“Once I ran into trouble on the street near Jindřišská tower. There was a guy from Wehrmacht there, wearing shoulder boards which probably made him a major or a colonel – it was clear he was a high-ranked officer. He asked me directions in German. I don’t recall anymore where exactly he wanted to go. But anyway, I told him off in a very rude way. I told him he was a German swine and so on. And this gentleman put his hand on my shoulder and told me in very good Czech: ‘Please, don’t say this because if I were a German swine, I would have taken you with me now and you’d be shot dead tomorrow. Remember that and beware of talking to us.’ I’m not saying I liked those Germans but still there was at least someone among them who felt sorry for a little twat like me and spared me. But I must say they were beasts and I witnessed them doing terrible things.”
“In each atelier there were boys from the student Communist party committee. They had their people. In our case it was Lauda who later became director of Mikoláš Aleš gallery. He used to ask me: ‘Miťan, what about you? Are you not joining?’ I told him that I wasn’t. He replied: ‘Why not?’ So I had discussions with them, explaining that we weren’t buying it while they were comparing it to Christianity and such bullshit. But we didn’t budge. So they proposed our expulsion from school. But since back then the teachers had a word in the case we got away with it. Still, nobody really pressured us hard. It was more like – boys, don’t be stupid, come on. But we were simply pig-headed. I can’t imagine that I would’ve listened to Gottwald, do you understand? To me, he was a complete idiot.”
“I spoke with Castro. He told me this – suggesting that he knew who I was – through an interpreter that day: ‘You may criticize the revolution. But you must not humiliate the revolution. That’s a different thing. And please, let the people here paint the way they want. Just don’t introduce those quirks of yours – the so-called realism.’ In fact, he called it kitsch instead of realism. ‘Because we have full storages of that realism from the Americans.’ I, as a person who arrived from a socialist country packed with socialist realism, was in shock. At the beginning, I really liked this Castro. Only later had I changed my opinion but that doesn’t matter anymore.”
Dimitrij Kadrnožka was born on 29 October 1923 in Kroměříž. His father Jan Kadrnožka was a WW I legionary and a hero from the Battle of Zborov. Dimitrij studied Military Academy when WW II broke out. During the Protectorate era he was sent to forced labor but was allowed to serve it in Prague. In 1950 he graduated from the Academy of Arts, Design and Architecture in Prague and later from stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts. He was eventually appointed Professor. In between 1967 and 1974 he lived in Cuba. He established and then as a dean managed the Escuela Superior Nacional del Arte in Havana. He got to know Fidel Castro in person. Because of his disagreement with the Warsaw Pact armies’ occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 he ran into trouble with the communist functionaries. He never became a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party but after 1989 his name was on the list of secret police collaborators. He filed a law suit to cleanse his name and proved that the accusation of his collaboration was unfounded. He authored over 150 movie posters and received numerous international awards for his paintings. Dimitrij Kadrnožka died on April 23, 2022.
