Golem—Man Awakened with Glowing Hammer

Among the outstanding works of the “youngest surrealist” František Hudeček (1909–1990) is Golem—Man Awakened with Glowing Hammer (1935–1937).¹ A hallucinatory dream sequence, the picture shows a weary male figure—apparently wearing a diving suit, deep in the dark troughs of the ocean—being threatened by an eerie monster with clawlike arms reminiscent of an insect. The amorphous figuration reveals Hudeček’s technique of automatic painting, in which he used sheets of starch paper and distorting mirrors to transfer all sorts of deceptive shapes into the pictures.² The awakening of the man by a blow to his head with a glowing hammer may be read as an analogy for the reanimation of the golem—by the Shem, the unspoken Hebrew name of God, or by means of a symbolic illumination that guides the way from the murkiest depths of the mind toward new knowledge. In this case, it probably refers most of all to the political situation of the time, and specifically the Spanish Civil War.

The figure of the golem was widely prevalent in the Czech context in the period. Hudeček may have encountered it in legends from Prague, in a 1930 production by the Liberated Theater, or in Julien Duvivier’s Franco-Czech film Le Golem (1936).³ Artistic treatments of the golem frequently feature fire. Similarly to the golem, it has a frightening destructive power, and it carries great significance for human beings as the vital ingredient in the alchemistic transmutation of metal and the forging of the world. Hudeček’s father was a village blacksmith, and the artist was fascinated by fire from his earliest childhood. In the dramatic year of 1938, he made a pastel drawing entitled My Father’s Smithy, in which the glowing forge, surrounded by streams of sparks and the figure of a sorcerer, becomes a focus connecting the world and the cosmos.⁴ The unconscious, destructive actions of the hammer-wielding giant in Golem, in turn, recall Hudeček’s painting The Wanderer—The Specter of the Civil War (1937).⁵

Arno Pařík is an art historian whose research interests include the history of Jewish Prague, the reconstruction of Jewish sites and synagogues, Jewish art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and art from the Theresienstadt ghetto. He has curated many exhibitions at the Jewish Museum in Prague and written widely on Jewish memorials and artists.

Translated by Kate Sturge