The Life and Art of Vojtech Kubasta (1914-1992)

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Nazi Occupation and World War II

Despite Kubasta’s degree in engineering and architecture and Pokorny Sr.’s connections, architectural projects were difficult to obtain. According to a photograph annotated by Kubasta, he began teaching around 1937 at the Rotter School of Graphic Design. Kubasta then worked for a local plastics manufacturer, Baklax, designing both household objects and advertising and marketing promotions. While working there, he made the transition from architect to graphic designer. His experience on the Quadrifoliacs’ commissions honed his decorative and graphic design skills and laid the groundwork for later involvement in many successful commercial projects.

Through the efforts of well-known professors at the Polytechnic, (Oldrich Blazícek, Zdenek Wirth, V.V. Stech, and Antonín Engel), Kubasta was able to secure several jobs designing dust jackets, exlibris, and other illustration work. Pokorny contended that Kubasta went into the field of publishing by drawing scenes from Old Prague, which “especially when the Germans were around, people liked and spent money on. Publishing was good business,” and “Kubasta made money.”7

The art of Czech puppetry flourished in the mid-twentieth century with fairy tale themes predominating. “Artists, authors and actors [wanted] to stress…the puppet theatre [as] an artistic genre”.8 In the late 1930s and into the early 1940s, Kubasta worked for Cenek Sovák, a popular writer and director of a noted puppet theater, Loutková scéna v dome Komenského. Komenského is a reference to Johann Amos Comenius (Jan Amos Komensky,1592-1670) of Bohemia who in 1654 published, Orbis sensualium pictus (The World Around Us in Pictures). Comenius is known as “the father of books for children and of picture-books especially”.9 Kubasta designed puppet stage sets of small Czech villages, the interiors of castles, and even some puppet costumes. Featured in Sovák’s theater was the puppet, Jezek Píchacek , a hedgehog. He used the character to illustrate a series of books for Sovák published by Dolezal in the 1940s. The story of the hedgehog family is easily understood, even by those too young to read or unable to read Czech, because of the anthropomorphized expressions—arched eyebrows, down-turned mouths, and joyous smiles—on the faces of the animal characters.

In 1941, Kubasta illustrated, in color and black and white, Joyful Stories for Children (Veselé vypráevní detem - Dolezal). It was written by Vlasta Burian, a famous Czech actor of the 1930s and 40s known as ‘The King of Comedians’. Some of the illustrations for the book were reminiscent of the cartoons from The New Yorker, especially the one of New York paparazzi filming the performing dog and mouse. In order to keep working in films while the Nazis occupied Prague, Burian entertained various German officers at his villa. The Communists later called him a Nazi collaborator and banned him forever from the theater. Burian’s reputation was later reinstated and his likeness is now ensconced in the Prague Wax Museum.10

In 1001 Arabian Nights (Arabské pohádky z 1001 noci, Dolezal-1942) Kubasta demonstrated his knowledge of art history by borrowing from the painting, “Escaping Criticism” by Père Borrell del Caso (1835-1910). By using trompe l’oeil, the genie in the story appears to escape the confines of the illustration. The three-dimensional style of illusion foreshadowed his later pop-up structures that characteristically extended beyond the margins of the page. The illustrations in 1001 Arabian Nights are lavish and boldly colored, with fine line marginalia and decorative initial letters giving the book the feel of an ancient sacred text. The endpapers are remarkable because they place the reader in the center of a bustling Arabian bazaar surrounded by fanciful minarets. Typical of Kubasta‘s trademark style, a small dog is shown lost in the maze of the narrow streets.

At the publisher Dolezal, Kubasta met the eminent art historian, Dr. Otakar Storch-Marien and his career in the books arts was significantly advanced by the chance reunion. Storch-Marien’s new association with the long-established Prague publishing house, Aventinum, served as a “driving force” for the struggling company and “the firm entered a new and productive phase.”11 During the height of World War II, Czech publishers, “managed… with few exceptions… to withstand the pressure of the occupying forces attempting to lure them into active co-operation, and avoided the publishing of anti-Semitic, Nazi, or other pro-regime oriented production.”12 To circumvent supporting the Nazi agenda, Czech publishers printed the classics or titles that appealed to national pride.

Working together, Kubasta and Storch-Marien created a series of three suites in portfolios, each with five architectural lithographs of Prague’s monuments. The lithographs were hand-colored, often by Kubasta’s younger sister, Jarmila.13 Each portfolio was accompanied by a few pages of text written by the most notable historians on the subject. The three limited editions were: Loretta’s Meditations (Loretánská Meditace-1943), Strahov Melancholy (Melancholie Strahova-1944) and Waldstein Palace (Valdstejnsky Palác v Praze -1944). The last was by Zdenek Wirth, a prominent art historian, who wrote extensively on Prague’s historical sites and organized a movement for the preservation of its historical monuments. In all the portfolios, Kubasta used a warm, soft-colored palette and each one featured a uniquely designed title-page vignette.

The great success of the first three portfolios was followed by a fourth one, Klementinum (1945). The Klementinum, a sixteenth-century Baroque structure in Prague, was a Jesuit college and the site of a mathematical museum and astronomical observatory. Today it houses the national and university libraries. Perhaps Kubasta’s optimism at the end of the war motivated him to design a standout volume showcasing fanciful images of the heavenly bodies and the signs of the zodiac. In any case, the images marked the beginnings of the exuberant style that became his hallmark. Unlike the previous portfolios, the cover and endpapers of the Klementinum were luxuriously illustrated. With its large format and decorative endpapers, it appears to be the forerunner of the Panascopic pop-up books that followed ten years later.

Aventinum continued to prosper during and immediately after the war as Kubasta continued his collaboration with Storch-Marien. It published the first post-war literary classic, Pavel Eisner’s (1889-1958) Goddess is Waiting (Bohyneceká), considered “…the apotheosis of [the] Czech language.”14 Kubasta designed dust jackets for a documentary account of Prague during the final days of the War as well as several other titles that Storch-Marien was unable to publish during the Nazi occupation.15

Post-World War II

In Three Centuries of Children’s Books in Europe, Bettina Hürlimann called the Czechs, “a nation extraordinarily rich in good illustrators.”16 “The classics of the Western, as well as the Eastern, powers [were] available, together with a colourful collection of their own [Czech] story-books,” and they were “illustrated by their own artists and obtainable in cheap editions.”17 In the post-World War II period, Czechoslovakian citizens lived under rigidities of the Soviet system. Kubasta and other Czech illustrators resisted the Communist call for artistic conformity by creating native and folk images with bold colors and lines. Hürlimann concluded, “this was also a time when other countries had very few picture-books to match these freely constructed [Czech] masterpieces.”18 After World War II, Kubasta continued to illustrate children’s books, dust jackets, colophons, maps, and posters. In 1949, he illustrated the first Czech translation of Winnie the Pooh (Medvídek Pu-Vyrehrad). It became an instant favorite, thus demonstrating the power of popular Western culture to infiltrate Communist societies. Another example of the West’s influence was his design of the book jacket for the Czech edition of Betty MacDonald’s The Egg and I (Vejce a já; Vladimir, Zikes-1947), which was made into a movie starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray and whose photographs are prominently featured on the jacket. Surprisingly, the colophon has a cartoon character strikingly similar to Woody Woodpecker. Kubasta confirmed his Southern Bohemian roots in illustrations for the book, The Secret of Uncle Joseph by Frantisek Herites (Tajemství Stryce Josefa; Aventinum-1948). Set in eigthteenth-century Vodnany, he drew a series of watercolors of homesteads, preserving for posterity a rapidly disappearing way of life. Storch-Marien, also from Vodnany, commissioned him to produce the homesteads as postcards. He commented later that “even though Kubasta lived and worked in cosmopolitan Prague, he was able to distill the essence of the countryside in his sketch-books.”19 Although he worked primarily with the publishers Aventinum and Dolezal, his illustrations also appeared in volumes printed by Mladá fronta, Vyrehrad, Mladé létá (Bratislava), Melantrich, Nová osveta, Vladimír Zikes, and Albatros.

In 1948, the Communist Party came to power in Czechoslovakia and „turned private book publishing and book selling …upside down.“20 Czechoslovakian intellectuals tried to manage the upheaval to their advantage, but failed. Censorship became stricter and was put under the auspices of the Ministry of Information. “Over 370 publishing houses were closed down in [one] year...”21 The Ministry of Information now had control over publishing, selling, distribution, and even the types of materials published. As a result of the new laws, it took as many as five years for permission to be granted for the publication of certain manuscripts.

The Soviet Union’s plan to develop heavy industries changed the landscape of Eastern Europe. Industrial complexes sprung up along the beautiful rivers and overflowed into the rural areas. Kubasta commented on these changes in a satirical watercolor painting of Sleeping Beauty. In the foreground, two traditionally costumed couples dance happily, while swirling around them are four scenes illustrating the modernization of textile production. The first is a traditional Sleeping Beauty spinning yarn, the second shows spinning as a cottage industry, followed by a weaver working on a hand-operated loom, and finally in the background, he calls attention to an industrial wasteland with belching smokestacks, terrible dragons of a new reality. Clearly, the new repression in publishing did not dull “the prolific and facile” pencil of Vojtech Kubasta, who continued to turn out hundreds of illustrations.22

Kubasta married Helena Elisabeth Safaríková of Prague in 1944 at the Loretta Church in Prague, a church he illustrated so beautifully for Aventinum. The following year his first daughter, Helena was born, and three years later, his daughter Dagmar was born. Kubasta, now a family man, had new incentives to seek buyers for his art. His beautiful wife was “strange and dominating”23 and a difficult presence in the household. Whether or not this affected Kubasta’s parenting cannot, at this vantage point, be gauged. But he immersed himself in his work while at the same time surrounding himself with his daughters. Because his studio was in the center of the apartment, his daughters witnessed and sometimes participated in his creative processes. He frequently turned his work projects into entertainment for the girls by making them, for example, a puppet theater with all the props and costumes. Kubasta met business associates at home or at local Prague cafés, often taking his children with him, and always dressing up in suit and tie looking elegant and handsome.

Significantly, Kubasta kept his own reference library. Impatient to work and eclectic in his tastes, he preferred to have research material at his fingertips. In nearby large files and shelves he stored magazines, newspaper articles, huge stacks of clippings, books on myths, legends and ancient cultures, and whatever else he thought would one day come in handy. When he worked on a story set in Arabia, for example, he had only to open his files to capture the authentic environment or costumes of the period.24