Current Affairs Exhibition shows diverse work and fortunes of Josef Čapek
If artist Josef Čapek is less known to non-Czechs than his younger brother Karel, the writer, that’s all the more reason to visit the new exhibition dedicated to his life and work at the National Library. The show, which opens on Wednesday, commemorates the 125th birthday of the jack of all artistic trades, and recalls the very different fortunes and pursuits of his professional life.
Josef Čapek
People from anywhere in the world might know some of the fine art work of
Josef Čapek, his other international claim to fame being his suggestion of
the word ‘robot’ for his brother Karel’s play R.U.R., which has
surely entered every modern language. Czechs themselves meet this
personality in childhood, through his tales and illustrations of The Little
Dog and the Kitty from 1929.
But Josef Čapek, like his more famous brother, was truly an artistic Renaissance man: a graphic designer, scenographer, poet and literary critic, among many other things – all presented in the new exhibit on display at the Clementinum in Prague. Gina Boháčková of the Karel Čapek Memorial told me more:
'Foot bath'
“We made an exhibition about the life and work of Josef Čapek, who was
an important painter and personality but has always been in the shadow of
his brother Karel. He was not only a painter, but also a writer, a poet and
a philosopher. So on 30 panels we document his artistic work and his life,
showing not only his youth but also his studies, his first writings with
his brother, pre-war avant-garde paintings and, at the end of his life, his
fight against fascism and totalitarianism, and his death in a concentration
camp.”
Čapek spent almost all of WWII in a concentration camp, and died just weeks before the end of the war. How is that painful period of his life recalled in the exhibition?
“It is remembered with two paintings that he made in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, and an original collection of poems from the concentration camps that were published after the Second World War.”
'The Little Dog, the Kitty and toys'
Čapek’s poems written in the concentration camps are credited with
having been of great comfort to his fellow prisoners, who copied them and
shared them amongst themselves. He died in the Bergen-Belsen camp in April
of 1945, in the days just before or after its liberation. His burial site
is unknown, and so he was given one of only two symbolic gravestones in the
Vyšehrad cemetery of notable Czechs.
The exhibition at the Clementinum, however, deals also with the happier times of Josef Čapek’s life, such as his work for children. It also includes many of the publications of the National Library on which he collaborated either as a writer or an illustrator, and many of the monographs kept by the Karel Čapek Memorial fund.
The exhibition will be open until July 4.
