Tomáš Fantl: To the bottom of the world at the toss of a coin
When Tomáš Fantl was a small child, the course of his life was decided, quite literally, by the toss of a coin, and as a result he grew up in Melbourne instead of his native Prague. Today Tomáš is a successful artist and has exhibited in many countries around the world. For the last few years, Prague has once again become Tomáš’s home. He has just published a collection of poems, written over several decades, which reflect the many layers of his life, including his relationship to art, to his Czech roots and the importance of chance and serendipity in his life.
We started our conversation with Tomáš reading a poem from the collection, Fifty Poems. It reflects his work as an artist.
Smudge
Dank!
Smudge!
The air holds a nervous shrill.
Thick humidity deadens all echo.
The smudge appears, there,
On my drawing,
The Rorschach on my hand.
It sits emblazoned,
Fully in focus,
Screaming loud,
Louder than my work.
On the surface,
The paper thick.
Actually –
Beautiful smudge!
Very beautiful!
Indigo!
Not so on my left hand,
Where it’s incised into my handprint,
Lacking all delicacy.
I’ve had smudge before.
Not often but,
often.
A blot even!
It allows me to obfuscate!
Ah, yes!
Use the smudge!
Delve and recreate!
I make the viral critter perform!
Tamed!
As the poem goes on, a second blot appears. In art, unintended things happen...
“It does happen, and I think I learned to use the smudge. To me, in creativity there’s no mistake because all those things that you perceive as being not relevant when they happen can actually be a way of learning and you can make them relevant. That’s what I do and that’s actually what I’ve done with my life. I’ve used serendipity very often in just living.”
And chance – or serendipity – has played a huge role in your life, going right back to your beginnings as a child. Let’s go back to your childhood. You were born here in Prague.
“I was born in Prague 7 on Veletržní Street and my father and his brother who had survived six years in the Czechoslovak Free Army under British command came back here after the war because they were fierce patriots.”
They were Jewish, so if they had stayed they would have been sent to concentration camps.
“Yes. My father’s father had passed away when he was ten years old, so he was not in the picture for a long time, but they found out that their mother had perished as soon as she reached Auschwitz. And the younger sister, not my grandfather’s sister but my father’s sister, survived because she was able to work. She somehow survived, and she eventually went to Argentina.”
So, your father and your uncle came back to Prague. This was before the communist coup of 1948, and they thought that they would build a new life here in Czechoslovakia.
“Yes. They began a new life here. My father worked for an insurance company, and I was born. We lived on Veletržní Street, just around the corner from the Veletržní Palace. And we lived next door to my uncle on the sixth floor.”
And what about your mother?
“My father met my mother when he and his brother were fighting in Palestine. My mother’s story is a very difficult one and I never could ask her what had happened. She was one of eight children, from just across the Czech border in Poland, literally round the corner from Auschwitz, and she ran away from home as a teenager. She went down the rivers and somehow got to Palestine.
“My mother could never talk about her father or anybody in the family. It so happened that my father met her in Palestine and married her. That’s the short of it. Both her parents and four of her brothers and sisters perished in concentration camps. She didn’t know it at the time, but three of them after the war ended up in Australia. It was under their sponsorship that we were able to get to Australia.”
At the toss of a coin
So, after the war your parents and your uncle were living in Veletržní Street, and then came the communist takeover in February 1948.”
“When the communists came to power here, given all the fighting and their experiences in the army during the war, my father and his brother didn’t want to leave, but they both had children and so they decided to apply for a visa. At that time most of the visas were offered by America, Canada, Britain and Australia, and they got a visa for Australia. But the communist authorities said that only one family would be allowed to go with one suitcase.
“My life has been dependent on what happened then. The two brothers – my father and his brother – decided the only way to solve this life problem was to take a Czech crown – I don’t mean a crown for the head, I mean the coin – and to throw the coin. It landed on the head side and we got the visa. My uncle and his family stayed here for the full period of communism, and my father and his brother were only able to write aerogrammes, as they were at that time. I think in the entire period of communism, there were probably two phone calls. So we went to Australia, to the bottom of the world, totally cut off.”
At the beginning you talked about serendipity and chance. Given the extraordinary chance of how you ended up leaving Prague, it is not surprising that you have seen chance as playing a big role in your life.
“It played an extraordinary role in my life even as a child. Most children are looked after and nurtured by their parents – and I was too – but my parents had to get jobs in factories, so I went to school on trams and buses by myself. This was in Melbourne. I became very independent.”
Did you speak Czech at home?
“We did. We spoke only Czech, but it was familiar Czech. When I first came back here during communism, I was too frightened to speak because at home I only heard the familiar form. As an example, my parents would say, ‘ty budeš’ or ‘ty půjdeš’ or whatever. I never heard the formal ‘vy budete’.”
So you didn’t know how to be polite to strangers!
“I had no idea how to be polite because in the English language the ‘I and thou’ had long gone.”
Becoming an artist
As you were growing up, did you always know that you were going to be an artist?
“No.”
How did that happen?
“I had some wonderful teachers and I think if a child has a wonderful teacher who imprints on them and nurtures them, something magical happens. I had a desire to be a doctor, but I know that I would have been a creative doctor. I wouldn’t have been sitting in a surgery and just seeing patient after patient after patient.
“I’ve got a few schoolbooks from those times. I drew in a very idiosyncratic way. That was serendipitous again, because one of my mother’s brothers remained a bachelor, and he would go on cruise ships. One day he came back – I was five years old – and he brought a box which contained three tiny bottles of different coloured inks. They weren’t available in Australia. So that was a serendipitous thing, that I received something no one else had at that time in Australia.”
But you didn’t leave school and go straight on to study art.
“No, and that’s another story. My father insisted that I should study accountancy. So we bought all the textbooks and I went to university, and I lasted six weeks. I thought if I do accountancy my whole life is going to be in a debit column and in a credit column, and I’ll be going, like a train, up that end and then turning round and coming back again… and again up that end, then coming back. So I left.
“My father didn’t like that, but I was pretty feisty. We didn’t argue about it, but I decided not to continue. But it was too late to go to art school that year, so I went to night school. Then I studied four years in the academy. I had fantastic teachers and I learned to draw exceedingly well. Drawing for an artist at that time was life-drawing, learning from the human body. It wasn’t just making marks and so on, it’s actually teaching your eyes how to look and not just see. Most people see and they don’t look.”
And to this day your work is figurative…
“It is figurative and always remained figurative, but in a way it also remained narrative.
Back to Bohemia
“I came back to Czechoslovakia the first time in 1975 on an Australian passport. My parents were terrified because in that passport it said that I was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. But I said, ‘I don’t think the communists are going to make an international situation over me!’ And I came by car. It was navy blue Volvo with maroon leather seats. When I came I didn’t realise that there were so few cars, so in many ways I became the Prince of Bohemia! That’s one of the reasons I used the title for one of my poems.”
That’s a good cue for us to hear an extract from the poem Prince of Bohemia, which deals with your complex relationship to the country of your birth. Let’s hear the first few stanzas.
The Prince of Bohemia
I am the Bohemian Prince, in my skin.
Incognito, but yet I am.
Claiming the ether
Strolling, all routes.
Coronet unseen
Judicious my tack
From the lofty bastion, Prague Castle atop.
I can’t stop!
Iridescent jewels on canvas and paper
I make.
Stake my claim, denoting my histories,
forging my thoughts
in bursting images
my trumpets roar.
My Bohemia
From where I left to that bottom entity.
But I came back
to the richness of my throne
where I had always grown
and lost and won, and won again.
Sometime becalmed, then on the rush.
The semaphore called – always –
to return to my coronet
and anoint my head
before dead!
Throughout the poem there are references to Czech history, to your own life, to Australia…
“I think people in Europe would not believe what Australia was like back then and what it meant for my parents to go to Australia at that time, in 1949, when you couldn’t even get rye bread there. It didn’t exist. It was just white stodgy British bread. My father inculcated into me that I am a European and that I am Czech. And I was always very proud to be Czech and middle-European. That stayed with me all my life.”
Did the Jewish part of your identity stay with you as well?
“It did. I was very proud of that too, but I was made to be fearsome of it, because when I started school, in those days on Friday mornings the Christian minister would come. And I would go outside into the corridor and sit on a bench looking straight into the classroom – and they all saw me – and of course in those days it was taught that the Jews killed Christ.
“So almost every Friday I had to run home, because the kids were chasing me because I’d killed Christ. So it was a very difficult thing to be openly Jewish. But I was. I didn’t trumpet it, but I didn’t run away from it.”
Was the Holocaust ever spoken about in your family?
“The Holocaust was never spoken about but it was all around me, because almost all of my parents’ friends, and my mother’s sister and her husband, had numbers on their arms, and I saw them all the time. I knew what they were, but we didn’t ask any questions, because they had come to Australia, they had survived, and they needed to survive, to keep surviving. It was very difficult. It's always emotional, but time hadn’t gone on long enough to be able to talk about these things in an objective way.”
To return to Prague in 1975… there you are with your Volvo. You must have turned heads. Did you have a sense of familiarity as you were walking through the streets of Prague?
“No. All in all I came back four times during communism. So I became better and better – and I took more and more risks. There’s a bridge that goes from behind the National Museum here to Nusle. It was brand new, built during communism, and I was driving with my uncle and my aunt and my cousin in my Volvo, when all of a sudden on that bridge I was stopped by police.
“So I pulled over, I took out my passport, and they started speaking to me in Czech. Well, not only did I not know any formal Czech, but I wasn’t going to speak in Czech to them.
So I said, ‘Do you speak English?’
‘Anglicky, anglicky, tady nikdo nemluví anglicky. Tady je Českolovensko!’
I understood what they were saying.
I said, ‘Parlez vous francais?’
‘Francais, francais. Tady se nemluví francouzsky!’
‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’ I was living in Vienna at one time so I spoke German.
‘Deutsch, Deutsch!’
And then the colleague of the policeman came and said, ‘Co děláš s ním? What are you doing with him? He’s a foreigner!’
And the policeman gave me my passport, saluted me and said, ‘Arrivederci!’
And he let me go.
I looked at my uncle who was sitting in the front seat and he was completely drenched in perspiration, because my car had English number plates. If anybody had asked him or my aunt for their identity papers, they would have known they were Czech and we would have been in trouble at that time.”
The two sides of the family were split at the toss of a coin when you were three years old. When you came back to Czechoslovakia and once again connected with the part of the family that had stayed, was that difficult?
“It was difficult, especially during communism. My aunt, my father’s auntie, had survived Auschwitz. She had the most wonderful humour. She was always singing and always laughing. But my uncle was scared of absolutely everything. He was totally the opposite to me and my father, because it is a hard thing to stay and for so many years to live under such tyranny. I would walk in the streets with my uncle and be very casual, and my uncle said, ‘You can’t do that.’ He was terrified all the time. So there was a long distance between the two brothers, not only physically but in what they had become. They’d fought together during the war and survived, but they had become these separate entities.”
As an artist in Australia and Europe
We’ve jumped several decades. In the meantime you also had a career as an artist.
“In my very first exhibition I sold a lot of work. I was very, very young and the director of the brand new National Gallery of Australia which is in Canberra, purchased five works of mine. And I thought, where do I go from here? Where’s my career going to go now? I had a few more exhibitions and I also got a teaching degree.
“In those days – pre-terrorism – tourists could come to Australia and they could extend their visa to stay and sell their return ticket to a travel agent. So I bought a ticket from Melbourne, Australia to Brussels, Belgium. I knew nothing about Belgium. I had schoolboy French, but I happened to meet somebody who knew somebody and who put me in touch with a gallery in Brussels, which was one of the best galleries as it turned out, and I had a show. I sold a lot of work, and then I moved to Antwerp and had lots of other shows in other parts of Belgium. And so things happened.
“Then I went to London. I got odd jobs to survive, sharing flats with other people, I was creating, I had an exhibition. Then I wrote to Henry Moore who was probably the most famous sculptor of the twentieth century. I wrote to ask if I could come to see the studios in Hertfordshire.
“I spent a day there and I met him. He had sculptural assistants. I wrote and asked if there was any chance of getting a job – and I got a job. All sorts of things happened through that too.”
And you went back to Australia and had your own family.
“I have a son, Raphael and a daughter whose name is Matisse. When they were seven and four my wife and I divorced, but they were little, and I stayed there for over thirty years until they were well and truly out of secondary school. I came back overseas every two or three years for six weeks and I always came here to Prague for two weeks to visit my extended family and to keep my own Czech connection.
“Once the children grew up, they started leading their own lives and again something very fateful happened in Melbourne. Across the road from where I had a studio was my bank, a branch of Westpac, one of Australia’s four leading banks.
“One day this person came into the bank who had a senior job in Westpac. She was sent to that branch where I had been going for many years to make it run better. I met her and I met her husband, and then one day on a Sunday morning two years later, I was having a coffee in a coffee shop just below my studio, and in she walked. She was wearing jeans, which I hadn’t seen before because she was always very corporate. She sat down with me and told me that David her husband and she were moving back to the UK. Maggie is Scottish and David was born in the UK. At the end of that she gave me her email address and I put it in my phone as we all do, and I never gave it another thought.
“Three years later I was in London, in the little two-star hotel which I always went to in Pimlico, and at the end of the day I was just sitting there doing a drawing or something like that, and for no reason whatsoever her name popped into my head. I looked into my phone and sent her an email saying, ‘Hello Margaret and David. I don’t know if you remember me. I’m in London. It would be nice to see you.’ And she wrote back to me saying that David had just very recently died during surgery. She decided that she’d come to London and meet me. We saw each other a few times. We had great fun. I hadn’t laughed for a long time. I was coming to Prague to visit my family and she came here for a week. I went back to Australia, packed up my things and we got together.”
A lifetime of poetry
And you moved to Prague.
“We moved initially to London for three years and then we moved to Prague. We have been here for eight or nine years now.”
And Maggie persuaded you to bring out this collection of poems…
“Well, she didn’t persuade anything really. When we were living in London, we were at our favourite pub just off King’s Road, Chelsea. It was a beautiful day, and we were sitting outside at a little table, and she saw that I was writing in a little thin book. She asked me what I was doing.
“I had never told anybody what I told her. I said rather shyly, ‘I’m writing poetry.’ I’ve been writing poetry since I was thirteen years old, because I love language, I love using it, I can express myself, and it’s just for me. And she asked me if she could read some of the poems. And so again I very sheepishly handed it over to her, and she started reading.
“Immediately, without me even knowing, she went on the internet and looked at which publishing houses in America and the UK deal with poetry. She got an answer back and they said, ‘Send us fifty poems for us to consider.’ That was how the London publisher, Olympia Publishers, decided that they would publish this book.”
You had always been writing poetry, but up to that point you had never considered publishing it. Did you feel any connection between your poetry and your work as an artist?
“I did. I had the most extraordinary English and history teacher when I was at secondary school. He imprinted on me the love of language, and I just started writing. I loved literature, I loved writing, and so I began to write poetry.”
Let’s hear another extract from one of your poems. This is a poem which I think has very current political connotations.
“This is from a poem which I wrote here in Prague in 2018. I don’t usually talk about the dates, but this is relevant. It’s called Bended Flesh. I’ll read just two verses.”
I cool my tongue.
These are times of encroaching freefall.
Raisins lie dry, shrivelled in bowl,
like an old corpse in the desert.
Balsamic lies in catatonic blobs
in the easy flow of olive oil.
Inane Trump bequeaths tweeted legacy.
Putin waits and kills … a few more!!!
I sit in my Prague of betrayed histories.
I curl my lip of disgust.
Putin said, “A person who chooses his fate
will regret it a thousand times.”
Lonely is exile
I felt, as a child … and on!!
The harridan bursts in.
Punch drunk for confrontation!
“Since the Ukraine war Maggie is always reminding me that I wrote that back in 2018. It was almost a prediction of what was going to happen.”
You are settled in Prague now. Do you both feel at home in this city?
“I feel very much at home and I think Maggie has grown to feel at home, but it’s not the at home that I thought it was going to be. It’s not the at home where I can feel that way emotionally, but it is my homeland absolutely.”
Let’s end with another extract from your poem Prince of Bohemia. This is from the very end of the poem.
Furtive glances run Charles Bridge
as comic artists steal the cash.
Smetana grimaces at the squeals,
the blackened saints observe, erect.
Sentinel gulls, ordered, aligned,
neatly placed along the rope.
Lanterns … no … lights,
gas lit, everywhere.
Glorious!
Vainglorious!
The trajectory is set
The Castle surmounts.
I am secured.
Quid et quo!
And … maybe to be continued.
