Drahomír Josef Růžička - New York Impressions

"Just as you cannot expect to rush up to something you're seing for the first time, snap the shutter, and come away, and come away with a masterpiece. You've got to know all the angels, all the moods… if you expect to do more than scratch the surface."
Drahomír Josef Růžička

Drahomír Josef Růžička (born Trhová Kamenice 1870 - died Long Island 1960) brought to the culture of Czech photography his own experience, as attained in the USA. Between the two World Wars he disseminated the model that had proven successful for himself, an agile participant of the American photographic salons. Even though this bizarre international arena of artistic aspirations tended towards inertia and stagnation, it still evinced some degree of diversity. Růžička styled himself an urban photographer and was first an adherent of the method employed by Alfred Stieglitz in the magazine Camera-Work. Following this model, he over time brought his own form of drawing with the lens into focus. He counted among his personal friends Edward Steichen and Clarence H. White, together with whom he co-founded the organization Pictorial Photographers of America. In his own words, as paraphrased by the editor of the magazine Fotografický obzor, Augustin Škarda, it was in fact Růžička who came up with the idea to establish a public education society at a party at his house on Long Island.
After the outbreak of the First World War eroded traditional values, Czech amateur photographers felt the need to break free as soon as possible from the formal habits of the Belle Epoque, and were of the opinion that the Americans were going in the right direction. They were struck both by the poetic celebration of the modern city and especially its civic dominants, as well as the growing simplification of technology. Understandably so: by far not everybody had the talent to develop the positives in the reprinting stage with fanciful daubs of the brush, or to manually complete negatives by applying paint in the manner of actual painters. His promotion of a purist Pictorialism (the creation of prints on the basis of a purely mechanical projection of the negative) earned Růžička a level of publicity in the Czech amateur periodicals which has cast a sort of baleful shadow on his work lasting until today: historians sometimes rank him as part of the avant-garde (which is, however, invariably the responsibility of individual confusion, rather than the lack of art-historical focus of once un-interchangeable fronts).
D. J. Růžička expressed the faith of Anglo-American Pictorialists in the indivisibility of the impact of an imaginatively chosen entirety, composed in a sculptural manner. At the same time, let us remember his main motivation as an artist - to revel in the transformations of light on a given motif. His precise leanings were best articulated by Jaromír Funke, at the time the leading intellectual of the Czech photography scene. Funke was a generation younger than Růžička, and took the latter's counsel in his early days as a photographer.
D. J. Růžička was apparently an excellent companion. Never patronizing, during the evening debate sessions of the Czech Club of Amateur Photographers, he would even reveal the technical flaws of his own works. It is also to Funke's credit that he published a record of this experience. He summed up Růžička's 1925 exhibition in Prague by stating that the artist did not seek diversity in his subject matter: "As a Pictorialist, he relishes the beauty of values, and the expressive loveliness of objects. He operates exclusively within the bounds of a romantic Impressionism, a form of harmony to which even the skyscrapers of technology-driven America, when seen by him, succumb - being always surrounded by a luminous, brilliant atmosphere which becomes the heart of his Romanticism."
Funke eventually reassessed Růžička's contribution, in a cameo written in 1936 and reprinted in Fotografický obzor. His tone is still one of respect; but now he very visibly wrote from a more advanced vantage point, describing the compositions as refined, but formal. For an example, take certain of his photographs of skyscrapers, lit by a setting sun. It makes these majestic works of man loom terrifying in their monumentality, transforming them into fairytale castles, enchanting in their grandiose plasticity, form, and light. [...] It was in a sense a revelation that by merely photographing one could achieve such outstanding results, whose prerequisite was the photographer's perceptive eye. [...] Earlier work with soft lenses which added to photography an artificial moodiness was quite sensibly replaced by sharply defined lens."
Part of the fascination on the part of the Czech photographers was due to the excellent quality of Kodak photographic paper, to which Jan Lauschmann, an expert in photochemistry, could find no European equal. In his memoirs (as published in a magazine) he recorded Růžička's passion for the light conditions of early summer, which he would allegedly rush to meet before the crack of dawn. In an article titled Zkušenosti městského amatéra (The Experiences of an Urban Amateur) written for Fotografický obzor in 1922, Růžička specified: "When the sun has already climbed a little higher, an hour or two after sunrise, the mood is at its most charming. [...] Extremely picturesque pieces can be gleaned along the banks of ponds in public parks, particularly if the background is softened by a slight vapor or a subtle mist, (it is on such days that we get the best results) which lend the pictures a rare beauty."
A popular gynecologist among the Czech émigré community in New York, Drahomír J. Růžička was usually listed in catalogues with his professional title shortened to Dr. His photographs, such as A Bridge in Venice, Monumental Stairway, An Old Wall - Prague were left undated. Like his colleagues, Růžička was not concerned with the literal nature of the moment, but with timelessness. He committed his most successful photographs to platinum paper. The price of the exhibition pieces was precisely stated. When in 1933 he sent his work to the 16th Annual International Salon of Pictorial Photography, next to Růžička ($ 8) one could buy for instance also works by Leonard Misonne ($ 12-18). In January these were exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum, and in February at the M. H. De Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California. This type of gathering at such addresses was attended even by the genuine artists of the photography scene. In fact, the most successful Czech participant of the salons was the fully professional František Drtikol. Solo exhibitions were few and far between in those days, and so in order to win satisfaction, agile photographers sent their work to as many as thirty salons each year.
In Růžička we do not find nudes that nostalgically contemplate the beauty of the models, or rigorous exploits in terms of composition. His work has been examined in two monographic publications (dating to 1959 and 1990).
Drahomír J. Růžička and Jan Lauschmann - two men dedicated to photography and related through marriage - kept up a correspondence until Růžička's death. Thus we know that the Czech-American artist made his last exhibition print at the age of eighty-four. He symptomatically titled it Newyorská imprese (Impression of New York). By dating it to 1954 he simultaneously rounded off half a century from his beginnings in photography.
Růžička has already been commemorated as one of the remarkable figures of the past, in 2001 by PPF Art in the replica of Sudek's studio. The exhibition consisted of monochromatic works, the only type that the artist himself ever put on exhibition. When in the 1930s he began working with the new 35mm Kodachrome film for full-color slides, he approached them differently than his black and white photographs. These 35mm slides - designed for projection - presage the mood of 1970s work by Joel Meyerowitz or William Eggelston. In the second monograph dedicated to Růžička, Daniela Mrázková wrote about a collection of several hundred slides, carefully preserved by Jan Lauschmann; apparently a selection of those was presented at Růžička's solo exhibition of color photographs held at Photokina 86 in Cologne. Yet, as a magazine editor she published Lauchsmann's testimony of a mere few slides sent by Růžička as a showcase to the old country after the Second World War (see Revue Fotografie 1974/2). The scenery of New York, with a boat deck in the forefront painted red keeps recurring as a sort of quotation in literature on photography. One can understand that color descriptions change from one case to another. What should not waver, however, is the date. When first published, the photograph was dated 1940, at the exhibition 50 Years of Modern Color Photography organized by Manfred Heiting. Zdeněk Kirschner's report on Photokina 86 records two Růžička pieces at a retrospective summary exhibition (see Revue Fotografie 1987/2): let the solo exhibition in Cologne be therefore annulled as the monographer's myth. (Still, the surviving collection of images mounted on aluminum suggests that there were in fact six exhibition items). In the catalogue for Co je fotografie: 150 let fotografie / What is Photography. 150 Years of Photography, Mrázková dated the same picture to 1936, and subsequently insisted on this dating as editor (Fotografie Magazín 1996/4). The legend disseminated by the monograph is suggestive; according to this version, when leaving the Old Country for the last time in 1936, Růžička was said to have purchased an apparatus for gathering travel souvenirs - a small Kodak Retina camera… however, the survivor of this last parting Jan Lauschmann supervised a diploma work at FAMU in Prague (defended by Jiří Bursík in 1980) entitled Dr. D. J. Růžička - život a dílo, where the beginning of Růžička's work with color inversion is once again set as 1939. Thus even the most exact dating remains merely approximate: New York, 1930s - 1940s.
Josef Moucha

Bibliography:
Jeníček, Jiří: Drahomír Josef Růžička. Praha, SNKLHU 1959, p. 19.
Peterson, Christian A. - Mrázková, Daniela: The Modern Pictorialism of D. J. Ruzicka / Moderní piktorialismus D. J. Růžičky. Minnesota, Minneapolis Institute of Arts 1990.