Josef Lada: 20th Century Czech Artist
Painter, Illustrator, Satirist and Children's Author
May 11, 2009
Looking at Josef Lada's pictures is like undergoing a powerful regression back to one's childhood. The kind of childhood that every child deserves. The journey back in time is always a pleasant one whichever of Lada's paintings you choose to be your window into a parallel, better world. There is no trauma, no tears, no conflict, no ill-feeling, no corruption. Lada's innocence and his diversity as an artist made him a Czech national treasure.
Biography
Josef Lada was born 17 December, 1887 in the little village of Hrusice, southeast of Prague and died 14 December 1957 in Prague.
The youngest of four children of a shoemaker, he left his native village for Prague in 1901 to apprentice as a painter decorator and theatre scenery painter. In 1902 he began his apprenticeship as a bookbinder.
In 1906 he studied for a year at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague. At this time he was introduced to an anarchist and proletarian movement which grew out of deep discontent with the policies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of which Bohemia was a part.
Caricatures and Political Satire
Lada's earliest work is asscociated with politics. As a supporter of the anarchist movement, Lada became the editor and illustrator of a satirical magazine Caricatures in 1909. His political cartoons from this period fit perfectly with the contemporary mood of repressed frustration but his images were always infused with humour.
In 1911 Lada became a member of the executive committee of the Party of Moderate Progress within the Limits of Law founded by the Czech author Jaroslav Hasek.
From the 1910s Lada also began to work as a contributing illustrator for numerous other periodicals, among them were several respectable national newspapers. He published his first book for children My Alphabet in 1911 and started receiving commissions from publishing houses for illustrations of books by other authors.
Naive Art
While avant-garde dominated the latest development in arts in the first decades of the 20th century with artists' tendencies towards abstraction and deconstructing the conventional concept of depicting reality, Lada chose lhis own, less popular path that led some contemporary critics to classify him as a Naive artist.
The motifs of country life in all seasons, village traditions,and activities of rural folk are, indeed, present throughout Lada's work. Despite growing up in poverty, his childhood was happy enough to be later translated into beautiful visual memories. His is a safe and warm world of family gatherings where old traditions are observed with joy, of children playing and animals frolicking, all set within the reassuring regularity of seasonal changes.
Since he spent many years working as a caricaturist and later illustrator for newspapers, he develpoed his own style which peaked after 1920 and derived its typical bold lines, flat perspective, primary colours, schematic distribution of pictorial elements and simplified form from his practice of drawing cartoons.
Children's Books
Lada dedicated his life to children's books, both as author and artist. Apart from his own books, he contributed to numerous children's magazines and illustrated books of fairy tales by other authors as well as collections of national fairy tales worldwide.
Although his time was almost consumed with producing art for children, he continued to draw caricatures with a strong political stance. In these satirical cartoons, animals feature prominently as they assume human characteristics and human occupations, or rather humans are depicted as animals to amplify their stupidity and incompetence.
Lada's best known illustrated character is The Good Soldier Svejk, the anti-hero of one of the most famous works of world literature written by Jaroslav Hasek. Lada created some 600 images of Svejk as a rounded, merry, naive walking disaster of a character.
Sources: Josef Lada Memorial, Hrusice
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