Damjan/Damian Pešan: Transfer of Experience

Name: Transfer of Experience

Author: Damjan/Damian Pešan

Dating: 1956

Location: on the door head of the main entrance to the Faculty of Economics, VŠB-TUO at Sokolská Street 2416/33 in Moravian Ostrava

Execution: three sandstone reliefs, 120 x 90 cm, the central panel marked PEŠAN 1956 in the lower right corner of the frame

TEACHER AND STUDENT OR THE DIDACTICS AS A RELIEF

Damjan/Damian Pešan seems to be an artist oriented towards woodcarving, church themes and associated primarily with the prominent First Republic architect Jože Plečnik. That is why it is quite remarkable – and perhaps slightly mysterious – how he managed to receive the sculptural contracts in Ostrava, or more precisely in Poruba. There, in 1956, he created a group of four statues of children, young pioneers, on a portico ledge of a block of flats.

In the same year, Pešan completed reliefs on the front facade of today’s Faculty of Economics in Sokolská Street in the centre of Moravian Ostrava. Each of the three stone panels captures a couple of half-figures, of which the elder one always represents a professional experience, and the other a student who is being educated – first in the field of mining, then geology, and finally metallurgy. The three-dimensional images transition from low to high relief, and in the contour are identically formatted as large voussoirs located on the massive door head above the front entrance to the vestibule of the building. It is noticeable that this time, the author worked with stone similar to the way he did with carving before, even though the themes of all three reliefs are purely civilian with regard to their location. Though in the spirit of traditional Ostrava iconography, they go against the descriptive schemes of that time through the method of their creation. The sculptor carved each figure to extend beyond the frame, almost monumentally, without any miniature modelling and schematic gestures, as ordered by the ideology of that period. Thus, his work is much closer to the First Republic tradition of the monumentalized figures of the miners and smelters from the repertoire of the work of the Ostrava sculptor Augustin Handzel, or the sculptor Josef Kubíček from Brno, who was temporarily based in Ostrava, rather than to the sculptural representatives of the work in the so-called Socialist Realism style. After all, Pešan is locally close to the sculptural work at the administrative palaces of Ostrava from the 1920s a 1930s.

Façade of the Faculty of Economics with reliefs, photo by Roman Polášek

Damjan/Damian Pešan

(1887 – precise date of death unknown, assumed after 1969)

Work: Transfer of Experience

The personality of this artist gives a somewhat strange impression in the Czech environment. Damian Pešan was born in Prague and during his creative life worked as a sculptor and a woodcarver. He received his education at the School of Applied Arts in Prague (1908–1914 and 1920–1923), under supervision of Emanuel Novák, Jan Kastner, Celestýn Klouček, and Josef Drahoňovský. The training provided him with a unique preparation for the design and craftsmanship that could later apply in the field of applied art industry. One of the main objectives of education was to create a sense of material and the ability to combine individual art disciplines. Before the First World War, the school was also important as a starting point for artistic avant-garde. All this, combined with the work under architect Jože Plečnik, was a substantial contribution to Pešan‘s artistic career. Still, the art history literature is quiet about this artist; we can find only incomplete glossary information and his work is only reminded in connection with Plečnik’s architecture. At the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, Pešan created a bronze sculpture of two bulls carrying a canopy on the so-called Bull’s Staircase, which connects the passage from the third courtyard with the Na valech Garden (in Czech On A Fortified Line) at the Prague Castle, and seven years later wood carved the figures of Christ and six Czech patrons for Plečnik’s Church of the Sacred Heart of the Lord in Prague’s district Vinohrady. In the 1930s and 1940s, Pešan‘s woodcarving was also associated with the work for puppeteers, which was at the time when he taught at the State Central School of Housing Industry in Prague (it was established in 1921 as the State School for Wood Processing, today‘s the College and Secondary School of Applied Arts in Prague-Žižkov). There one can find original wooden furniture in the library and the principal’s office, where Pešan and František Kment have also incorporated their wooden statues.