlarge its labour force. In 1968, it signed an agreement with Yugoslavia. Yugoslavs, like the citizens of other nations working on a temporary basis, received ‘guest worker’ status: The Gastarbeiter agreements were aimed at low-skilled workers for jobs requiring few qualifications.