Zdeněk Burian

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Zdeněk Burian

Zdeněk Michael František Burian , (born February 11, 1905 in Kopřivnice , Moravia , † July 1, 1981 in Prague ) was a Czech draftsman and graphic artist and was best known internationally for his illustrations of books about prehistoric animals and people.

Life

Burian was born as the second child of Eduard and Hermína Burian. At the age of fourteen, in June 1919, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague . During the first year of his studies he switched to the second year. However, he did not finish his training in Prague, probably depressed by the big city life and the environment of his older classmates, but left Prague. This was followed by occasional work on construction sites, as a porter, with shop window arrangements and as a forest worker. He found shelter in the boy scout settlements in the vicinity of the rivers Sázava , Berounka and Kazín .

He developed his distinctive talent for drawing on an autodidactic basis. In particular, his stays in nature shaped his later work in terms of image design and realistic representation. Burian learned various techniques and in 1921 took a job with the publisher A. Sveceny. In the same year he published his first illustrated work "Dobrodružství Davida Balfoura" (The Adventures of David Balfour) by Robert Louis Stevenson . From 1922 further works followed, and in the following years he worked successfully with the publishers JR Vilimek, J. Touzimský and J. Moravec in the field of adventure, fantastic scientific and popular scientific literature. He benefited from his precise knowledge of nature from the time he spent in the great outdoors in the early 1920s, as well as his ability to paint quickly. Allegedly, he was able to complete a common painting in less than an hour. This made him very popular with publishers.

From 1924 to 1925, Zdeněk Burian did his military service in the Czechoslovak army at Valašské Meziříčí . He also worked as a division painter. In 1927 he married Františka Loudová. Daughter Eva was born from the marriage.

From around 1930 he illustrated books for the Czech book market full-time not only by Czech but also by foreign authors such as Karl May , Jules Verne , Rudyard Kipling , Alexander Dumas , JF Cooper and Jack London . In 1935 he met the Czech paleontologist Josef Augusta . He won him over for the illustration of popular science books about prehistoric people and extinct animals and plants. The first six paleontological reconstructions were made in the same year, in addition to his full-time work of book and book cover illustration. This was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration for both Burian and Augusta, which only ended in 1968 with Augusta's death. Burian then continued to work on pictorial reconstructions of primeval life with other well-founded authors (Špinar, Wolf, Mazák, Beneš) until the end of his life.

Due to the increasing success with his primeval interpretations, Burian also gained great fame abroad since the 1950s. Numerous exhibitions at home and variously abroad followed, mainly on his paleontological-paleoanthropological work. Western publishers also became aware of him, so that he was able to take on some orders from Germany, America or Switzerland, which was not a matter of course in times of the Cold War with Czechoslovakia as an integral part of the Eastern Bloc. Burian painted the archaeological reconstructions in the Anthropos Pavilion in Brno , set up by Jan Jelínek in 1962 , which presented archaeological finds in a new way and was internationally influential in museum design.

In 1978 his wife Frantiska died. Burian spent the last years of his life mainly in the Moravian town of Štramberk , where he also had his studio. He died at the age of 76 on July 1, 1981 after complications from an operation in the Prague hospital. On July 10, 1981, Zdeněk Burian was adopted in the Praha-Strašnice crematorium.

Because of his great popularity and quality of his work, the Dvůr Králové nad Labem Zoo set up the permanent exhibition Vývoj človeka na zemi in 1983 , where his last, unfinished picture cycle is shown. In 1989 a memorial plaque to Zdeněk Burian was unveiled in Koprivnice. On August 8, 1991, the city of Koprivnice was posthumously awarded honorary citizenship. Finally, on May 28, 1992, the opening of the Zdeněk Burian Museum in Štramberk , in which his pictures, but also pictures by other Czech artists, are exhibited in changing exhibitions.

Work and style

Zdeněk Burian worked practically until his death in 1981 and left behind an almost monumental number of pictures. There are different information about the total scope of Burian's oeuvre, depending on the book or catalog, it includes 14,000 to 20,000 works. In a current exhibition catalog for the Dvůr Králové nad Labem zoo, Burian's biographer V. Prokop summarizes his work as follows: "... in addition to illustrations and covers for 456 book titles, Burian created over 200 independent book covers and illustrated around 550 stories printed in magazines. The illustrations and book covers thus reached the impressive total of 14,000! The almost 1,100 oil paintings and over 250 independent tempera paintings, gouaches, pastels and other techniques are also impressive. The palaeontological and palaeoanthropological topic is with 386 oil paintings, 128 tempera paintings, gouaches and pastels as well as more than 350 pen and pencil drawings ... "

In 1978 he started a 34-picture cycle for the Dvůr Králové nad Labem zoo on the history of life on earth (comparable to his work from 1956 under the technical supervision of Augusta). Due to his sudden death in 1981, this cycle remained unfinished with 22 completed works by then. The Dvůr Králové nad Labem Zoo has set up the 22 pictures from Burian's last creative phase as a permanent exhibition, supplemented by 58 paintings previously created.

Some of the best-known and most stylistic works such as Animals of Prehistoric Times (1956), People of Prehistoric Times (1960) or Saurians of the Primordial Seas (1964), which made the global popularity and popularity of these images possible, first appeared in German. The books were translated into many languages ​​(German, English, French, Russian, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese) and brought Augusta, later Špinar, but above all Zdeněk Burian great international renown. Two books, each with a compilation of pictures of the primeval animals on the one hand ( Animals of Prehistoric Times, Zdeněk V. Špinar) and of prehistoric people on the other ( Menschen der Urzeit , 1977, Josef Wolf) provide a good overview of Burian's work by adding summarize his work from the 1950s to the late 1970s. Both books were repeatedly published internationally until the 1990s and are also a reason for the high level of awareness of the Burian motifs.

All images in the mentioned palaeontological publications are based on research and represent the state of knowledge about humans and animals of prehistoric times. As these books are among the first to cover the entire development of life on our planet from the Precambrian to the Neolithic documented and the images were also used in other publications ( e.g. Weltall - Erde - Mensch , 1954, GDR), they were pioneering, and Burian's interpretations of prehistoric nature still inspire our image of these living beings, especially of the dinosaurs and ancient elephants, as well as from the prehistoric and stone age people. Along with Charles R. Knight, Burian is the most important style-defining illustrator for prehistoric life of his time. The motifs of his works are so well known and widespread that they are still copied today on many postage stamps and in various children's books. His works are also still widely used in many specialist books, especially motifs on topics that have not had such a strong visual change in representation and interpretation since the early 1980s (e.g. Paleozoic, mammals, ice age, human ancestors).

Another preference was for Native American images . Many motifs of the early adventure stories came from the Western milieu. And in his ethnological works from the 1960s and 1970s there are also many motifs of Indians. In addition to the pictures for the paleontological / anthropological books, Burian continued to create illustrations and book covers for many novels, for example for the complete Czech Jules Verne edition, a special Tarzan edition or the works of Karl May.

Most of the books and magazines illustrated by him were published exclusively in the Czech language and were never distributed internationally. Even in the few translated copies, some pictures or drawings from the original editions are missing. Thus, the majority of Burian's contributions to adventure and fantastic literature, as well as to some extent to paleontological anthropology, are unknown outside the Czech Republic and accessible only with difficulty, if at all. In the Czech Republic these days, older novels with his illustrations are occasionally reissued; In addition, his best-known book on palaeontological topics Kniha o pravěku (Animals of Prehistoric Times ) by Zdeněk Vlastímíl Špínar (1916–1995) was repeatedly reprinted , although in contrast to the first edition, some pictures were supplemented or replaced by pictures from his later years. Abroad, this work was last published in 1991 in the 15th edition by Werner Dausien Verlag for the German-speaking area and in 1995 in a slightly updated form in the 5th edition by Thames and Hudson for the English-speaking area. New books, which can present the entire spectrum beyond Augusta's, Spinar's and Wolf's books to the foreign audience (comparable to the Czech works Otisky času by B. Záruba 1997 or Zdeněk Burian by V. Prokop 2005) are, with the exception of The Lost Worlds by Zdeněk Burian by J. Schalansky 2013, not available in German-speaking countries.

It is worth mentioning the film that was shot in 1955 on the basis of Burian's pictures and drawings of Josef Augusta's works (for example Divy prasvěta 1942, Animals of Prehistoric Times 1956), or with its background images: “ Journey into prehistoric times ”, original title: “Cesta do pravěku ” , directed by Karel Zeman . The film shows considerable trick scenes for the time. So if you are familiar with Burian's pictures, you will recognize pictures in many scenes. The film is now available in two, albeit very Spartan, DVD versions in German.

Illustrated works (selection)

Paleontological-paleoanthropological topics

  • Divy prasvěta , 1942, J. Augusta (13 color pictures, 75 drawings)
  • Weltall Erde Mensch , 1954 (18 pictures, several of them as double-sided colored fold-out pictures)
  • Animals of Primeval Times , 1956, J. Augusta (60 large-format panels on the development of life from the Cambrian to the Quaternary)
  • People of prehistoric times , 1960, J. Augusta (42 large-format panels on human evolution)
  • Pterosaurs and primeval birds , 1961, J. Augusta (31 colored plates)
  • The Book of the Mammoths , 1962, J. Augusta (40, partly double-sided plates)
  • Saurians of the primeval seas , 1964, J. Augusta (47 partly double-sided plates)
  • Colossi of primeval continents and seas , 1966, J. Augusta (23, partly double-sided panels on elephants, rhinos, whales and flightless giant birds)
  • Grzimek's Animal Life - History of the Development of Living Beings , 1972 (13 double-sided colored plates, not shown anywhere else since)
  • Animals of the Primeval Times, 1972, Z. Spinar (160 colored pictures, compilation of earlier pictures from the collaboration with Augusta and more recent ones from the collaboration with Spinar)
  • People of primeval times , 1975, J. Kleibl (116 images, partly from the collaboration with Augusta)
  • Jak vznikl človek (Sága rodu homo) , 1977, V. Mazak (116 original drawings)
  • People of primeval times , 1977, J. Wolf (172 colored pictures by Augusta, Kleibl, Mazak, Wolf)
  • Animals of primeval times , 1979, J. Benes (128 color pictures by Burian and Spinar, some not previously published)
  • Primitive man and his ancestors , 1980, V. Mazák (67 colored pictures)
  • The world of extinct animals , 1982, B. Záruba (80 colored, partly new pictures)
  • Paleontologie obratlovcu , 1984, Z. Spinar (132 pictures, some colored plates of previously unpublished pictures)
  • Paleontology , 1986, Z. Spinar (37 older images black and white)
  • Cesta do pravěku , 1995, B. Záruba (135 colored, partly unpublished images)
  • Otisky času , 1997, B. Záruba (323 color illustrations from previous books since 1942)
  • The lost worlds of Zdeněk Burian , 2013, J. Schalansky (Ed.) Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-88221-081-1 . (251 colored pictures and drawings from books since 1942, excluding mammals and humans)

Book illustrations (titles of the German translations)

  • The mammoth hunters , 1952 (story by Eduard Štorch )
  • Adventure on the Great River , 1954 (story by Eduard Štorch)
  • The Bronze Treasure , 1955, (story by Eduard Štorch)
  • At the bonfires of the Paleolithic , 1958 (Text: Josef Augusta )
  • Petrified World, 1962 (Text: J. Augusta)
  • Blown Life , 1964 (Text: J. Augusta)
  • Great discoveries , 1965 (Text: J. Augusta)

About Zdeněk Burian, his life, his work

  • Zdeněk Burian - monograph in 5 parts + 2 supplementary volumes, 1982, PM Sadecký
  • Zdeněk Burian - a paleontologie , 1990, V. Prokop
  • Zdeněk Burian - pravěk a dobrodružství (rodinné vzpomínky) , 1991, E. Hochmanová-Burianová
  • Ilustrátor Zdenek Burian. Monograph a soupis díla , 1995, V. Prokop
  • Stoleti Zdeňka Buriana , 2004, V. Hulpach
  • Zdeněk Burian , 2005, V. Prokop

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Burian, Zdeněk
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Burian, Zdeněk Michael František (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech draftsman and graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH February 11, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Kopřivnice , Moravia
DATE OF DEATH July 1, 1981
Place of death Prague