Drawings for Books / 1947 – 1994

Stanislav Kolíbal (1925 v Orlové) is mostly known throughout the world as a sculptor. This book however focuses entirely on his drawings for books. Already by 1947 Václav Pour, a prestigious publisher in Prague, commissioned him to do illustrations for the Chinese story Leather Shoe. Kolíbal illustrated books by Petr Bezruč, Jiří Orten, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Jaroslav Kratochvíl, Ladislav Fuks, Romain Rolland, Karel Čapek, James Joyce, Antonín Sova, Ivan Vyskočil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others. He recalls: “The fifty years during which I made my illustrations had various stages. There was a period of political thaw as well as a time of constraint leading to personal restrictions. So I did not illustrate books continuously but when the possibility arose, often quite intermittently. It took twenty years after the publication of Karel Čapek’s stories and Romain Rolland’s novel to publish Dubliners. During this break some editors had the nerve to commission me to do illustrations for Fairy Tales for Both Ears (1978) and for Spanish Fairy Tales (1984). The long breaks, however, also had a positive side. They allowed me to gain a comfortable distance from the previous work and thus have a new space for seeking alternative and sometimes completely different solutions that the new book required. I am convinced that each text calls for such a solution from the artist in order to approach the character of the text as closely as possible.”