Anna Zemánkóvá was born in Olomouc, Moravia (then Czechoslovaka) in 1908. Although interested in drawing from a young age, she was discouraged by her father who wanted her to follow a more lucrative career. At his suggestion, she studied dentistry from 1923-26 and then worked as a dental technician until 1933. At age 25, she married First Lieutenant Bohumir Zemanek and stopped practicing: at that time, it was not socially acceptable for her to continue to work after her marriage. The young couple moved to the town of Brno, a major manufacturing center, and had four children. Although one son died at age four, two sons and one daughter survived.
The war years, with the Nazi occupation, were difficult; by 1948, with the Communists in firm control, the Zemaneks moved to Prague. Anna spent her time caring for her family, generally ignoring the external political turmoil. Her passions were listening to classical music and reading. With her children grown and her marriage in shambles, her personality changed: she began to have 'fits' and periods of severe depression. In 1960, her son Bohumil, an artist, remembering reports of an earlier interest in painting, brought her pastels and paints. She ignored the latter, but began drawing with the pastels, and immediately became consumed with artmaking. Into it she directed all her creative energies, attempting to channel universal forces into her practice. The previous societal boundaries that had been drawn for her—marriage, motherhood, then the shackling her spirit with age, a feeling of abandonment, and disease, and she reacted first with frustration, then anger, and finally with this ancient ululation of art-making that lasted her until she died. Her creations, whether in oil pastel, cut paper collages, or painted satin collages, are sublime.
There are some rare and fortunate times in one’s life when one is allowed by intent sometimes, yet most often by fluke or by luck, to witness on some sensual level of a beauty that is completely unadulterated and heart-piercingly direct. Mankind has never invented an adequate eschatology of words to match those moments. I am not sure that Anna Zemánková deliberately set out to make this kind of beauty. I am sure that it represents the outcome of a struggle for some kind of inner balance, a way of bursting out of the cage of her physical and emotional body, a way of thinking about things, of attempting to will an equilibrium. It was certainly a way of reordering the world. Life had drawn boundaries for her, shackling her spirit with age, a feeling of abandonment, and disease, and she reacted first with frustration, then anger, and finally with this ancient ululation of art-making that lasted her until the end and continues now beyond the physical. Her life was ultimately successful, then. She took a chance, dared to tap into something eternal and succeeded.
