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

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Mozart and Prague

During the war years Kubasta began his life-long love affair with Prague. In cooperation with another author, Dr. Antonín Novotny, he produced a set of historical books about the city, incorporating classical architecture and motifs. When writing about Prague, he referred to the city as if it were a person. Kubasta became an avid collector of Prague memorabilia, including historical maps of the ancient city, old prints, and famous porcelain figurines. Later on, as he attained greater financial success, he acquired prints of the Old Masters hoping they would shield him from the economic insecurity caused by the Communist regime.

Throughout his career, Kubasta could be found at his desk surrounded by favorite objects from his collections: Napoleoniana, Mozartiana, antique maps, family photos, and others. Amazingly, he also found time to serve as a corresponding secretary for the State Preservation of Prague.25 Many of his children’s books, including The dragon who would not wash (O nemytém drackovi; Orbis-1971) ( featured the Prague skyline and monuments. In the late 1970s, he even designed a decorative scarf featuring the landmarks of Prague located near his apartment in the Smíchov section of the city. One image is of a Soviet military tank that has since been removed and replaced with a fountain.

Kubasta was also passionate about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and images of the Austrian composer filled his home studio. Curiously, he did not listen to any music while he worked. Prague showed a “sincere interest” in Mozart and, unlike “the fickle Viennese … never abandoned him.” Mozart was purported to have said he loved Prague because [the people] understood him.26 Kubasta always kept across from his desk a blue Delft mug of Mozart’s Salzburg.

In 1956, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Mozart, Kubasta produced a portfolio of twelve Prague city scenes associated with the composer. The twelve hand-colored lithographs were also reproduced on note cards, postcards, and calendars. During his visits to Prague in 1787 and 1791, Mozart stayed at the Villa Bertramka where he composed music and finished the score of his most famous opera, Don Giovanni. Known as, ‘the opera of all operas,’ it was Kubasta‘s favorite. As an avid member of Prague’s Mozart Society, he annually designed its New Year’s card, then sent it to his personal list, signing the card ‘p.f. V. Kubasta’, p.f. in Latin meaning pour felicité – all the best.27

Artia and Pop-ups

In the early 1950s, Dr. Storch-Marien left Aventinum.28 The struggling publishing house, which he had revived for the duration of his association with Kubasta, was again having difficulties and Kubasta sought work elsewhere. Capitalizing on his love of Slovakia, Kubasta worked for Slovtour, the Slovakian state travel agency, and designed its logo that was used for thirty years. He created striking tourist posters of the Demänová Caves and the Jasná ski resorts and souvenir booklets for Slovtour using movable and pop-up elements. According to his daughter, Dagmar, Kubasta said, “pop-ups make [the ads] livelier.”29 As far as can be determined, these promotional materials seem to be the first time he commercially produced three-dimensional ephemera. It is likely that he was influenced by his collection of nineteenth-century lacy pop-up greeting cards.

Under the Communists, Czechoslovakia accelerated its industrial growth and manufactured many consumer products for export. During that time, Kubasta worked for the Czechoslovakian Chamber of Commerce designing advertising materials for light bulbs, sewing machines, radios, sunglasses, and Pilsner’s famous beer. The ads, in vivid colors and clean lines, were printed in numerous languages and often contained movables and pop-ups that breathed life into the flat paper products. With all of these projects, he sought “the possibilit[ies] in the movable paper.”30

In 1953, Kubasta began illustrating for Artia, the state-run publishing and trading house. Children’s publishing, and publishing in general, were enjoying a rebirth. The printing presses in Czechoslovakia had not been destroyed in the war as they had in Germany. The old Czech presses allowed for the heavy application of dyes. During printing, the paper became richly saturated with color that appropriately supported Kubasta’s highly stylized faux-naif design. It was while he worked for Artia that he found his greatest and most lasting successes.

In the mid-1950s Kubasta offered Artia his first pop-up book, a crude, primitive affair, by his own account. Soon after, he quickly developed a simple method of cut-and-folded cardstock with a slant-cut that gave the illustrations greater volume and depth and allowed the scenes to extend beyond the edges of the page. Many of his books incorporated pull-tab mechanisms, adding to the tableaux’s complexity. A perfectionist in many respects, Kubasta believed, “everything must be just right!”31 Beginning” with the stories of the Brothers Grimm and the classic, Robinson Crusoe, Kubasta wanted “to create for children a small theatre inside the book.”32

At home, Kubasta’s desk was strewn with colored pencils, scissors, cardstock, and paper. He incorporated whenever he could, cellophane and aluminum foil into the illustrations, and any other element that would accent the reality of the diorama he was creating. He once entertained in his studio a famous author who came to see how his pop-ups were made. According to the visitor, Kubasta seemed to have everything worked out in his head and knew how the pop-up would finally turn out even before he began the design process. The visitor did not realize that “each and every one of [Kubasta’s] books demanded an extensive knowledge of descriptive geometry.”33 Kubasta admitted, however, to hating math but loving geometry because it “made perfect sense.” Although his pop-ups were minutely calculated to give the greatest sense of perspective, he knew full well that “as far as the dimensional imagination is concerned, children take it as incidental.”34

According to Opus VK, a 1989 pamphlet that attempted to list all of Kubasta’s works, Christopher Columbus (1954) was the first pop-up book in what was later to be called the Panascopic Model Series, a possible reference to the ‘model’ and ’stand-up’ books from the earlier English Bookano series by S. Louis Giraud.35 Primarily based on the Klementinum format of 1945, each folio–sized book had a heavy cardboard triptych cover with an illustrated story stapled in the center. The back covers unfolded to reveal double page pop-ups standing as high as thirteen inches. Bancroft, in 1960, packaged twelve of the books using the Panascopic format.

Through his pop-up creations, Kubasta’s fantasy world becomes real to the reader. At a time before there was a television in every home and before video games such as GameBoy and Sega, Kubasta’s pop-ups provided children with the opportunity to interact with their own imaginations by opening up the three-dimensional images of Columbus’ caravels sailing the roiling Atlantic , medieval knights jousting in front of a castle, monkeys swinging gaily on swaying palm trees in a far-off jungle, or a farm with free-standing movable animals. Several of the pop-ups, especially those with holiday-related Christmas or Easter themes, were also published without text and were intended to be used as table decorations.

Kubasta’s witty illustrations reflected his Weltanschauung and his compassion for humanity and nature. The endpapers of Noah’s Ark -1958, showed Noah explaining to the animals the fate that was going to befall them: the faces of each anthropomorphized animal, appropriately, expresses horror, sadness, or shock. Similarly, Lothar Meggendorfer’s (1847-1925), International Circus -1887, also individualized the characters in the audiences of the dioramas.

At Artia, Vojtech Kubasta published more illustrated and pop-up books than one would think humanly possible. The sheer number of titles he designed continues to confound contemporary paper engineers. Today, a single pop-up book, from concept to publication, can require up to two years to completion. According to Opus VK, Kubasta illustrated and paper engineered over ninety books between1955-1965, and collectors and scholars are still discovering titles that were not recorded. His use of embellishments on numbers, corners, head- and tale-pieces, and decorated margins, like those in 1001 Arabian Nights, attest to his prodigious creative powers.

Besides designing the elaborate Panascopic Model Series, Kubasta illustrated the fairy tale pop-ups using a deceptively simpler format. The books, beginning with The Flying Trunk, employed a theater-type setting. With linen spines at the top, text parallel to the spine, and colored-cord bindings, the cardstock was folded again and again to create the pages. True to his over-the-top style, most of the initial books in the fairy tale series had movable elements in the cover itself. His use of the slanted cut extended the three-dimensional elements beyond the border of the page.
Not satisfied with the three-dimensions alone, Kubasta often added a pull-tab, or, in rare cases, a wheel. The additions were not gratuitous or merely decorative. The overall effect of the cuts, folds, and additional movable elements created the illusion of a small theatre.

Kubasta said his books were created in stages: 1) inspiration for the artistic solution of an idea; 2) pencil sketches; 3) calculations for the pop-up; 4) mock up of the actual size book. The entire process could take as long as three months to complete.36 If one takes into consideration the great number of books he paper engineered and illustrated, a major part of his genius was keeping track of all the different projects. With the humility for which he was well known, Kubasta acknowledged the skill and dexterity demonstrated by the women who assembled his books. “To watch them work is like watching a concert!” he was quoted as saying. An interviewer in 1988 lamented, “unfortunately in our country [Czechoslovakia], these [pop-up] books were never seen by our children.”37