Pavel Brázda in the British Isles

Next year, the Czech Republic will celebrate the centennial of its modern
statehood. It will be an excellent opportunity to reflect on the good things we
have given to Europe and the rest of the world, where we have excelled, and how
we have enriched our nation and the world around us. We will unspool a century-
long film encompassing a plethora of sad and funny stories, and we will seek
inspiration for the present and the future. And next year, Pavel Brázda, like Queen
Elizabeth II, will mark 92 years on Earth. The span of his life covers almost the
entire modern history of our country. It has seen both of its extremes, the high
points and the low points; it connects the past and the present; it bears witness.
It contains what is most noble in humanity, from the past to the present and
into the future. Anyone who has had the extraordinary opportunity to visit Pavel
Brázda and Věra Nováková in their flat in Prague’s Vinohrady neighbourhood will
have been smitten with the remarkable atmosphere of First Republic refinement,
exquisite taste and omnipresent, uplifting and almost palpable warmth rising not
only from a cup of steaming tea, but also from some intangible depth. You are
immediately drawn into exciting events in which elegant language and traditions
are a framework for a deeper reflection on issues in contemporary society and
modern times.

Pavel Brázda himself embodies the best of what we have produced in the Czech
lands, what has come to fruition here, what has made an impact beyond the
borders of our country. He is a worthy representative not only of Czech art
and culture, but of the Czech spirit. His “hominism” – art about people and
for people – is imbued with kindness, an ability to look at human beings with
an understanding of their weaknesses, joys and passions. It’s a  method that
condemns, mocks and find irony in what is evil and low, but at the same time
leads to forgiveness, cleansing, contemplation. His is a colourful and complex
grasp and vision of the world, without an overambitious attempt to uncover all
its secrets, suspicions, gaping uncertainties and contradictions. Pavel Brázda is
knocking on the door of our lives, perceptibly, but without insistence and with
humility. Bringing news, he is at the same time ancient tribune and modern
messenger, heralding joy, strength, and redemption. Now at the start of his tenth
decade of life, he is coming to Great Britain. It’s a place where mainly young,
aspiring artists are supported and warmly received, but maybe this tendency is
already a bit cliché.
PHOTO BY KAREL CUDLÍN

In his heart and soul, Pavel Brázda is fundamentally a young artist. The
demanding content in his work is often playful. He likes to surprise. He uses
magic and enchantment. He shows us sparks of eroticism. He speaks with the

PAVEL BRÁZDA, 90TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION, 21 AUGUST 2016

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 verve of a student and tirelessly supports his arguments. He has the potential
to be discovered and explored. Worthy of special mention is Brázda’s absolute
and lasting fidelity to principles, first and foremost his allegiance to freedom.
In good times and bad, Pavel Brázda follows his own path. Regardless of the
difficulties and temptations surrounding him, he stays true to his vision of life
and art, his idea of happiness. He never gives up, never equivocates. In this sense,
the quiet and poetic Pavel Brázda remains radical and young. I could not have
a clear conscience if in this essay introducing Pavel Brázda I did not devote at
least one sentence to the artist Věra Nováková, the painter’s life partner and
support. Without her care, perspective, understanding, but also generosity and
humour, Brázda’s artistic and personal pilgrimage would undoubtedly have been
more challenging. I hope that this exhibition brings them further fulfilment and
satisfaction. I firmly believe that Brázda’s work will captivate viewers in Britain and
open the door for a continued dialogue, which is needed today more than ever.

London, 21 March 2017 

LIBOR SEČKA, VĚRA NOVÁKOVÁ, PAVEL BRÁZDA, MIROSLAV AMBROZ AND JONATHAN WATKINS LIBOR SEČKA
ČESKÝ KRUMLOV, 12 APRIL 2017  Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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 Lucky

This April, we arrived at the Egon Schiele Centre in Český Krumlov, in the South
Bohemia region of the Czech Republic, to attend the opening of Pavel Brázda’s
retrospective exhibition. It was an unforgettable evening. The artist, with his
artist wife, Věra Novaková, could not have been more welcoming, beaming in
the midst of a body of work that dates from the 1940s until now; an extraordinary
achievement. How tenaciously he has applied himself to making smart and
candid observations about the world as it turns around him, during some of the
most difficult years in the history of his country. He wears wisdom lightly, his
paintings and drawings often very funny in the face of adversity, and the mood
they cast overall could not be less precious, less pretentious. Brázda seems not
overly concerned with his identity as an artist, refreshingly, but rather occurs to
us as someone who simply prefers to get on dealing with real life, with whatever
it serves up.

Český Krumlov is a beautiful town, stylish and full of charm, epitomising the
resilience of the Czech Republic, a quarter-century out of the Czechoslovak
Republic, through Nazi occupation and Soviet invasion, a Velvet Revolution and
now national independence within an unsettled European Union. Pavel Brázda,
91 years old, has witnessed all of this, and his work somehow embodies it with the
same kind of panache. After the opening, we enjoyed drinks and dinner by the
nearby banks of the Vltava, a defining river that has flowed through that modern
history and much more, including the arrival of the Celts in the 4th century
BC, the rise and fall of the Great Moravian Empire, the Hussite Revolution and
assorted dynasties; we were seizing a blissful moment, but also very mindful of
the ancientness of a human culture that had been pointing accidentally in our
direction.

How lucky we are. Lucky to have been there and then in Český Krumlov, to have
been the recipients of such hospitality, to have met Pavel Brázda and to get a (much)
better idea of where he is coming from. It’s very lucky for Birmingham that this
should be happening here and now. Thanks to the Czech Embassy, and especially
the Czech Ambassador, for making it possible. Above all, thanks to the artist.

Birmingham, 17 April 2017 

JONATHAN WATKINS
Director of Ikon Gallery

SUN OVER HEAD, COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, 2010

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 Pavel Brázda is here!

Pavel Brázda is one of the most interesting contemporary artists the Czech
Republic can offer the world. For most of his long life, he made art outside
the public eye, because he and his life partner, the painter Věra Nováková,
were excluded from cultural life for political reasons. They both had their first
large exhibition – already in retirement age – after the “Velvet Revolution”.
Paradoxically, exclusion from the public sphere helped him to maintain a life-
long nonconformist attitude and to create with a sense of inner freedom and
independence. In fact, he has enjoyed the role of an outsider – someone apart
from the mainstream who can observes everything around him with a smile.

His works are a quintessence of his life experience and an individualistic reflection
of the world, extending beyond the influence of the present time. Brázda is a great
observer, glossarist and raconteur of human stories, preferring to communicate
them with a cheerful, kind and ironic outlook, and holding up a mirror to his own
intimate life as much as to the outside world. One of the unifying threads in his
work is a perpetual wonder at the fundamental absurdity of the world. The world
for him is a marvellous theatre and game. Play is the essence of what it is to be
human, and, accordingly, each person is a teammate in the game of life – in the
rise and demise of all things, in the comedy and tragedy of the universe. Brázda
also has the rare gift of being able to offer a literary interpretation of his own
works, through his alter ego, Přemysl Arátor.

His paintings from the 1950s are a testament to his superb mastery of
photorealistic painting, yet his extensive and multi-layered body of work is
characterized by a search for artistic shortcuts. Brázda’s images are difficult to
slot into existing categories, although we can find connections, reverberations,
and forerunners for various aspects of his work. To create his newer images,
Brázda uses a computer, which allows him to implement his ideas better now
than a paintbrush and canvas. His intentional use of bold colour contrasts is an
attempt to capture the vibrancy of the contemporary world.

Throughout his life, Pavel Brázda refused to make compromises with his
conscience. He did what was ethical, and what was not ethical, he did not do. This
(seemingly) simple path in life enabled him, even in challenging times, to remain
solitary and independent. This is an important message that he disseminates to
others through his life and work. Pavel Brázda is free, happy, alive, not for sale,
and incorruptible. Pavel Brázda is here!

MIROSLAV AMBROZ
curator
MAN EMBRACED BY A SNAKE-WOMAN, CHASED BY ERYNIA, PRONÁSLEDOVANÝ ERYNIÍ, COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, 2010

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“My work is motivated by service to the classic Trinity of long ago: not only

Truth, but also Beauty, and above all, Good. And it wouldn’t work without

that famous la la la love. Love with a capital L. In short, and perhaps well

said in other words, without positive relationships. I sometimes realize

that the ultimate goal of my work is an entirely earth-bound expression of

such ideals. And therefore, when I try – sometimes playfully and sometimes

responsibly, which is usually more difficult – I have no misgivings about its

meaning. And about its service to people in the intended way.”

Pavel Brázda
 The Life and Times of a Perpetual Outsider

Pavel Brázda was born on 21 August 1926 to a prominent family in Brno. His father
was a well-known lawyer and leader of the Agrarian Party. From an early age, he
was surrounded by people from the worlds of literature and art. His parents had
a large art collection that included the best of modern Czech art: works by Josef
Šíma, Václav Špála, Bohumil Kubišta, Jan Zrzavý, and especially Josef Čapek.
Pavel Brázda’s maternal grandmother, Helena Čapková, was the sister of Josef
and Karel Čapek, and all three Čapek siblings maintained a very strong emotional
bond. Karel was a world-renowned writer, as well as a photographer, collector
of ethnic music, and chairman of the Czechoslovak PEN Club. Josef, too, was
a multifaceted personality – a painter, graphic artist, playwright, prose writer,
children’s author, journalist, art critic and theorist. He studied and detailed
ethnic and indigenous art in his book The Art of Native Peoples. His paintings
influenced Cubism and also German Expressionism. Josef and Karel worked in
almost complete symbiosis, living together in a villa that became a gathering
point for the First Republic intelligentsia and society. Together, they wrote several
books and plays. The now-common word “robot” came from Karel’s play R.U.R.,
but the idea for it came from Josef.

After the untimely death of her husband, Brázda’s grandmother Helena Čapková
married Josef Palivec, an eminent Czech poet, translator and politician. A former
diplomat in Geneva and Paris who was awarded the “Grand Croix de la Légion
d’honneur” for his translations of French poetry, he served as a government
minister after returning to Prague and stayed in politics until the communist
coup in 1948. Pavel Brázda’s mother, Eva Brázdová, was an avid reader and
was also a favourite niece of the Čapek brothers. She even became the model
for a character in Karel Čapek’s utopian novel Krakatit (1924). In it, Čapek
expressed his fears about war and the dangers of abusing modern technological
inventions, which would soon come to pass.

In 1938, the map of Czechoslovakia was redrawn in Munich. Surrender of the

Czech border regions meant the end of the Czechoslovak First Republic, which
over the previous 20 years had been governed as a supremely democratic, orderly
and well-functioning state. The country’s political form had been shaped by the
humanitarian philosophy of the first Czechoslovak president, Tomáš Garrigue
Masaryk. It was right around this time that Pavel Brázda began drawing and
painting, which he learned primarily by studying nature. He was 13 years old
when war broke out, and the ensuing events affected members of his family.
Karel Čapek, a staunch pacifist and humanist – and a thorn in the side of the
fascist regime – died of pneumonia before the Gestapo could arrest him. After

HOMINIST DRAWING, 1943

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 establishment of the Nazi-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Josef
Čapek was deported to a concentration camp (he died in Bergen-Belsen a week
before the country was liberated). Josef Palivec was imprisoned as a member of
the resistance movement (fortunately, he lived to see liberation).
 
Brázda sensitively understood the environment in which he had grown up,
and sought to find his place in it. His attitude to life was largely influenced by
literature, and his artistic stance was close to that of surrealism, although he
wasn’t keen on its excessive artificiality and exclusivity. At the same time, he was
looking back to the distant past with reverence for the Old Masters. He studied
Romanesque and Byzantine art, art of the early Renaissance, and art of native
cultures, as well as the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. In
his mother’s library, he discovered literary treasures that helped him to survive
those bleak times. He read Apollinaire, Comte de Lautréamont, Huysmans, the
verses of Jiří Wolker, and collections by the surrealist Vítězslav Nezval. He was
captivated by James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which presented a way to describe
the world in multiple layers and showed an amazing attention to detail. An
P.B. 1934
important source of spiritual nourishment for him was the work of the quirky
Czech philosopher Ladislav Klíma, who, following on from Nietzsche, was
convinced of the irrationality of the entire world and whose writings highlighted
how variable, absurd and ridiculous are the social conventions demarcating the
boundaries of the so-called “normal” world. For Brázda, he became the prototype
of a thinker at the margins of society, an individualist who creates without the
goal of attaining recognition or success, working outside the public eye, for only
himself and maybe a few close friends. Brázda viewed him as the paragon of a
person who strived to live with dignity and a free mind, even under oppressive
external circumstances.
 
“The world of classical European or Euro-American culture was something we had
experienced more than the poverty, emptiness and dismay of our own times. For
example, after the assassination of Heydrich, we began to see these long columns of
names of people who had just been executed. Those were terrible moments. We listened to
foreign radio, we watched the unfolding of events, but there was so little positive that it
was hard to keep up ours spirits. To survive, it was necessary to retreat into the symbolic
world of culture, to which we still had connections”.
At the beginning of 1940s, Pavel Brázda was impressed by the text “The World
We Live In” by Jindřich Chalupecký, which later became the manifesto of the
art group Skupina 42. His text ends with the words: “Art detects reality, creates
reality, uncovers reality, the world we live in, and we who live in it. Art, in its purposes
and intentions as well as its themes, is nothing other than the everyday, frightful, and
glorious drama of man and reality: the drama of an enigma confronted with a miracle.
If modern art is not capable of this, it is pointless.”
He worked up the courage to bring his drawings to Chalupecký and also to
Nezval and Karel Teige. In Brno, he had gotten to know members of the art
DRAWING, 1943 group Ra, but he could not really find any common ground with them. The
16
meeting was a disappointment for him, a confirmation of the need to forge his
own path. In the spring of 1943 in Brno, Pavel Brázda together with his friend
Jaroslav Dresler established a new art movement called Hominism, whose name
was proposed by Josef Palivec. Brázda stated: “It was my intention that it should
be art about people and for people, in other words that it should take up the
tradition of modern art, while, however, distancing itself from the artificiality,
excessive formalism and exclusivity of surrealism. It was my aim to make art that
was simple, understandable, and addressed a wide circle of interested people”.
He wanted Hominism to be “down-to-earth surrealism for simple people”.
His early drawings became the basis for his later work and were close to the
approach of comics. Already in the early work, there is a clear desire for a
deep knowledge and vision of the world, as well as a search for symbolism,
simplifying shortcuts that could be used to capture someone’s character or
nature in a way that would be easily understood. However, he did not shy
away from more complex compositions. These were composed loosely in the
style of Dada collages and were a kind of “theatre of the world”. He adopted
symbols of urban life: advertising, skyscrapers, cars, airplanes and blimps;
but he also made drawings of the periphery, with distressed and flaking ads
and slogans, which became the new emblem of mass culture. For him, art
created a fascinating and magical dream world that was far more attractive
than the real one. Such an escape from reality would become for him the only
way to survive with a healthy mind in the coming decades. This world also
PEN AND WATERCOLOUR ON PAPER,
incorporates “low” genres of culture, the poetics of the circus and funfair,
1956
adventure films like Harry Piel’s The World Is Mine, in which the hero is an
unseen stowaway on various means of transport through the whole world.
For Brázda, such an invisible hero was the perfect prototype of an artist who
passes unnoticed through the objective world as an impersonal observer and
whose external involvement is limited to his eyes, which collect and capture
everything, both wondrous and sombre.
In the autumn of 1944, during the period of forced labour in occupied
Czechoslovakia, Brázda was made to stop all artistic activity and become a forest
worker, which was very demoralizing, especially in winter. After the country
was liberated, Brázda began studying art history and philosophy at Masaryk
University in Brno. The following year, he went to Prague and continued his
studies at the Academy of Applied Arts, but he didn’t devote enough time to
his studies and was dismissed after a year. In 1947, he visited Paris, where he saw
the exhibition “Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme”. But he was more
impressed by Jean Dubuffet’s paintings at the Galerie René Drouin. He could
not have known that this would be his last trip outside the country for 40 years.
He tried studying again, this time at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where
they accepted him as a third-semester student. But he did not finish his studies
there either. In February 1948, there was a communist coup in Czechoslovakia,
and hopes that the country would continue the pre-war republic’s tradition of
“cultural democracy” were thwarted. For the next 40 years, Czechoslovakia was
within Stalinist Moscow’s sphere of influence behind the Iron Curtain. DRAWING, 1956
17
 The worst period was the first half of the 1950s, when the most brutal methods
of Stalinism were used, including show trial executions and the establishment of
concentration and labour camps for political foes. People who opposed the regime
were intimidated and silenced, and they emigrated or were imprisoned. Thousands
of people had their property confiscated, were forcibly evicted and relocated, or,
because of their “bourgeois origins”, were sent to forced labour camps without trial.
The political show trials of the 1950s left in their wake more than 200 executions
WEDDING, 1950 and more than 250,000 prisoners. In such an environment, a young man from
a well-off “bourgeois” family had no chance to remain at the Academy of Fine
Arts for long. In 1949, a time of growing communist repression, he was expelled.
The same fate awaited his girlfriend and future wife, the painter Věra Nováková.
Much worse circumstances were met by those closest to him. His father, Osvald
Brázda, was deprived of the right to practice law, his property was confiscated,
and he was sent to a forced labour camp. His step-grandfather, Josef Palivec, was
arrested in 1949 and convicted in a 1951 show trial along with Milada Horáková
and Záviš Kalandra. Originally, he was to be hanged, like the others, but in the
end, he was sentenced to 20 years. Brázda’s uncle Adolf Procházka, a minister in
the Czechoslovak government, emigrated in the nick of time together with his
wife, Helen Koželuhová.
Pavel Brázda and Věra Nováková married in 1950 and moved into the flat of his
grandmother Helena Palivcová to help protect her from eviction and relocation
to the border region as the wife of someone deemed a traitor. They lived with
her until her death, which came not long after the release of Josef Palivec from
prison. In order to earn a living, Brázda trained as a house and interior painter,
while he and Věra both continued their artistic work. Finally, in 1952, they both
completed their education at the College of Applied Arts. They did not wish to
join the official Union of Artists, so they had limited possibilities to work as fine
artists. The only commissions allowed to them were illustrations in professional
scientific and medical publications. They were not permitted to exhibit their
works. These grim times inscribed themselves on their subject matter and method
of working. They both repudiated the optimism of communist propaganda, each
in their own way, by creating a kind of visual counterpart to the prose of Yevgeny
Zamyatin, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. The first important painting in
which Brázda summarized his life and art to this point was the 1949 self-portrait
The Monster Waits, the Monster Has Time. The painting expresses a sense of dismay
about the world and a commitment to resistance. The intricate apocalyptic
composition 5 Minutes Before the End of the World (1945–1953) reflected the threat
at that time of a new armed conflict. The painting Did You Forget to Shave? (1950)
is bizarrely introspective with numerous symbolic meanings. Brázda examines
every microscopic detail of his face and tries to express existential horror in an
almost comics-like manner.
 
In the second half of the 1950s, he abandoned veristic, fine-grained narratives and
arrived at a symbolic way of expressing subject matter, a method which he applied
in two large cycles: “Racers” and “War Against People”. Images of motorcyclists
DRAWING, 1955 on the race circuit along with their spectators are not a mere memory of the
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artist’s beloved races at the Masaryk Circuit in Brno. At the same time, racers
symbolize vitality and energy, but also the futility of a “fast” consumerist lifestyle.
In 1954, he painted the visionary cycle “Astronauts”, figures in space suits – half-
human, half-robot. For his mother, who had a challenging time enduring the
desperate circumstances of the time, he proposed as a form of therapy translating
subjects into needlework. But in 1958, after a suicide attempt, she died at the early
age of 52. In the 1960s, Brázda focused on the structure of his paintings. Gradually
he simplified his paintings and experimented with the surface of the painting. He
discovered the “akronex” technique, which allowed him to create a structurally
dynamic surface on a painting; an inspiration for him was a scene from the Spanish
film director Juan Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist that shows an exhibition of PEN AND WATERCOLOUR ON PAPER,
Barcelona structuralists. 1956
Liberalization of the Czechoslovak regime in the 1960s gained momentum and
had a positive impact on culture. However, the reforms of the so-called Prague
Spring met with displeasure from the Soviet side. In the early hours of 21 August
1968 (Brázda’s birthday), Czechoslovakia was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops, with
a deployment of 6,300 tanks in the streets followed by ground units of around
500,000. Prague’s attempt at “socialism with a human face” was cut short. The
absurdity of life after the occupation is epitomized by the ridiculous name the
Communist Party thought up for the crackdown: “Normalization”. It was a time
without a shred of normalcy. The regime demanded loyalty and obedience, which
thousands of people had to demonstrate not only with humiliating participation in
rallies and parades, but also by attending meetings and becoming members in such
organizations as Friends of the USSR. Opponents of the regime were fired from
their jobs and reassigned to positions beneath their stature and with no possibility
for advancement and were moved into smaller apartments. Their family members
often met with unpleasant consequences. This repression mainly affected people
in academia, culture, the media and management positions. Former professors
often worked as cleaners or pavement sweepers. Although most in society resigned
themselves to the circumstances and adapted, there were islands of resistance,
small groups of people who refused to accept the return of totalitarianism and the
Soviet occupation and who contributed to the creation of an alternative “second
culture”. An unfortunate era arose of dividing Czech literature into officially
permitted writing and literature banned from publication and from libraries,
which was distributed in typewritten copies as samizdat. The desperate act on
16 January 1969 of Jan Palach, who in front of the National Museum in Prague
immolated himself, was an agonizing cry against the lack of freedom in occupied
Czechoslovakia and a call to society to shake off its lethargy and resignation.
 
In 1977, Pavel Brázda went to work as a stoker in a coke boiler room at the First
Dental Clinic at Albertov in Prague, where he remained for 10 years. It was a quiet
refuge where he could draw in his free time and socialize with free-thinking friends
without scrutiny. A co-worker there was a leading linguist and editor of the illegal
samizdat journal Critical Anthology. At their home, the Brázdas held seminars on
philosophy, which were attended by such great minds as Zdeněk Neubauer, Tomáš
Halík and Professor Jan Patočka, all banned in their day. DRAWING, 1955
19

NIGHT SHIFT AT BOILER ROOM, 1978
When Pavel Brázda retired in 1987, he looked back on the years spent in the
boiler room as the apex of his career. He found the pinnacle at the bottom. One
of the most significant works of this period was his canvas Show Trial, which is a
monument to politically motivated travesties of justice. In the 1980s, he worked
with various techniques, ranging from the simplest means of expression (line
drawings) to collage. In the series “Colourful Tales” (1995–2005), he focused on
the relationship between men and women in the most bizarre situations of life,
especially love. The man and woman alternately give the other their heart, melt
in embrace, or draw each other into eternal duels, hinted at by movements or
gestures. Everything unnecessary is omitted and the image is simplified into the
form of a symbol and suggestion. Since 2007, he has been perfecting his work with
the help of a computer. He first makes drawings with a marker, which he scans,
then he adjusts the colours on a computer has them printed on canvas. The title of
Pavel Brázda’s most recent cycle, “The Human Comedy” – which is a clearly legible
and comprehensible visual novel in paintings – makes a nod to both Dante and
Balzac, but also to a little-known play by Ladislav Klíma.

Pavel Brázda and Věra Nováková did not have their first official exhibition until
after the Velvet Revolution, in 1992. The discovery of their works became a real
sensation. In 2006, to mark his 80th birthday, the National Gallery in Prague
prepared a large retrospective exhibition of Pavel Brázda’s work. In 2008, he was
awarded the Medal for Merit, which was given to him by then President Václav
Klaus. However, he returned the medal in February 2013 due to disagreement with
Klaus’ policies. Brázda received official recognition in 2010 at the age of 84, when
the National Gallery in Prague displayed his paintings in its permanent exhibition
of modern art. In recent years, he has exhibited his work in Moscow, Wroclaw,
Shanghai and Prague. For his 90th birthday, the Gallery of the Central Bohemia
Region (GASK) organized a retrospective exhibition. There have also been
notable books about him: a monograph issued by the Argo publishing house, the
annotated biography The Monster Waits, the Monster Has Time, and the book Play.
For the important milestone of Pavel Brázda’s 90th birthday, Czech Television
filmed a documentary about him. The artist’s last major retrospective was opened
by Brázda and his wife, Věra Nováková, on 12 April 2017 at the Egon Schiele
Centre in Český Krumlov.

MIROSLAV AMBROZ

DRAWING, 1995–2005

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A selection of Pavel Brázda’s key works
(with commentary by Přemysl Arátor,
a leading expert on his work and his best friend)
 1949–1950
THE MONSTER WAITS, THE MONSTER HAS TIME
The Monster Waits, the Monster Has Time, Self-Portrait of P. B. ’49 was the first
painting which was considered a gallery exhibit by its then 23-year-old author. He
was nurturing a hope that at some point in the distant and hazy future it
would be displayed in Prague. Already by 1949, he did not foresee a change
of the communist dictatorship and release of Czechoslovakia from the Soviet
system, nor a collapse of the Soviet Empire in a manner other than by war.
He was not sure if he would ever live to see it. That is also why he called the
painting The Monster Waits, the Monster Has Time. He began to paint it shortly
after his dismissal from the academy and was finishing it at the time when he
was already officially registered as a house painter’s apprentice. He imagined that
at some point, if war did not destroy everything, his painting would be exhibited
on the first floor of today’s Špála Gallery, which was a  more attractive venue
back then than it is today. In Prague, the painting was displayed for the first
time in twenty-seven years at the small theatre “V Nerudovce”, and for the
second time in forty years in the cellars under the Vinohrady market. After that,
it was displayed in Prague again in 1990–92 at several exhibitions considered to
be marginal. It was appreciated, in particular, by people from the Revolver Revue
and by some young artists. It became a kind of heraldic painting and icon,
representing a perfectly uncompromising and relentless resistance of a free spirit
against the forty years of communist dictatorship. Art experts did not take note of
the painting. In many a case, they managed to appreciate its alleged resemblance
to some paintings of Rudolf Hausner, from the Vienna School of Fantastic
Realism. But Brázda’s Monster P. B.’49 was created a decade earlier, so it was
not possible to place it anywhere in their worldwide construct of local art. His
painting was lacking a foreign model in the history of art. Should Monster P. B. ’49
be permanently displayed in the National Gallery one day as a key work from
the late 1940s, it will be evidence that qualified experts can sometimes, at least
belatedly, recognize well-painted and unusually original paintings. The question
of whether and to what degree it was necessary to resume the ideas of the pre-war
avant-garde – just as with Brno Hominism– could only be answered with actual
paintings. Nonconformist surrealism was the only remaining tradition that was
ripe for further development: to grasp the existential human situation, openly
and personally, at the beginning of the further exploits of Stalin’s empire, which
had enchained this small country and was getting ready for the next one. P. B.
and V. N. were starting something that did not share many common features with
the conventions of that time, including surrealist ones. It was to be a personal
statement, more earnest, modest and objective in nature. Authentic. Trustworthy.
Truthful. Nothing else, apart from the craft of painting it well, actually mattered
any more. Condensation of reality into symbols was only one of the methods of

THE MONSTER WAITS, THE MONSTER HAS TIME, OIL ON BOARD, 78 X 44 CM, 1949–1950

25
24
 this realism based on existentialism. When Jáchym Topol or perhaps Viktor Karlík
saw this painting, he said: “But this is not surrealism any more!” Indeed, it is not.
It is basically a straightforward depiction of reality as experienced, condensed into
unambiguous symbols. In all elements. Not only is the pair in the nest, with bird-
like heads somehow resembling doves on tomb stones, indeed P. B. and V. N., but
also the good-natured sun above them is a specific landlady from the small pub
“V Pekle” (In Hell) by the Charles Bridge, who left them in the next room with
the light switched off. And when they were leaving, she observed good-heartedly:
“You indeed had a great time.” The extracted tooth on the neck of the female
body, protruding in an embossed manner, as can be seen at close range, is P. B.’s
molar tooth, a so-called wisdom tooth, which he gave to V. N. It is also present
in his no-less-personal Still-life with a Mace, painted before Monster. It is possible
to look therein for a symbolic meaning, combined with lived reality and
perhaps a primal gesture as well. However, it was never on a necklace.

DID YOU FORGET TO SHAVE?, WATERCOLOUR ON BOARD, 37 X 30 CM, 1950

THE MONSTER WAITS, THE MONSTER HAS TIME - DETAIL, OIL ON BOARD, 78 X 44 CM, 1949–1950

26
 1953
DOBROMIL AND DOBROMILA (THE BED IS YOUR CHURCH)
Dobromil and Dobromila is a radical departure that remains distant from modem
art and wants to be something else, something that begins outside of it and
expresses reality in a manner like virtually nothing from past art. It relies not
only on a Cranach-like fine processing of the incarnate, but also the decorative
treatment of the drapery on the bed and the couple, creating an altar of sorts, is
a continuation of medieval illuminations. They float within the ornamental black
and golden framing through the starry night towards the open window, in which
the divine morning Sun appears and looks down at them. All formal means used
here – and they are no ends in themselves – serve as a precise description and
reconstruction of the actual situation. In the bedroom of P. B. and V. N. there was
indeed a rather big window through which the morning sun entered and in whose
warmth and light P. B. liked to make love. The super-reality of portrayal here
even corresponds to the basic external model. In the well-structured biography of
Brázda in the catalogue Pavel Brázda / Věra Nováková – the 1950s, Terezie Pokorná
writes: “Pictures with suns (e.g., Dobromil and Dobromila, 1953, The Sun Is Bathing
With Children, 1955) were perhaps intentionally meant to bring a cheerful note,
however, the experience of all-embracing grotesqueness and absurdity cannot be
denied, even in these.” Such a statement, rare in art, is put forth by P. B. not
as part of an agenda, but from a fundamental vital necessity. The all-embracing
sun, which gives us – or does not give us, no reason to forget that – light and
warmth and cheerfulness, does not cease to be an impenetrable divine source
from the absurd universe. P. B., who loves southern countries more than his own,
is the sun’s sincere admirer, even though in his paintings the sun is smiling in
a way that might create the impression of a suspicious metaphysical irony. In its
ambiguous function, Brázda’s sun, here with a wholly sensuous role, is usually
one of his hermetic deities in which it is possible to be embodied, or at least
which can be accepted as a universal fount of vital energy.

DOBROMIL AND DOBROMILA (THE BED IS YOUR CHURCH), WATERCOLOUR ON BOARD, 53 X 53 CM, 1953

28 29
 1954
The great astronaut
The Great Astronaut is half man, half robot, or at least a man who is partly
armoured, standing in the middle of the universe, marked by black stars
on a golden background. In this painting, a certain connection can be found
with the monumental realism of Mexican art of the time. Shortly before it was
painted, there was an exhibition of Mexican art in Prague; when its theorist, the
writer Antonio Rodriguez, was opening it, each time he repeated the words “il
realismo”, Brázda’s heart gave a leap, revelling in resonance with this simple need.
David Siqueiros’ Our Present Image, which he saw there, was and is a sensational
painting, baroque and monumental, whose massive pathos was completely
unparalleled in the art of the time. With all its admirable power, such pathos
was, and remains, alien even to P. B. Nevertheless, this painting, combined with
THE RED ASTRONAUT, WATERCOLOUR the overall impression of contemporary Mexican art, probably contributed to
ON BOARD, 28 X 18 CM, 1954
his need to create a painting featuring a monumental figure. It is possible that
Aztec art was a closer and more permanent model in this respect. And so, here is
a figure standing firmly in the middle of the universe. He is extending his hands
towards it, and in doing so, is also expressing his power and will to venture into
it. He compares himself to its inhuman and infinite expanse and meaning, gives
up on achieving it, and accepts his human limitations. He is at the same time
powerful and powerless. His lifted hands can be interpreted in various ways.
The Great Astronaut remains a unique figure with its individual conception of
a monumental representation of contemporary man.

SILVER ASTRONAUT, WATERCOLOUR ON THE GREAT ASTRONAUT, WATERCOLOUR ON BOARD,

BOARD, 45 X 18 CM, 1954 142 X 58 CM, 1954

30 31
 1954
THE Walking box
In The Walking Box, the freely elaborated story of Dobromil and Dobromila is
rounded off. It is one of Brázda’s prime paintings of the ’50s, in which the
stylized realism of the decade’s first half reached a balance between reality and
super-reality, between objective concreteness and its abstraction, and gave birth
to a work that is formally simple and classic at the same time. The painting has
something in common with the Gothic style and the early Renaissance. Not
much, but a little more than with modem art. From modem art, perhaps only
some elements of Chirico and Warhol are present here. Common features with
Warhol are clear at first sight in the multiplied figures on the fence; however, due
to temporal reasons, as Warhol’s multiples came later, he could not have been
the influence for Brázda’s idea, which comes from 1944. The steep, daringly tilted
pavement bears resemblance to the perspective of Chirico and Rousseau and
contributes to the shallowness of space, if indeed there is any, in addition to the
clearly deceptive illusion. The rear section of pavement is perhaps no farther than
the front one; the diminishing size of the cobblestones and crying children on
the posters creates a perspective that is only hinted at. Just past the posters, the
singularly diminished coulisse of a factory appears, probably a brewery, judging
by the type of chimneys. There is nothing beyond the fence at the end of the
street, only the end of the world. Perspective here is intentionally exaggerated
and unconvincing. And light? Although the sky brightens towards the horizon, as
if some light were indeed there, no other light can be seen here. And there is no
air at all, as there is no more need to breathe here. Perhaps there is a holy ghost of
sorts instead of air. It is a space similar to the Gothic one. There are no transitions,
and surfaces are cut out sharply and stuck onto the basic plane of the painting, as
if it were a collage. There is something similar to the composition of the Master
of the Vyšší Brod Altar, where it is rounded off by the separation of the painted
areas from the gilded ones and by the gradual intensification of the ultramarine
areas in a rich scale from the darkest ultramarine to white, in contrast with other
warmly harmonized areas. If the sharply cut-out areas themselves are graded
towards an indication of volume, then this is done in a monochromatic manner,
fully separated from the environs. There is no common source of lighting or trace
of an overall natural light. Each figure or its part, each object, has an existence of
its own. Everything here is transplanted into an artificial world, into the artificial
space of the painting, which at the same time resembles and contradicts the real
space in a remarkable way. In any case, this is a stage that is much cleaner and better
organized than the space of the three-dimensional world of phenomena, which by
comparison is chaotic, shapeless and floating. We, together with what is left of
the terrestrial world and what came through the gates of Heaven, are in celestial
space. In a world where not only time but also the originally three-dimensional

THE WALKING BOX, WATERCOLOUR ON BOARD, 103 X 51 CM, 1954

32 33
 space enabling volume as well as motion has stopped, this space levels off into
a surface. Out of the evanescent phenomena from the world below, represented
by the couple, the immobile ideal core has fallen out, possibly forever. They are
pressed into the surface as objectively convincing eternal phantoms. The original
title of this painting was Sandwichman the Walking Box, Accompanied in His Mind’s
Eye by His Concubine. The Concubine could, also be called his Soul, or princess
Soul, as added by a poet. However, because of her obvious immateriality, the
word “concubine” indicated a more apposite relationship. The poet Jiří Kuběna
honoured these protagonists of mythical worlds with the immortal names of
Cupid and Psyche. Thus, he beheld in them the likenesses of P. B. and V. N.
However, the painting was not conceived that way at all. Sandwichman the Walking
Box bears no resemblance to P. B. at the time of its painting, and there was no
intention for it to do so. Originally, the male figure was to be merely the last
representative of the circus, walking, not completely alone but accompanied by
his soul, down a deserted street with a fence plastered with innumerable crying
children. This motif was taken from the period magazine Dikobraz, where it
symbolized an unfulfilled five-year plan. For some, the children in this painting
might represent the five-year plan; for others, they can be the future, or just
children. Neither does his concubine bear any resemblance to V. N., although
the artist had a difficult time trying to make the figure as woeful as possible, for
example by drooping her breasts, which was achieved by lowering the nipples.
Her head is totally different. Nevertheless, through the captivating power of
poetic words, these two figures, already included among Brázda’s imaginary self-
portraits in Revolver Revue, were promoted to Cupid and Psyche of the 1950s.
Used for the poster for Brázda’s and Viktor Karlík’s joint exhibitions and later
drawn several times for invitations as well as on a collective New Year’s card, the
figures became a universally accepted symbol of the legendary inseparable pair of
Pavel Brázda and Věra Nováková.

1956–1958
TERROR
A head delineated in lines that themselves writhe in horror, and already body-
less, it turns away from the dark manifestation that is coming. It came out of
the red sky, its head is bent forward and the hands are approaching. They bear
claws from which there is no defence. Once these claws cut into the flesh, the last
opportunity to escape is gone. As the sky is burning, this phantom is advancing
– this Mortal Danger, or Death, bearing resemblance to man, or at least to a built
man, a completely inhuman, mechanized robot. Terror. Or a Demon. The Evil
Spirit of War. Slowly advancing, unstoppable. Spawn of the devil. Pure Terror,
without relief and without hope. 

TERROR, OIL ON CANVAS, 85 X 60 CM, 1953

34 35
 GREY FIGURE AND HER ANGEL, WATERCOLOUR
ON PAPER, 39 X 20 CM, 1957

1956–1958
SOMEONE ORDERS, SOMEONE OBEYS
This painting, loosely associated with the “War Against People” cycle, represents
a figure of power along with a common man who is subject to it, whether during
war or in civil life. The increased use of surfaces consisting of paint mixed with
sand, which already appeared in some earlier paintings (for example, in the
profiled head in The Stronger Will Prevail ), creates a free connection with Dubuffet,
which would be developed in the 1960s, especially in terms of technique, with
more application of texture following the artist’s acquaintance with acrylic
dispersions.

RESIDENT OF A METROPOLIS, WATERCOLOUR MEMORIES FROM MILITARY SERVICE, OIL ON CANVAS, 85 X 60 CM, 1956–1958 SOMEONE ORDERS, SOMEONE OBEYS, OIL ON CANVAS, 60 X 85 CM, 1955–1959
ON PAPER, 29 X 17 CM, 1950s

36 37
 1956–1958
5 MINUTES BEfore the end of the world
While V. Nováková’s second large, monumental composition was underway, Sic
transit gloria mundi, which she solved straightforwardly in terms of ideas and
composition, P. B. started to utilize and process a summary of the experiences of
a man who, more than in an external world in which he did not feel at home, was
finding his own life ambivalently in the world of his imagery and in its literary as
well as drawn artifacts. But only further shaping of some of those experiences and
arranging them into an open, albeit complex, entity could give them a more
communicative meaning, make them accessible and approximate to possible
perception. Thanks to a certain detachment from past experiences he had
overcome, is was possible to use original materials, which sometimes had
a repelling effect like odiously prolapsed guts, to create an extremely complex
drawing. Later, in 1965, a work that is orderly and satisfying in terms of aesthetics,
and whose existence could emerge if only in the cultural environment of one’s
own apartment, could actually become its distinctive decoration. When a rather
ghostly acquaintance of Ivan Sobotka referred to as Lord Richter – and that
indeed was his name (der Richter = judge) – saw this composition more than fifty
years ago, shortly after it was finished, when it seemed quite unusual even to
people well-versed in surrealism, he declared that this was not a painting but
a telephone switchboard. P. B. accepted such an observation as flattering. He did
not want the painting to be normal at all. He perhaps saw it as a sort of large,
ideal exhibition of at least a fraction of the objects he had been recording since
1945 without knowing for what purpose. The labyrinthine composition formed
from their assembly really did bear some resemblance to a telephone switchboard.
If someone wanted to get through to something less ambiguous than a multi-
voiced visual tangle of all its participants, they would have to put up with the final
title. There is nothing else but the ability to survive in this absurd world. There
are few paintings as complex as this; it can be argued that apart from the two
previous large compositions of V. N. from that time, which of course are quite
different and much more classical, there is nothing like it in this country. As
a post-surrealist as well as post-cubist painting, its undertaking was very
ambitious in its construction. Its execution, in a relatively small format for such
a large drawing, as well as in the later painting of the same format, is disciplined
and humble, as well as sufficiently condensed into an exceptionally rich yet
classically well-organised form. An intimate format of 63 x 136 cm, which was
used for the first definitive version of this drawing as well as the painting, has
its advantages. In the National Gallery or other major museum, where this
painting should be displayed permanently, it will not occupy too much space.
When 5 Minutes Before the End of the World was displayed in 2001 at an exhibition
in the former synagogue in Dobříš – similarly as the Tree of Life and The End of the
38
World by Věra Nováková – as a  computerized magnification of the original
drawing to a width of approximately two and a half metres, all these monumentally
composed works stood the test of a larger format. 5 Minutes Before the End of the
World is unique, even as a post-surrealist painting. It is impossible to find a Czech
or international surrealist painting that comes close to its strange nature or to
which it could be compared. The painting also contains an homage to the
surrealist tradition, whose mantle it takes up, and which in its symbolic realism it
overlaps elsewhere, lacking neither a rational meaning nor a modern classical
order. Traditionally speaking, it could be included in the category of black
romanticism or sousrealism (sub-realism), if only because it takes place below the
level of so-called reality, on its bottom, in sub-reality, and in the large underworld.
To these ends, Breton’s attractive term “amusement halls of the world beyond” is
embodied vividly. In the outline of the ensuing large composition, P. B. proceeded
in a rational manner in formal terms, and in the details he used his intuition. It is
possible to interpret them subsequently in one way, as well as to leave free space
for various hermeneutic analyses. Or for the mere pleasure of a free flight of
imagination into a peculiar world that is difficult to navigate. However, it is
possible to find in it much of what being present in the so-called normal world
resembles in its symbolised form. Mythical spaces and stories of pleasure and
pain usually form a part of the super-reality of ideal celestial worlds. Hell is a part
of Christian heaven, and the Underworld is a part of the world inhabited by gods.
The source of heavenly pleasures could also be the super-reality of haunted
houses in amusement parks or of film and TV horrors. If such a composition is to
be perceived more broadly, it is necessary to go through it step-by-step. That way,
the whole can easily be perceived as merely confused and semantically
indistinguishable labyrinthine ornament. At first sight, the central Head in this
composition attracts attention with its size; it is an egg-shaped globe installed on
a neck, which is actually a Classical column. It has bruised wings instead of ears;
the eye sockets are empty, so it cannot see. Instead of a pair of eyes, the heads of
Hitler and Stalin were to be placed, respectively, in the right and left eye sockets.
This was postponed due to the threat of police inspections, which P. B.
experienced during both the Nazi and the communist eras. The eyes were not
supplemented with these prominent demons until the painted version of 1956, by
which time such danger was no longer imminent. Under this dominant feature
there is the facade of an amusement hall with a jolly attraction, formed by two big
barrels as tall as a human figure, each of them rolling to a different side. The
visitors were to pass through these barrels, and it was open to question in what
condition, whether standing, sitting or lying, or whether they would stagger or
tumble out of them. Hardly anybody would emerge without falling, but passing
through the barrels could be a learned skill. Behind this façade, something more
serious and worse is taking place: brain surgery – one of the operations of the
century. A dangerous and risky procedure on the man’s brain by an anonymous
engineer of human souls under the spotlight of the bright future. Out of which
the head of a baby emerges. Under this scene, clasping its hands, is a heart run
over by a tyre, as can be seen from its imprint. A dagger is stabbed into it. The
clock, formerly a street clock, has become a menacingly live mechanical creature
whose hands on the dial are showing – what else but five minutes before the end
39
 5 MINUTES BEFORE THE END OF THE WORLD, OIL AND WATERCOLOUR ON BOARD, 63 X 136 CM, 1956–1958

40 41
 of the world – five minutes till twelve. The hands of the clock come to life are
embracing the sitting figure, which is holding its head in its hands, bowed down
to the table so as not to see anything. Indeed, for this is (as added in writing on
the painted version at least) the AUCTOR – the originator of everything going on
around him here. It is he who brought all this to pass and called all this upon
himself. On the table, he rests his head on a telephone with a peculiar receiver,
with an ear for listening and an open mouth, which may be hearing and speaking
only what it says, possibly even shouting a little when the receiver is hung up.
There is also a candle of sorts with an eye that’s shedding tears, a symbolic brain
in an open book on a plate, and a fork intended for eating it, pointed towards it.
Accompanied by a smallish revolver. And also a philosophical toothbrush –
remarkably impracticable, because instead of a bundle of bristles there are five
teeth fitted on it. It is possible to enter such a painting as into an eerie modern
fairytale, no less drastic than many of old standing, into a dangerous kingdom
where the world is enchanted like in a dark mirror. And to partake in it, perhaps
as one of the small characters nearly lost therein, maybe as the winged pair in the
nest on the roof above the procession of voracious mechanisms being murdered
in the right section of the painting. Riding or in flight, they swallow – as airplanes
with dragon mouths – or they are ready to swallow, children as well as other
people. We also find here the motif of innocent babies or infants who, as
messengers of the future, are run over and eaten by an ogrish mechanism. Near
the figure on the ladder – we recognize it as a variation on the one in The Alienated
One – which is on its way up to somewhere else, towards heaven, and looks back
down to the Underworld, there is a metal frame surrounding a face whose
expression of increasing contempt is a resumption of Monster P. B. ’49. Above the
face there is even an egg with an embryo holding a revolver in its hand. At the
upper left, we see a pioneering couple from an advertisement (“We are the new
youth, the youth of Gottwald”), straddling a tube of toothpaste, wielding
a gigantic toothbrush to clean the teeth of the old Sun, whose beard is a jug of
milk. There is also a smaller pair, watching this scene from their little airplane,
and the littlest pair, riding away from it all on a carriage with a horse’s head and
naked human buttocks. There are also other tiny inhabitants of this atrocious
town. A naked man who is coming out of the chimney door and is stretching
himself. A big bird breast-feeding the sun in swaddling clothing, through which
one can go up the stairs to the binoculars in the hollow of its head and watch
from there a naked woman sunbathing on a slowly floating airplane. There appear
also good memories of touching human relationships and their dog-like
faithfulness in windows of the house that resemble eyes. Another window
presents a completely bald nude woman with a robot. At least some of the more
pleasant memories from the human world are endangered by the advancing
machinery. It is also possible to become an otherwise insignificant minor figure
in whose likeness the painting’s viewer and pilgrim at this enormous exhibition
of peculiar diversities can sit down, bent over the large reclining diver in a wetsuit,
who may still be alive. The bearded infant standing above him has lifted an index
finger in warning. If there is anything here that has or can have a symbolic and
vital meaning, then it’s the devil or omniscient God who can make something of
it, or at least the artist, or the guide and his visitors, who together follow the
42
paths through this maze and their intricate junctions. It is possible to examine
the painting endlessly and in minute detail, following the indicated instructions,
and find objects therein whose symbolic qualities give a comprehensible meaning
or are open to infusing with meaning, or merely offer themselves to having
a sense or remote suspicion of meaning. Or they are self-sufficient in the realness
of their own existence. This painting is sometimes mentioned in a superficial
connection to Hieronymus Bosch; however, it has little in common with his
works, both thematically and formally. Moreover, and oddly enough, until 1953,
P. B. did not know the complex compositions of Bosch, in particular The Garden
of Earthly Delights, except for a single atypical painting, which he did not like. He
got acquainted with it at the time when he was finishing preparations for the
painting, and he took a cue from two of its details. Of more substantial
significance for the creation of individual objects and the overall conception was
the “Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme” in Paris. For P. B., it was utterly
unsatisfactory; neither Magritte, who was most dear to him, nor Dalí, nor Miró
was present, and not a single painting captured his interest. Of several
panoptically pleasant objects – such as a rather sweet female breast under black
velvet available for examination by touch – there was at least one object of
valuable interest to him in the magically darkened environment full of bags,
perhaps filled with coal, suspended from the roof. That one object then gave rise
to a four-legged table – an animal with four human legs, a shaggy animal tail and
a human head with an open mouth, which is either barking or yelling. The
original object, humanized here, did not feature it. On the table is an appliance
with a human head and extremities, which was originally a banal advertisement.
P. B. actually recorded all such creatures as models for objects that could perhaps
be used sometime in the attractive ideal maze of a gigantic amusement hall. Also,
some halls of the amusement parks of Bmo were single-storied and quite complex
and extensive, so in one of these haunted halls, perhaps in Vienna or elsewhere,
richly furnished with staircases leading to various attractions, it was possible,
somewhere at a terminus above the first floor, to bump into a giant head of
a monster, which was alternately opening and closing, and in it lay a life-sized
human couple made of wax. Most likely because of the unsatisfactory quality of
the surrealist exhibition in Paris, where, in his view, so little of the work held up,
P. B. attempted to create a magnificent space, an ideal hall or museum of sorts,
which would become, as an exaggeration of an amusement park with new and
unprecedented attractions, a gigantic exhibition of innumerable objects of
a surrealistic, panoptic nature. It is possible to enter and wander through its
dizzying and astonishing complexity for a long time and still discover new and
additional objects. P. B. tried to ensure that this painting would become
a monument of his interpretation of surrealist suggestions rendered into a more
satisfying imaginary exhibition (at least for him) than the one in Paris. And
further, transferred into the rational order of a monumental painting, originating
from cubism and filled at the same time by a rich and objectively presented
imagination. In analytic cubism, all formal elements into which the subject is
distributed and abstracted are placed evenly along the whole surface of the
painting, gradually bypassing illusive space and its perspective. This is similar to
the approach in 5 Minutes Before the End of the World, the difference being that all
43
 component parts of the painting are concrete and material. Closer to this method
are Dadaist montage photographs, proceeding from analytic cubism, which fill
the whole surface of the painting with figurative components. Here, this point of
departure is still connected to a classic central composition employed since the
Renaissance, which had been used previously by V. Nováková in her Tree of Life
and Sic transit gloria mundi. At the major group exhibition The End of the World? at
Kinský Palace in 2000, Brázda’s monumental drawing was displayed on the same
wall as paintings by Bohumil Kubišta, Václav Tikal and Jindřich Štyrský. In strictly
formal terms, it compared well with Kubišta’s Istrian Landscape; it did not
compare so well with the optically more illusive Štyrský canvas next to it; and it
did not compare at all with the canvas by Tikal, with its total lack of compositional
compactness, which – paradoxically – is characteristic of 5 Minutes Before the End
of the World, a work teeming with irrational life. In comparison with the previous
small-scale compositions drawn in chalk (Sunday Afternoon), pencil (Melancholy),
or hair brush pen (The Street Where the Sun Turned to Stone), the technique and
style of the drawing had changed. In continuity with Hominist drawings he made
in Bmo and their combination of pen and pencil, a relatively thick lettering pen is
used here, complemented by hair brush pen and chalk, yielding the plasticity of
embossed type and various degrees of opaqueness ranging all the way to black.
Therefore, the form becomes more stylized as well as monumental. The space
changes as well. The drawing does not possess the overall convincing depth of an
illusive space. Everything is pressed together into a single image plane, as if it
was glued upon it. The individual components leave the impression of having
been cut out and placed – sometimes even one over another – on a single surface.
Even though they sometimes overlap, they are not separated spatially.

THE STREET WHERE THE SUN TURNED TO STONE, DRAWING, 1952 GUARDSMAN ANGEL, OIL AND ACRONEX ON BOARD, 129 X 84 CM, 1954–1961

44 45
 1954–1961
GUARDSMAN ANGEL
The first version of this painting could be called Apprentice and Angel the Humanist.
The apprentice is a young boy who found his way into a monstrous enterprise
(perhaps in Moravian Ostrava, as observed there by P. B.) where the machinery of
heavy industry is in operation under motto: “At the end of our effort is a man”;
the apprentice at this end has his own answer to that. His gesture is a well-
known one, which communicates: Lick my eye, or more precisely and vulgarly:
Eat shit, or Eat shit, all of you! It was worse in the case of the Angel, whom
P. B., mistaken in his good will at the wrong place, tried to create as a positive
character. Originally, it was the head of a manly and responsible protector, but
of the type better suited for an American movie in the role of Mr. Perfect Good-
guy, a fair sheriff capable of enforcing law and justice and good against evil, with
a happy ending. Realistically speaking, the head was hopelessly impossible, so
perfectly inappropriate in respect to the whole surrounding situation, that after
1960 P. B. simply cut it out and kept it as a memento. Instead, he inserted there
a newly created mask of a robot-type monster, in this case performing a policing
function. Thus a crueller, but at the same time more truthful, variant was created.
The original irrational idea was saved by a misguided painting, returned to reality
and given an unexpected elan. On the neck of this by now wholly inhuman demon,
P. B. put a wheel as a reminder that man here is only a negligible component
of the mechanism. He glued old five-crown coins into his palms, as if to show
that it’s everything such a personified system is capable of giving. To top it off,
in contrast to Guardian Angel, he called him Guardsman Angel. The painting
was then inserted into a frame apparently of heavy armour. The depiction of
a completely earthly reality was again lifted into an allegorical sphere and levelled
onto an expansive surface from which only a shallow embossing emerges. The
slightly advancing head of the Utopian demon and additional elements of relief
on the cold-blue body are enough for a three-dimensional step out of the frame,
and the red background is animated in an ornamental manner by the hell of heavy
industry. The parts of the painting with relief, which captured P. B.’s interest in
Theodoricus’ monumental figures and which were partly used in Monster P. B. ’49,
play a dominant role here.

PORTRAIT OF THE FATHER, ACRONEX ON BOARD, 107 X 145 CM, 1956–1958

46 47
 1956–1958
portrait of the father
This portrait proceeds from the mutually tense and often confrontational
relationship between the artist and his model. It represents his ironic glorification
as well as jocular revenge for past and – as it turned out later – some future
wrongs. The father is presented here – therein lies his generalization – as a self-
centred and rather threatening or at least frightening authority. He forms the
monumental centre of a three-piece altar painting of sorts. The result is a peculiar
deity seen from a terribly close range. The head is outlined schematically by
a red rectangle into which only the face is drawn in detail. To this frame, similar
schematic suggestions of shoulders are attached in red triangle frames. From
these, his wife, Eva, and son Pavel are turned to him as queer donors, authority
with an appropriate mix of seriousness and laughter. That applies even to the most
worshipped ones who, even today in the current agreeably liberal society, are holy
and untouchable for many people, such as the Christian God the Father and His
Son, or Allah and His Prophet Muhammad. And also many other bizarre deities.
There are so many in the world that, according to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, all of
them could just laugh at the idea that there is only one god. It is highly advisable
to take in a similar manner, for that matter, any worshipped authorities from the
scientific, philosophical or artistic sphere. And, after all, also oneself. Let this be
the message of the Portrait of the Father.

PORTRAIT OF THE FATHER - CENTRAL PART, ACRONEX ON BOARD, 107 X 145 CM, 1956–1958

48
 1956–1958
OVER THE DEAD FOE
The little soldier standing over the dead enemy is probably a Russian soldier
looking at a dead German. This rosy-cheeked little soldier, still inexperienced,
almost giving the impression of being a child, did nothing worse than to act as
an obedient child. If he were disobedient and did not fire when ordered to, some
political commissary would have shot him in the back, and with good reason. An
army serves to obey and kill. And even now, when this little soldier stands with
his head bent in wonder on the battlefield over the dead enemy, whose frozen
eyes still can see, his own eyes are also astounded and a little bit red, as if they
were burning or disposed towards crying. He looks into the void, not receiving an
answer as to why he killed this man when he feels no hatred for him. The big dead
head seems perplexed by the fact that it is dead. And so it gradually takes on an
accusatory likeness in the middle of a flowering meadow. And this basically quite
good and innocent little soldier – a soldier with a good heart – is left to wonder
endlessly what he really did and what death truly means.

1956–1958
OVER THE DEAD FRIEND
This scene is clearly related to the Hungarian uprising against the Russian-
controlled supremacy of the communist party, which was suppressed brutally
in 1956 with an invasion by the Soviet Army. Its participants are two friends who
were separated by this war into antagonistic sides. One of them is dying due
to aggressive power. It is probably the one who rose against it. His friend of
old standing is in a soldier’s helmet standing over him with sympathy, perhaps
triggered when seeing the work of his side’s army. The rebel’s death cannot be
undone or rectified, whether he was killed by this ordinary soldier or his army.
The soldier is responsible for his – and not only his – death. He is the rebel’s
murderer. Because every army, let alone an offensive allied army, is an army of
murderers. 

OVER THE DEAD FOE, OIL ON CANVAS, 85 X 60 CM, 1956–1958 OVER THE DEAD FRIEND, OIL ON CANVAS, 85 X 60 CM, 1956–1958

50 51
 1956–1958
THE STRONGER WILL PREVAIL
This title is a provocative alternative to the motto “Truth Will Prevail” – in this
case, the stronger will prevail. That’s usually the way it is, unfortunately (or thank
goodness?), in nature as well as in war. Most of human history mirrors this side
of human nature and progresses only slowly, and only some of the time. The
more fair-minded person does not prevail; that happens only exceptionally, or in
fairy tales. And even if he were to win, it would be because he was or had become
stronger. The human profile in this painting, glancing up uneasily at the result
of the match between the Red and Blue one, is asking: “Who is the fair one here?
The Red or the Blue one?” Here, the Red one has prevailed. In the state Czechs
live in and which used to have, but no longer has, the motto “Truth Will Prevail”
under its national emblem, communist terror did prevail. That happened 10 years
before this painting was finished and for a hopelessly long time after. Sometimes
truth also prevails: for example, at the end of the 1980s, when, according to
Václav Havel, truth and love prevailed over lies and hatred. Maybe not forever, but
this can sometimes happen if we take great pains; sometimes it can occur even
without us. However, it is not natural. These are only attempts at implementing
the human moral law against the law of nature, in which the stronger do indeed
kill the weaker. The last victor in the war against people is General Death. It
was a great honour for Pavel Brázda when a casual visitor to the exhibition at
the synagogue in Dobříš told him that these simple monumental paintings,
such as Threemen and Green Woman or The Stronger Will Prevail, reminded him of
a Classical tragedy. In this connection, Pavel Brázda’s ontological pessimism and
atheism became more radical, which he cannot resist to declare here. Blind nature
is innocent; God in his imagined incarnation is not. TO HELL WITH GOD! And
God was taken by the devil. And to heaven with the devil! And God took the devil
into an inseparable alliance. And into joint responsibility for everything. It is
possible to go even further, past the boundaries of generally accepted good taste.
God and the devil play with animals and humans like a cat plays with a mouse.
Or a  bird, which – fortunately – they kill for killing’s sake, gradually and with
irresistible pleasure. God eat shit! (Laughter.)

THE STRONGER WILL PREVAIL, OIL ON CANVAS, 85 X 120 CM, 1956–1958

52 53
 1957–1958
EMBROIDERED PICTURES (with Eva Brázdová)
Embroidered pictures were made for one year, from February 1957 to the spring
of 1958. The impulse for them was the comfortless situation in the life of Eva
Brázdová, Pavel Brázda’s mother, who was constrained by personal problems on
the one hand and external circumstances on the other hand. After 1948, Brázda’s
father, as a rich Brno attorney and a former chairman of the Agrarian Party, was
sent to a forced labour camp by the decision of a special commission. Fortunately,
he managed to get out of there on account of fabricated health reasons with
a minimum disability pension. But his parents were expelled from Brno and from
their eight-room apartment, already diminished by that time. They had to move
to a country house in Veverská Bitýška, where they were provided only one room
and a kitchen. The ensuing situation, worsened by the ongoing disintegration
of the marriage and family, was borne badly by P. B.’s mother. She began to
drink secretly, was showing susceptibility to hysteria, and even attempted suicide
several times. Her will to live was completely weakened. And then P. B. got the idea
that by making embroidered pictures she could, at least to some extent, set aside
all her troubles and hardships and escape for a while from her sad everyday life to
a magical world, which would satisfy her love for art and an unfulfilled need for
creativity and also add some meaning to her life. Even earlier in the 1950s, P. B. was
interested in the arts of native cultures and admired his grandmother’s collection
of folk embroidery removed from national costumes – these were wonderful
items in themselves, comparable to African-American or Native American folk
art. At the same time, his grandmother liked to knit, and so he got the idea to
prepare a few figurative drafts for her, which she could knit to while listening
to banned foreign radio broadcasts. Then, he thought that such pictures could
also be embroidered, and realized that his mother could do this, too. Unlike the
older generation, she was not familiar with handiwork. But his grandmother
explained to him the possibilities of various stitches, and she even prepared
for him pattern palettes of sorts, which he would send to his mother together
with the drafts for the first embroidered pictures. Initially, he made the drafts in
black and coloured ink on paper and then copied them to fabrics designed for
embroidery. He used canvas, embroidery canvas, but also burlap and grey floor suitable for embroidery. However, in terms of themes, the embroidered pictures
rags. P. B. also designed types of stitches on his own, but his mother, who got with their idyllic nature were deliberately completely different from P. B.’s works
really interested in this, was already choosing the stitches and putting finishing of the period, which were considerably more serious and dramatic. At the crux of
touches to them. Several dozens of embroidered pictures were created in this these pictures was the need also to find comfort in the terrifying ambient world.
way. Both P. B. and Eva Brázdová made them with great pleasure. He expected When P. B. looks at these embroidered pictures today, he often likes them more
more of this collaboration in the future, but his mother died unexpectedly – she than many other things he made at that time, and he attaches more importance
was 52 – and that was the end of it. Although the basic aim of his drafts was to them than it may seem. He believes that art should depict not only the horrible
“applied” rather than fine art, and their purpose was primarily to help a person and terrifying, but also the amiable, admirable and miraculous aspects of reality.
close to him, to a certain extent they were related to what he himself had been And he also thinks that art – like life – relates not only to truth but also to beauty
working on. Sometimes he proceeded from earlier drawings that he considered and even goodness.

EMBROIDERED PICTURES, WOOL ON JUTE, VARIOUS SIZES, 1957–1958

54 55
 EMBROIDERED PICTURES, WOOL ON JUTE, VARIOUS SIZES, 1957–1958 EMBROIDERED PICTURES, WOOL ON JUTE / SKETCHES, WATERCOLOUR AND PENCIL ON PAPER, VARIOUS SIZES, 1957–1958

56 57
 1956–1958
RACERS
The “Racers” series no longer expresses the feelings of 5 Minutes Before the End
of the World. The paintings reflect changes in the world of politics. Stalin had
kicked the bucket – allegedly, he had wagged a warning finger for the last time.
The threat of World War III and the downfall of civilization had taken a back seat,
and the world was facing a new situation. Papa Khrushchev was a different type
of man. He presented another political conception, based rather plain-heartedly
on the idea that socialism could compete with capitalism, and in doing so it
would not only catch up with it but even surpass it, by 1960 or 1970 – or at least
2000, perhaps sooner. The profusion of colours in “Racers” contrasts with the
greyness of the previous paintings and indicates that something from the outside
world was beginning to open up. A race can be seen as a competition among
social systems, ideologies, and so on, but also as a fight among individuals. We
can see in it a chance brought by the easing of those years, but also a life-or-
death ride able to avoid death. Each racer, on his own individual track, can either
win or crash. However, he always takes risks, and the limits of risk can never be
calculated precisely. The spectators just buy their tickets and watch the race. They
can observe, cheer the racer on, keep their fingers crossed – but that is all they
can do, if only because they have no means to join the race themselves. In the
painting Grand Prix, the audience still consists of individual people. Later in the
cycle, all the spectators are the same, becoming a mass.

Brázda says: “The theme of racing is also connected to my hobbies and passions.
I think (and it was confirmed by a horoscope) that I would have made a great
racer; in any case I would have enjoyed it. Our family used to have a posh car,
a Walter Prince, and I drove it many times in my dreams. Although I never acquired
a driver’s licence for a car or a motorcycle, I can compensate for all that by riding
my bike, which brings me the joy of speed as well as the pleasure of risk-taking.
I also talked at length about car races in Brno, as it was one of the few things
that I was really interested in. The Masaryk Circuit in Brno was distinguished
for its high standard, and famous racers such as Chiron and Nuvolari used to
drive there. It was simply the world as I like it – a world transcending the local
provinciality, which is repelling to me in all respects. In plain terms, it was
a part of the world theatre in my imagination, a popular spectacle of the same
kind as the Brno amusement park – surrealism for common people, in a certain
sense. Also in formal terms, the “Racers” series – similarly the to the “Soldiers”
and “Astronauts” series – meant an alteration. I acceded to the principle of
sign. I drew inspiration from the art of native cultures and used the elements
of their art for wholly modern purposes. I also opted for a completely new way
of working. In contrast to my former very slow painting, this time I wanted to

RACERS, WATERCOLOUR ON BOARD, 30 X 21 CM, 1956–1958

58 59
 quickly start a series of paintings conceived in signs and to play freely with shape
and colour, so that it would correspond to the atmosphere of motorcycle races as
I experienced it in Brno. Thus, the method corresponded to the theme. I started
the whole series of variously “car-bodied” paintings as a race in which speed and
technical economy were also important. It was a serial production of a kind. The
whole case of the “Racers” was based on a forethought of craft and the effort to
rationalize and even industrialize it as much as possible. It was cheerful work,
and it progressed quickly. Again, my familiar experience was proven to me: Man
is satisfied by every activity that flows easily”.

RACERS, OIL ON BOARD, VARIOUS SIZES, 1956–1958 RACERS, OIL ON BOARD, VARIOUS SIZES, 1956–1958

60 61
 RACERS, OIL ON BOARD, VARIOUS SIZES, 1956–1958 RACERS, OIL ON BOARD, VARIOUS SIZES, 1956–1958

62 63

A SMALL CALAMITY IN SPACE, ACRONEX ON PLYWOOD, 64 X 95 CM, 1969
PROFILE WITH AN EXPLOSION IN THE HEAD, ACRONEX ON PLYWOOD, 63 X 45 CM, 1969
64
1969
A SMALL CALAMITY IN SPACE
Everything here is scattered around. Originally, it was a composition that was strictly
formed into a perfect, completely static whole, built with Mondrian-like rigour on
a precisely weighted balance of vertical and horizontal axes. Captive in a relatively
perfect order, it was somewhat similar to Rear Wicket, but more disciplined. There
were no diagonals present here, unlike in the above-mentioned painting. Its order
was perfect in a machine-like way, and for good reason. Its central motif was the
static figure of the Man in the Machine. That was the title of the painting. There
was also a certain likeness of the artist in it. The surface of the relief was a layer
of aluminium, and the central static figure inserted in the machine was of copper
colour. In 1968, this artefact, together with two others (the relief The Fortress and
the sculpture Tower) and many other things, became the victim of destruction, after
which only fragments remained from the broken pieces of plywood. P. B. stored
these fragments, and shortly thereafter used them for a new painting. This resulted
in an exceptionally dynamic composition, evoking a catastrophe connected with an
explosion in outer space or psychological space. Arguably, a machine exploded in
it and its components were thrust out into space; together with them are remnants
of human figures, which can be recognized or at least bear a resemblance to
them. Whereas Man in the Machine was almost incarcerated in static orderliness,
the figure’s unexpected transformation results in one of P.  B.’s most dramatic
paintings. On a new black background and in its extended space, the ragged parts
of the upper layer of the fragmented plywood are glued just as they were found and
are additionally painted black. Also used are other parts of the former painting,
left in their raw preserved state. The unrestrained laceration of the original relief
by female hands was so rigorous and gave such picturesque results that perhaps
no natural catastrophe, nor an intentional act by the artist, would have produced
anything as convincing. Utilization of the non-artistic phase of the process that
produced these results is the concerted work of artistic and dramatic action, which
yields extraordinary authenticity. Apart from the preparation of the new black
plywood and red coating of the fragments from the original one, the artist confined
himself to observing what interesting configurations could be made by moving
the fragments around on the black surface – that is, to create a collage. When he
arrived at a result that was satisfactory, both in terms of expression and artistically,
he just pasted it all on carefully. The result was an extraordinary relief assembly –
a work unique for its three-phase creation, radically authentic and connected to life.
It turned out that even a seemingly perfect small disaster could result in something
good: an unexpectedly interesting painting. However, this is the exception.
65
 1970
relief faces
At the beginning of the 1970s, P. B. met an old mason, Mr. Stehlík, whom he
had helped to work on his family’s country house in Dolní Křečany near
Rumburk, and who was skilled in the art of stucco. From him, P. B. learned how
to cast plaster in moulds. He began with a series of faces in relief. Using regular
children’s modelling clay, he would mix together a variety of colours in the right
proportions to achieve a neutral taupe. On a glass base, he would then form the
mass into relief heads or masks, or, more precisely, faces. They were also derived
from classic models, primarily from antiquity, and in particular from ancient
Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece. Only exceptionally using an actual model, he
would form stylized faces in several basic types, with subtle differences, and
deliberately restrained and classic. That is, in a completely different way from his
dreamlike paintings and drawings from this period.

Most of the faces are not large, ranging from 10 cm to almost 20 cm. Some reach
life size, and some are almost two times larger than life. Whatever the scale, they
are always based on a monumentally simplified form. Some of them are relatively
shallow bas-reliefs, and in others the relief protrudes so much that they come
close to being sculptures – interesting to look at in a three-quarter view and also
in profile. To faces both male and female, P. B. would add a woman’s torso from
the waist up, like a mannequin. Plaster moulds allowed for multiple castings,
which were variously elaborated. P. B. gave special attention to polychrome. He
used it with aluminium as well as bronze, combined with various acrylic paints.
He would sometimes enliven areas of colour with an airbrush. He devoted special
care to the eyes, generally of different colours. This makes them stand out even
more, like the coloured enamel set into ancient bronzes or gold sculptures from
the Middle Ages.

P.B. admires ancient heads with fascinating eyes, whose alertness or semi-alertness
convince us of their independent existence, and whose immortality offers more
than the usual possibilities. They are like messengers from the afterlife, from
a region of dark desire for something out of reach. The eyes are, after all, the
visible projections of the mind, considered to be the domicile of the soul. When
the faces of P. B. stare into the world of the metaphysically absurd, their creator
does not sense in them a complete difference compared with the eyes of ancient
sculptures, which gaze into the absolute of another nature. He reveres them
as a model of perfection. P. B.’s ultimate wish, which he has yet to achieve, was
to create a head five times larger than the biggest and most plastic of them – one
reaching 6 feet – and to execute it in a similar yet even more detailed way than that
of Matěj Poctivý and his brother, called Golem.

MATĚJ POCTIVÝ, PAINTED PLASTER, 40 X 27 X 9 CM, 1970s

66
 RELIEF HEADS, PAINTED PLASTER, VARIOUS SIZES, 1970s

THE RELIEF ASTRONAUT, PAINTED PLASTER, 31 X 19 CM, 1970s MR. DÍK, PAINTED PLASTER, 31 X 24 CM TORSO, PAINTED PLASTER, 46 X 30 CM, 1970s

68 69
 1994–1995
COLOURFUL heads
Pavel Brázda made numerous paintings of heads in acrylic on canvas in the
first half of the 1990s, proceeding from much older sketches and drawings.
The heads are characterized by a formal reality in their visual approach
along with a psychological component that maps the quirks of different human
personalities – something typical of Brázda’s images generally. This body work
is a continuation of what he had already begun in the second half of the 1950s,
namely, a certain stylization or formalization, which we also see in the “Racers”
cycle and which he continued in the series “War Against People”. The “Colourful
Heads” series is indisputably a further step in the stylistic metamorphosis
underway at that time, which thereafter continued full force. The series is an
intermediate step to Brázda’s next stage of development – his digital images, in
which original line drawings are transformed into paintings without a brush ever
having been applied.

COLOURFUL HEADS, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 60 X 45 CM, 1994–1995 COLOURFUL HEADS, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 60 X 45 CM, 1994–1995

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 COLOURFUL HEADS, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, VARIOUS SIZES, 1994–1995
COLOURFUL HEADS, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 60 X 32 CM, 1994–1995

72
 1995–2005
drawings

DRAWINGS, PEN ON PAPER, VARIOUS SIZES, 1995–2005 DRAWINGS, PEN ON PAPER, VARIOUS SIZES, 1995–2005

74 75
 DRAWINGS, PEN ON PAPER, VARIOUS SIZES, 1995–2005 DRAWINGS, PEN ON PAPER, VARIOUS SIZES, 1995–2005

76 77
 2008–2017
THE human comedy
In a way, this open cycle is the apex of Brázda’s idea of Hominism, which he first
conceived in 1943–1944. Hominism’s central aim was to make fine art accessible to
the public, to make art about people and for people. The Human Comedy is a title
that had already been used many times before, and with good reason: In contrast
to the Divine Comedy, there is undoubtedly something we can call the human
comedy. In Brázda’s case, it’s a comedy whose depiction is centred entirely on
people and observation of their lives. Ultimately, even the word comedy, in that
it means something funny, plays a role, especially because the observations are
made with a measure of detachment.

The images are based on ideas and drawings that originated in the previous
and also the present century, but which Brázda had not yet been able to fully
implement. He did not approach the work with any preconceived notions; rather,
it was “dream work” that could be done in a fully waking state, during which he
would reshape reality into a surrealistic representation. When he began a drawing,
he never knew how it would turn out. He would draw and redraw, give it a formal
compositional order, and gradually the image itself would emerge. The central
theme was usually the age-old attraction or discord between men and women,
simultaneously expressing a symbolic representation of the human mind with
its animus and anima, based on the Jungian model. What’s essential is that the
figures have a deeper level. This extensive series of digital images is conceived
and prepared for division into individual chapters with a beginning and end, like
an epic. The project begins with birth and youth, continues with a series of erotic
tableaux, progressing to more dramatic and existential themes, and to old age and
death. The range of content is very wide. Images are conceived with a considerable
detachment and have their own individual attributes. They usually have a special
black, or gallows, humour, borne with exquisite pessimism and the human ability
to endure and to maintain a measure of detachment, even, for example, on the
executioner’s scaffold. Brázda’s humour, however, achieves a slightly different
aim, and he calls it “white humour”. It is founded on optimism and wagers on,
essentially, a certain manner or elicitation of a joke. In contrast to black humour,
it is based on a spirit of intuitive or instinctive optimism. It can also be seen as
a decision of a person to endorse the positive side of life and its possibilities.
It’s a choice. If a person has already experienced and exhausted pessimism fully,
then something must grow out of it that can overcome it. Brázda’s conception of
humour is a decisive triumph over pessimism, and it’s a creative act.

In P.B.’s paintings there is something of a circus atmosphere; the funfair was for
him a Palace of Horrors and Palace of Laughter. He wanted his work to be a kind of

WALK THROUGH THE DARKNESS, COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, 2008–2017

79
 city of wonders. It’s a cabaret of characters and eccentrics; it’s the theatre of daily
life. P.B. wanted his paintings to be understandable yet at the same time to satisfy
higher standards. They contain many hidden meanings that can also gratify more
educated and cultured viewers. The subject matter might even be macabre, but
he tries formally to make it as acceptable as martyrdom scenes in early Medieval
paintings. A viewer doesn’t really look at them with distaste, because they are
still beautiful pictures, without the superfluous naturalism that was popular
in the Baroque period. And the colourfulness and humorous detachment of
his images also help to dissipate their drama. Quite tragic themes are kept at
a distance or neutralized by their grotesqueness. If a person is alive and can use
their possibilities, they can face negative circumstances with energetic optimism.
And this is precisely the attitude on which his existence, his paintings, and his
youthful outlook are based.

All that he does he conceives as a certain form of play – whether it’s a painting,
or even talking about it or expressing something about it in words. It often
happens then that he injects a dose of humour into the endeavour, such as
when he decided to publish texts under a pseudonym. For this purpose, he
created a personality named Přemysl Arátor, who was Brázda’s closest friend and
a leading expert on his work. It’s all part of Brázda’s way of making light of things
that he is not able to take too seriously. But Arátor can get away with almost
anything, and can make it look so easy, thus Brázda is happy to leave it to him. In
any case, there is a certain connection to the great inspirational work of Ladislav
Klíma, which declares that in all things one must play and that one must find
something to laugh at in any situation.

Brázda enjoys his play, and (as he himself admits) it is one of the best possible
forms of fun, which is all too rare life. In the worst case, work can sometimes
arise from it, and when this work becomes too much, then it ceases to be fun
(for example, when you need to make order of things and it’s not just a fanciful
game anymore). And this pensioner really looks forward to a little more such fun,
and at the very least needs to finish playing the game, even though it would take
another 50 years to accomplish all the things that his active mind is able to invent.

OVER A POND / SCREAM / TIME MACHINE / WATCHING A PASSERBY / HAPPY MOMENT OF A YOUNG DIVER / MISERLY AND PRODIGAL
COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, VARIOUS SIZES, 2008–2017

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 THE MAGICIAN, / LEONORA AT HOME / THE SUN AND TWO DARK FIGURES / FULL OF SUN ŠKRHOLA’S FALL IN A SACRED TIRE / THE CLOWN / LADY LUCK ON THE WAY UP THE HILL / THE SUN ON A BEER
COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, VARIOUS SIZES, 2008–2017 COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, VARIOUS SIZES, 2008–2017

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 FIDELITY / ZEBRA–MAN / SHOES IN WHICH HISTORY HAS WALKED AND THEIR CONDUCTOR / ATTACKED BY A CAR THE CLOWN WITH THE MOON / BLUE HEAD, COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, VARIOUS SIZES, 2008–2017
COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, VARIOUS SIZES, 2008–2017
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 GRANNY AND HER GRANDDAUGHTER / MOON BATHING / LAST CHANCE / CHAQUE SOIR LISEZ CE SOIR, THE QUEEN / THE SUN ON A HEAD / I AM YOUR UNDINE / TANGLED EVENING,
DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, VARIOUS SIZES, 2008–2017 COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, VARIOUS SIZES, 2008–2017
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 SACRED COW ABOVE THE WAVES, COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, 85 X 120 CM, 2014 XENIA AND KING KONG STARE AT A HIGH-TECH UTOPIA, COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, 85 X 125 CM, 2014

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 ACROBATS / MICHELIN’S RHINO, COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, VARIOUS SIZES, 2010 RED HEAD / KAZIMIR SPIKY / ÜBERMENSCH AND UNTERMENSCH - OR, SUPERMAN AND LITTLE MAN / CARNIVAL QUEEN,
COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, VARIOUS SIZES, 2014

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 THE BELL HAS RUNG, COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, 85 X 120 CM, 2014 FLYING BETWEEN BUILDINGS, COMPUTER PAINTING, DIGITAL PRINT ON CANVAS, 85 X 65 CM, 2015

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 pavel brázda
Born 1926, Brno (Czech Republic)
Lives and works in Prague (Czech Republic)
EDUCATION
1950–1952 Higher School of Applied Arts, Prague
1947 Academy of Fine Arts, Prague — expelled for political
reasons in 1949
SOLO EXHIBITIONS (Selection)
2016 Gallery of the Central Bohemia Region (GASK) / 2015
Galerie U  betlémské kaple, Prague / 2014 The Game, New
Hall, Prague / 2014 From the Past to the Present, 1st Floor
Gallery, Prague / 2013–2014 Paintings and Graphics, Miejska
Gallery, Wroclaw (Poland) / 2013  20th-Century Artworks,
House of Arts, Na  Chvalské tvrzi, Prague / Human Comedy,
Municipal House, Prague / 2012 Proun Gallery, Moscow
(Russia) / 2007 New Paintings Painted by Electricity, Navrátil
Gallery, Prague / 2006–2007 Retrospective exhibition,
National Gallery, Prague / 2005 Colourful Images, Litera
Gallery, Prague / 2004–2005 Racers / 1954–2004, Navrátil
Gallery, Prague / 2004 Otherworld in Medúza, Medúza Cafe,
Prague / 2002 Pavel Brázda after 50 Years, Lucerna Palace,
Prague / Exhibition of Exhibitions, Čapek Brothers Gallery,
PHOTO BY PETR KRÁLÍK
Prague / 2000 Colourful Heads and Stories, Střepy Gallery,
Brno / Colourful Heads, Fronta Gallery, Prague / Colourful
Heads, Litera Gallery, Prague / To People in Peace, Mánes
Exhibition Hall, Prague / The Monster Is Waiting, the Monster
Has Time, Bítov Castle / Colourful Stories, Ungula Gallery,
PAVEL BRÁZDA
Prague / 1998 Colourful Heads, Litera Gallery, Prague /
1994  300 Xerox Copies from the Series Miraculous World,
Club in Smichov, Prague / 1992 Stepping in Shit, Čapek
Brothers Gallery, Prague / 1975 State Institute for Drug
Control, Prague
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EXHIBITIONS WITH VĚRA NOVÁKOVÁ
2017 Egon Schiele Centre, Český Krumlov / 2010 Brázda &
Nováková & Sobotka, 1950s, Ztichlá klika Gallery, Prague /
Věra Nováková & Pavel Brázda, Úpice / 2007 Věra Nováková
& Pavel Brázda, Chapel Gallery, Bruntál / 2001 Pavel Brázda
& Věra Nováková, Cultural House, Dobříš / 2000 Pavel Brázda
& Věra Nováková, Millennium Gallery, Prague / 1996 Pavel
Brázda & Věra Nováková, Museum and Gallery, Břeclav /
1993 Pavel Brázda & Věra Nováková — the 1950s–60s,
Archa Gallery, Zlín / 1992 Pavel Brázda & Věra Nováková,
Trepp Tower Gallery, Berlin (Germany) / Pavel Brázda & Věra
Nováková, PKC Gallery, Women’s Homes, Prague / Pavel
Brázda & Věra Nováková, Ethnographic Museum, Olomouc
/ Pavel Brázda & Věra Nováková, Cheb City Museum, Cheb
/ Pavel Brázda & Věra Nováková, Czech Centre, Budapest
(Hungary) / 1976 Pavel Brázda & Věra Nováková, Theatre in
Nerudovka, Prague
GROUP EXHIBITIONS (Selection)
2015 Art From the Heart, Shanghai, China / 2005 Mánes
Exhibition Hall, Prague / 2002 Anima Animus, Brno House
of Arts, Brno / 2000–2001 100+1 Art Works of the 20th
Century, Czech Museum of Fine Arts, Prague / 2000 The End
of the World? Kinský Palace, Prague / 1996–1997 Dawn of the
Magicians? II. Lost and Found, National Gallery, Prague / 1990
Polymorphism — Czechoslovakia / 1939–1990, Martin Gropius
Bau, Berlin (Germany) / 1988 Salon 88, Fučík Culture Park,
Prague
AWARDS
2008 Medal of Merit awarded by the president of the Czech
Republic / returned back to the president in 2013  / 2007
Personality of the Year Prize / 1991 Revolver Revue Prize, Prague
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PAVEL BRÁZDA IS HERE!
Published in a limited edition on the occasion of Pavel Brázda’s exhibition
at the Library of Birmingham, held under the auspices of Kateřina Kalistová,
the Czech Republic’s First Deputy Minister of Culture.

PROJECT DIRECTOR: LIBOR SEČKA

EXHIBITION CURATORS: MIROSLAV AMBROZ & JONATHAN WATKINS

PROJECT MANAGER: ONDŘEJ HOVÁDEK

CONCEPT, EDITING: MIROSLAV AMBROZ

GRAPHIC DESIGN: MIROSLAV AMBROZ, SÁRA AMBROZOVÁ

TRANSLATIONS: MIMI FRONCZAK ROGERS, STEPHEN HATTERSLEY

PROOFREADING: MIMI FRONCZAK ROGERS

TEXTS: MIROSLAV AMBROZ, PŘEMYSL ARÁTOR (PAVEL BRÁZDA)

LIBOR SEČKA, JONATHAN WATKINS

(C) ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. UNLESS OTHERWISE INDICATED, ALL MATERIALS ARE COPYRIGHTED BY THE AUTHORS

2017