Adolf Hoffmeister
Adolf Hoffmeister (born August 15, 1902 in Prague , Austria-Hungary ; † July 24, 1973 in Říčky u Brna ) was a Czech painter, caricaturist, illustrator, set designer, writer, dramaturge, translator, journalist, radio commentator, art professor, art critic, Politician, diplomat, cultural official and a cosmopolitan traveler.
Life
Adolf Hoffmeister was born on August 15, 1902 in Prague to a wealthy Prague family who still own the Hoffmeister luxury hotel on the Lesser Town of Prague . He is described as an elegant globetrotter and art lover, lover of good food and fine wines, who was particularly closely associated with the magical attraction of his hometown Prague. Due to his diverse activities, he can hardly be clearly classified into one of the art movements in his country. Pablo Neruda called him one of the “great watchful Europeans”, Louis Aragon “one of the greatest cartoonists of our time”.
What accompanied him all his life, however, was his left-wing intellectual attitude, which shaped many from his generation of the First World War. In October 1920 he was the youngest of a number of Czech intellectuals - among them, for example, the writer and later Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984 Jaroslav Seifert - who founded the left-wing intellectual artists ' association Devětsil (Butterbur, Nine Forces). Hoffmeister was also the group's first secretary. Devětsil tried to reassess existing values and to find a return to simplicity and tradition. Soon, however, Hoffmeister's ties to this group loosened and he began to travel to study the cultures of other nations firsthand. He wrote articles for Prague journals and magazines. Many portraits and caricatures of his artist colleagues, which were available to him for his cultural reports and interviews, also date from this period, as he usually added a caricature to all of his contributions. One of the most interesting is the portrait of Franz Kafka, with whom he was a close friend, shown on the postage stamp. But other public figures were also portrayed by him, as well as artist colleagues in particular. In the second half of the 1920s Hoffmeister was a participant in the meetings of the informal Stammtisch group of Prague intellectuals Pátečníci .
Having been in the 30s in Germany the satirical magazine Simplicissimus by the Nazis into line had been established Hoffmeister in Prague the antifascist Simplicus later Simpl called. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia , he fled to France in 1939, but was also imprisoned there for seven months. He escaped and continued to flee to the United States via Portugal and Morocco. There he directed the Czech radio in exile for the Czechs at home.
Paradoxically, during the time of his exile, he achieved particular fame through the children's opera Brundibár . He wrote the story about the children Aninka and Pepíček, who defeated the evil organ grinder Brundibár, which was the basis for his German opera libretto. In 1943 this children's opera with the music of the Czech Jew Hans Krása was performed several times by the children of the Theresienstadt concentration camp . It was only rediscovered in recent years and has been performed again, especially in Germany.
After returning to his homeland, he became Director General for Cultural Relations for his country and took part in many UNESCO activities in this capacity . In February 1948 he welcomed the communist coup as a staunch left-wing intellectual and became his country's ambassador to France. In the course of the increasing Stalinization he had to give up his functions and remained only professor at the Prague Academy of Applied Arts, where he maintained a special institute for children's book illustrations and cartoons, which was closely related to Jiří Trnka's animation company .
For a long time in the 1960s Hoffmeister was chairman of the art commission ( Komise pro posuzování ideové a umělecké hodnoty návrhů československých poštovních známek , commission for the assessment of the ideal and artistic value of the designs for the Czechoslovak postage stamps and the selection of the designs for the Czechoslovak postage stamps) Czechoslovakia was responsible. In this way he had a decisive influence on the development and the high artistic standard of postage stamps in Czechoslovakia. During this time, in 1968 and 1969, he made a total of 13 of his artist caricatures available for publication on postage stamps. In addition to the portraits of Karel Čapek and Franz Kafka , one can find u. a. on these stamps Ernest Hemingway , Pablo Picasso , Charlie Chaplin and Henri Matisse . He was also close friends with Jan Werich , one of the protagonists of the so-called “Liberated Theater”, to which three postage stamps and a block of the Czech Republic with Hoffmeister caricatures were dedicated in 1995.
After the crushing of the Prague Spring , when he saw a new chance to realize his idealistic ideas, he left his home again for two years and was a professor at the Université de Vincennes ( University of Paris VIII Saint-Denis), but returned in 1970 back to Prague. 1970–1972 he worked again as a professor at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague . In 1972, the year of normalization , he was disqualified as a non-person and as a “salon communist”. Adolf Hoffmeister died in internal emigration on July 24, 1973 in Říčky.
Works (selected German-language editions)
- 1960: Made in Japan. Artia-Verlag Prague (first edition 1958 by Československý Spisovatel, Prague)
- 1986: Columbus' ship. Caricatures, collages, illustrations. Eulenspiegel
Solo exhibitions in Germany (selection)
- 1961 Berlin (House of Czechoslovak Culture; opening by John Heartfield )
Individual evidence
- ↑ Václav Stehlík: Stari Friday Men Novodobí a Zpátečníci! , online at: vasevec.parlamentnilisty.cz / ...
- ^ Lothar Lang The Surprise of Adolf Hoffmeister in Die Weltbühne 16/1961, Berlin
source
http://www.batz-hausen.de/dhoff.htm
Web links
- Literature by and about Adolf Hoffmeister in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hoffmeister, Adolf |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Czech journalist, writer, politician, scholar |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 15, 1902 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Prague |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 24, 1973 |
| Place of death | Říčky u Brna |