“And didn't they somehow try to curb the creative freedom?” - “Well, at that time, it began to thaw a bit, they were little less savage thanks to Picasso and so. They tried to denounce some people, but Picasso, as he made that dove... He was one of the most wild persons in art at that time, so they just had to shut up and follow the line, so I could work in fact. Most of all, I was interested in animals. So I did women and animals. Inside myself, I just refused to watch everything that was going on, and I sort of created this inner thing of mine.”
“So I had been 'deployed' as a member of the so-called Luftschutzpolizei or Air Raid Protection Police. We were constructing air-raid shelters, they were quite narrow, just one meter wide. It was on November 20th, I think. There was fog and you could hear the roar as the bombers were approaching, and all of a sudden, they started dropping bombs on Brno. And on that November 20th, I was sitting at the entrance to one of the shelters, studying English vocabulary. And all of the sudden, from that fog above the Ponávka Street a Lightning emerged, this twin-boom fighter-bomber, like some arrow of silver. At that moment, I broke the sprinting record, as we were rushing towards the shelter, and I slammed the door behind me and the bomb fell maybe a meter away the shelter, so we were turning somersaults inside but we were unharmed. And that was this first air-raid, and they just took down the whole... we were on Příkop. And then Bratislavská Street just blew up, bombs were falling all over Špilberk, but there was nothing going on in our street. Later we found out why. As every night, one of the houses would blow up, as they were using time bombs. So step by step, the whole Ponávka Street just disappeared.”
“In fact, things started to get quite wild, as they had been bringing prisoners to the Kounic Residence Hall (Kounicovy koleje) and during classes we would hear gunfire as they were executing them. As it was quite close, just above us, where the executions took place. And I recall our Latin teacher, as it had started, saying: 'Rise,' and we sang the anthem. And if someone would report that, they would shoot us all. And as we were coming back from school, there was gallows installed in the Kounic Residence Hall's garden and there were executions being held at 3 PM. Public executions. On that gallows. And on the opposite side, as Tůmova Street winds up to the Cow Hill (Kraví hora), there were those morons standing in their leather trousers, waiting for the show to begin. So every time I went from school, such images would accompany me. And the interesitng thing was, if I could put it that way, that in the morning, as I went to school, there were already horse carts bringing coffins from the church down to the Kounic Hall.”
With a sense of humor, you can survive just about anything
Zdeněk Macháček, a portrait
photo: Lukáš Paulas (z internetových stránek https://zdenekmachacek.webnode.cz, s laskavým svolením pana Macháčka)
photo: Lukáš Paulas (z internetových stránek https://zdenekmachacek.webnode.cz, s laskavým svolením pana Macháčka)
Download image
Zdeněk Macháček, a sculptor, was born on August 16th 1925 in Brno. His father ran a printing studio with many important figures of the per-war cultural scene as customers. The family had been living in the Masaryk District (Masarykova čtvrť). Zdeněk witnessed arrests and executions taking place in the nearby Kounic Residence Hall (Kounicovy koleje). At the end of the war, he had been sent to build air-raid shelters and witnessed the bombing of Brno. After 1945, he witnessed the decline of the family’s printing business. He studied zoology and anthropology at Masaryk University in Brno. In 1952, he graduated from the Higher School of Decorative Arts in Brno and joined the local art scene. While looking for a place to set up his studio, he found the village of Křížovice near the foothills of Vysočina, where he had moved in 1971 to build his studio. After 1990, he founded Remote Gallery (Galerie z ruky) and also helped to found several art groups and workshops. He had forty solo exhibitions and participated in more than sixty collective exhibitions. He died on November 8, 2020.
