MACHOTKA, Pavel 1936-

PERSONAL: Born August 21, 1936, in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); son of Otakar (a professor) and Jarmila (a social worker; maiden name, Mohr) Machotka; married Hannelore Gothe, April 6, 1963 (divorced, December, 1980); married Nina Hansen, September 10, 1989; children: (first marriage) Danielle, Julia. Ethnicity: "White." Education: University of Chicago, A.B., 1956; Harvard University, M.A., 1958, Ph.D., 1962. Politics: Democrat.

ADDRESSES: Home—Loc. Bacciana, 06014 Montone (PG), Italy. Office—Department of Psychology, Social Sciences II, University of California—Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. E-mail—pavel@machotka. com.

CAREER: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, instructor in social relations, 1962-65; University of Colorado, Medical Center, Denver, assistant professor, then associate professor of clinical psychology, 1965-70; University of California—Santa Cruz, associate professor, then professor of psychology, beginning 1970, provost of College V, 1976-79, chair of Academic Senate, 1992-94. Also exhibits works as a professional painter. Precinct worker for local Democratic party, 1968.

MEMBER: International Informatization Academy (Moscow; academician, 1996—), American Psychological Association (fellow; member of Division on Psychology and the Arts; president, 1978-79), American Psychological Society (fellow), Société Paul Cézanne, Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (vice president, 1992-93).

AWARDS, HONORS: Woodrow Wilson fellow, 1956; Fulbright fellow, 1958-60; named honorary professor, Perm State Institute of Arts and Culture, Perm, Russia, 1997; honorary D.H.C., Charles University, 1998.

WRITINGS:

(With D. G. Langsley, D. M. Kaplan, and others) The Treatment of Families in Crisis, Grune (New York, NY), 1968.

(With J. P. Spiegel) Messages of the Body, Grune (New York, NY), 1968, revised and condensed edition published as The Articulate Body, Irvington (New York, NY), 1982.

The Nude: Perception and Personality, Free Press (New York, NY), 1974.

Cézanne: Landscape into Art, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1996.

(Editor, with L. Dorfman, L. Martindale, and others) Emotion, Creativity, and Art, Perm State Institute of Art and Culture (Perm, Russia), 1997.

Style and Psyche: The Art of Lundy Siegriest and Terry St. John, Hampton Press (Cresskill, NJ), 1999.

Pavel Machotka: Light, Form, and Sensuality, Galleria LaLoggia (Sansepolcro, Italy), 2002.

Painting and Our Inner World: The Psychology of Image Making, Kluwer Academic Publishers (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including Empirical Studies of the Arts, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Leonardo, Journal of Experimental Psychology, American Journal of Psychiatry, and the Czech journal Aesthetica.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Cézanne: The Painter's Art.

SIDELIGHTS: Pavel Machotka once told CA: "I write when I have something to say: to report on some psychological research I have done, or to report discoveries made about a painter such as Cézanne. Articles are for a professional audience and written in the style of each field; books, on the other hand, which I prefer to write, are in my own voice and directed at the informed reader, and have as their purpose to reveal as much about myself as about my subjects, but that is inadvertent and only the effect of my having found a voice in which to write.

"In my psychological writings I have been influenced especially by Freud, particularly the case histories in which he reveals a novelist's sensitivity to his characters. My aim is ultimately to understand 'people' as against 'subjects,' and his respect for the individual's complex nature is a model worth following. In my writings on Cézanne, there have been three influences: John Rewald by his hardheaded and scrupulous respect for facts, and Roger Fry and Lawrence Gowing by their painterly sensitivity and linguistic elegance.

"I am quite fluent when writing about psychology; perhaps it is because I have done it so much. More difficult—slower, more subject to revision and elaboration—has been writing about Cézanne. His art is too important to give anything less than one's best, and one's best includes perception, sensitivity, respect for facts, and above all precise yet evocative language.

"The roots of writing are not always accessible, and some may go back quite far, but I do recall early in my life wanting to make some major contribution to the psychology of aesthetics and to understanding Cézanne. I think The Nude: Perception and Personality and Cézanne: Landscape into Art, respectively, come closest to realizing that. Other major writings have been responses to discoveries—usually unplanned."

More recently Machotka added: "Two books on creativity came from my contact with painters and research into the dynamics of image-making in ordinary people: Style and Psyche: The Art of Lundy Siegriest and Terry St. John and Painting and Our Inner World: The Psychology of Image Making. Another unplanned book was an art book about my paintings, with a large number of reproductions and a critical essay by an Italian critic. That one responded to a one-man show I had in Sansepolcro, Italy. Now, I am following up my earlier work on Cézanne with a full-scale critical study of his work."