Pavel Alexander TAŤOUN (1954)

Portrét

We played Russian roulette with the regime

The artist Pavel Alexander Taťoun was born on 6 September 1954 in Lomnice u Rýmařova. However the family soon moved to Prague over the father’s work: “My father Ivan was a Social Democrat after the war. He was promoted and became a political employee. When after February 1948 the Communists began to swallow them up he was persuaded to work in the unions. He was a dutiful, believing Communist who was sobered up by the Soviet invasion 20 years later.” The end of the 1960s was a turning point for Taťoun. Following the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops on 18 August 1968 Pavel’s father didn’t speak for days. He voluntarily gave up a lucrative post as deputy secretary at the Central Council of Trade Unions, handed in his party book and joined a printing works in Smíchov as a labourer. In the eventful days after the invasion began Pavel, then 13, took justice into his own hands, along with lime and a paint brush. He and a group of friends did their best to confuse the occupiers on the streets, painting over direction signs, and also wrote unambiguous messages – “Ivan, go home!” – on pavements and roads. 

Pavel Taťoun, who had begun painting and drawing at the age of two, showed great talent. Despite this he was not accepted into the renowned Václav Hollar arts secondary school in Prague, due to his father’s demonstrative split from the Communist Party. Pavel became an apprentice instead. “I was forced to do an apprenticeship in a field that I found neither enjoyable nor interesting, as a low-voltage telecommunications operator.” At this time, inspired by the Beats in America and doomed French poets, he also rented his own studio. He spent his days working, painting and meeting people from the nascent Prague underground. He got into the music of The Plastic People of the Universe and DG 307. On Fridays at the legendary pub U Malvaze he would discuss art, life and the perverse nature of the regime, which with the onset of normalisation was slowly but surely turning the screw. It did this through censorship and banning everything with even a slight whiff of freedom of expression or artistic freedom. “Underground” people responded to the situation in their own style, organising secret visual arts and musical events by word of mouth. It was in this way that on 30 March 1974 Pavel Taťoun set off for the village of Rudolfov near České Budějovice, where a concert of the blacklisted Prague groups Adept, DG 307 and Plastic People of the Universe was planned. Only Adept played, and just three songs. Its enforced ending and the subsequent brutal intervention by armed state security forces led the event to become known as the Budějovice Massacre. The hippies in attendance were taken en masse to Prague by train, after passing through an underpass at České Budějovice station where Public Security officers beat them with truncheons while police dogs barked.  Soon afterwards Pavel experienced his first State Security (StB) interrogation. “They wanted names and I didn’t give them any. I repeatedly insisted I had overheard talk about the event. In the end they let me go. It definitely helped that in those days I was a regular employee, meaning they had nothing on me. But from that moment what they knew about me was that I was their enemy.”

In the second half of the 1970s the situation intensified. Part of the underground was behind bars. The StB hunted down Charter 77 signatories, including Pavel’s older brother Petr. The family experienced home searches and unceasing harassment. On the advice of friends from the dissent Pavel Taťoun decided to leave Prague and move to Moravia, to the village of Vlčice, near Loštice. He joined the local unified agricultural cooperative as a labourer. At the same time he continued painting and remained in the dissent, serving as a link between Moravia and the capital. He regularly visited his family in Prague, using those trips to smuggle samizdat literature, which he circulated at home among a growing circle of friends. A lot of paper was needed for copying texts and books banned by the regime and finding it involved a great deal of effort and conspiracy. Buying a large amount of paper from a shop could lead to denunciation and further StB interest. Pavel found his own solution. He would drive his car up to the rear entrance of a Šumperk paper mill where his friend Milan Hlaváček worked and the two would fill up the boot with cast off paper that the factory hadn’t processed. Pavel would head back to Prague that same night or just after daybreak, to evade detection. At the same time he did enter the StB’s sights again in 1984, when he put on a large exhibition of his paintings in the House of Culture in Loštice. Alongside the piece The Fall of Babylon – depicting world powers from medieval times on, including a swastika by Adolf Hitler’s profile as well as the five-pointed red star, all of which are engulfed in God’s flames, signifying transience – hung pictures with Biblical themes. “I had just returned from Prague with samizdat and I wanted to check out the exhibition. But the House of Culture was shut, sealed by a police tape. The StB had confiscated The Fall of Babylon. They returned it to me a year later, when its defective nature had been investigated at the Ministry of the Interior in Prague, no less.” He was barred from exhibiting again until the fall of communism. 

Pavel Taťoun was actively involved in the smuggling, circulation and copying of samizdat literature until the Velvet Revolution in November 1989, when his brother Petr was a close friend and colleague of future president Václav Havel. This is how with the first winds of freedom Pavel’s paintings appeared on the walls of an improvised presidential office in the Havels’ returned house on the then Engels Embankment. In the early 1990s Pavel Taťoun served as Olga Havlová’s driver during a visit to Italy. In 2021 he was still living in Vlčice near Loštice, freely making a living, as he had longed to all his life, from painting.