2024-02-19 17:59:26
No modern Czech illustrator was so strongly associated with one title. Cartoonist Pavel Reisenauer died at the age of 62, whose cartoons decorated the front pages and inside of Respekt magazine for more than three decades. The weekly magazine Respekt reported on the death of the Karel Havlíček Borovský award winner on its website.
Along with Václav Teichmann, Miroslav Kemel and Štěpán Mareš, Reisenauer was one of the best-known contemporary caricaturists. He signed up as the court illustrator of Respekt. “It was he who stamped the face of Respect, and did so for more than thirty years,” stated on the X social network, editor-in-chief of the magazine Erik Tabery.
Reisenauer’s often dark political drawings commented on and took events to the point of absurdity. One time he put the people in question in bizarre situations, another time he changed only an important detail on their visage. He gave the weekly a slightly sarcastic character creating a counterpoint to the so-called “kind” Czech humor. Reisenauer’s, on the other hand, used to be non-negotiable.
“I follow Czech politics only out of necessity and certainly not in detail,” he said at the same time, the author, who rarely spoke in public and gave interviews rather exceptionally to Hospodářské noviním. When asked about his work, he shrugged that “everyone can draw, they just have to grit their teeth sometimes”.
In 2009, he received the Karel Havlíček Borovský Journalism Award. The Czech Literary Fund awarded it to him for his unique artistic reflection of domestic and world events. “Of course I’m happy about the award, but it’s interesting that I got it, even though I’m not a journalist,” Reisenauer responded. He subsequently described to the ČTK agency that the entire article, to which the drawing on the cover of Respekt refers, is only received in the best case scenario. Most of the time, he only has a subject with a few theses and is happy if it doesn’t change during the drawing. “I have two to three days for my own drawing, so all the pictures are completely unfinished,” he explained.
He illustrated both Jirous and Viewegh
He has been associated with Respekt since its beginnings. The leading social weekly was created in 1990 as a successor to the magazine Information Service, which from November 1989 filled the information vacuum at the time of the fall of the communist regime. He personally followed up on the samizdate magazines Sport and Revolver Revue.
Pavel Reisenauer in 2008 with his monograph of 209 drawings and 33 paintings. | Photo: CTK
Reisenauer became known to the wider public precisely thanks to Respekt, although for a long time he also appeared on the front page of the Orientace Lidových noviny supplement. In addition, he was engaged in free creation. For example, in 2012, he had a solo exhibition in the building of the former Elektrické podnikas in Prague’s Holešovice, where he presented more than three dozen large color drawings. Despite the characteristic style, they were different from those for Respekt, working more with fantasy and exaggeration.
Five years earlier, the artist participated in a group show, which was prepared by curator Lenka Lindaurová in the 5th floor gallery in Prague. The artists were united by the fact that they started creating at the turn of the 80s and 90s.
In 1995, Reisenauer created a distinctive modern comic Death after Life, which told a fantastic timeless story from possible worlds. In addition, he illustrated the collection of poems Okuje by Ivan Martin Jirous, Magda Vášáryová’s book called The Discreet Guide, the title Los a sázka by Michal Horáček or New ideas of a kind reader by Michal Viewegh.
In the new millennium, he published a monograph in the Respekt edition, which included his canvases painted in tempera and oils. There were 209 drawings and 33 paintings. The works were typically almost black and white, with a minimum of other colored shades.
“I would like to paint in color, but mixing colors irritates me. However, it is different in a magazine – there I would prefer to do black and white drawings, but the covers should be positive, i.e. colorful,” the artist explained to Hospodářské novinim.
The most unique illustrator
The preface to the monograph was written by journalist Zbyněk Petráček. This commentator of Lidové noviny marked Reisenauer as “the most unique illustrator of Czech journalism”, whose drawings mix realism with exaggeration, irony and frequency of interpretations.
Petráček summarized all kinds of hidden meanings, jingoistics and riddles in his drawings, thanks to which his illustrations do not serve as mere accompaniment, but encourage careful study and rather represent comments.
According to the editor-in-chief of the weekly, Erik Tabery, Reisenauer has worked his way to perfection over the years. “The drawings are also a chronicle of the post-revolutionary events in our country. He was incorrect, but at the same time an extremely sensitive illustrator. He mocked the people in power, but experienced the fate of people who mostly lived on the margins. He also tried to help them.” he wrote Taber.
His work included thousands of works. In an oil painting called the Opposition Contract, he depicted the leaders of the ČSSD and ODS political parties on an impoverished horse, which they are trying to push forward. Otherwise, he discussed the same topic on the cover of Respekt editor-in-chief Erik Tabery’s book, where he commemorated the anniversary of the signing of the opposition agreement with an image of a Tatra 603 car with a beacon as a symbol of papalism. A car known from the days of normalization was driving through a dark forest and on the hood were only barely recognizable logos of the government and opposition parties, which at that time decided to cooperate.
Former Deputy Prime Minister Jiří Čunk from the KDU-ČSL, known for his problematic relationship with the Roma minority, was portrayed by Reisenauer as a Roma baron with dark skin and a prominent gold earring.
He once turned the many-times caricatured Prime Minister and later President Miloš Zeman into a transparent ghost hitchhiking on the highway from David Lynch’s film Lost Highway, and another time depicted him with a Kalashnikov “at a journalist”, which the President received during a visit to Zbiroh for his statements that journalists should “should have liquidated”. Although for one of the late drawings that mocked the president in 2020, the magazine later apologized.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Reisenauer drew the then Prime Minister Andrej Babiš from ANO in a mask, with the nemehel characters from the Pat and Mat evening sit on his shoulder.
Ukrainians sunk a Russian war cruiser the year before conceived as “Chuj Chujovič’s yacht”. And Miroslav Ševčík, the outgoing dean of the Faculty of Economics of the Prague University of Economics, recently interpretedcarrying the files of the former president collected from school in a box with the logo of the Václav Klaus Institute.
A picture from the exhibition of Pavel Reisenauer’s works in the building of the former Prague Electric Companies, 2012. | Photo: Jan Zátorský / Lidové noviny / Profimedia.cz
He drew from an early age
Reisenauer, a native of Prague, alternated between several jobs as a fireman or a night watchman after graduating, during which he could devote himself to drawing and painting.
Already in samizdat, for example, he illustrated the experimental novel Medorek by the writer and historian Petr Placák, with whom he collaborated even after the revolution.
“I came to caricature naturally, I drew from an early age, over and over again, until one day I ended up in the weekly magazine Respekt,” Reisenauer told laconically, how the hobby became a livelihood.
He joined Respekt in the summer of 1990. From 1993, he drew exclusively on the computer. After the Prague floods of 2002, he continued to be “spared” from editorial operations, which means that he did not have to go to the office every day.
He answered questions about his work with modesty. “I usually don’t frame the pictures and I almost never hang them, who would still look at them,” he answered in an online interview with Respekt readers. In it, he first rejected the label “brilliant draftsman”, after which he dealt with the question of what colors mean to him with insight. “A pile of hardened tubes with badly screwed caps, tangled hands and clothes and a lot of unnecessary work, that’s why my pictures, not some, but all, are black and white,” he added.
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