I like people, and that’s why I like art, it’s awfully simple
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Jiří Šetlík was born on 2 April 1929 in Prague. His father, Ing. Ivan Šetlík, established United Pharmaceuticals after World War II. He refused to join the Communist Party and was sent to prison at a show trial in 1949; he spent two and a half years behind bars for espionage. Jiří’s mother, Dagmar Šetlíková, was the daughter of the famous first violinist of the Bohemian Quartet, Karel Hoffmann. She worked in an administrative position at the Czech Philharmonic, and thanks to her knowledge of numerous languages, she provided assistance to various foreign musical celebrities during their stay in Prague. Jiří Šetlík attended a Czech-Russian grammar school in Prague-Pankrác, but when Germany attacked the USSR, all Czech students were forced to leave the school. He graduated in 1948. From the end of the war he was a member of the Social Democratic youth organisation, when the Czechoslovak Social Democrats were merged with the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), he received party membership. He welcomed the developments “out of a naïve and misguided faith in the Party and its ideology”, which he was definitively cured of during his compulsory military service with the Auxiliary Engineering Corps (AEC, known in Czech under the acronym PTP; forced labour for opponents of the regime - trans.), where he served as an “enlightenment officer”. He entered the army in 1952 after completing a degree in the history of art and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. As a translator, he participated in EXPO 1958 in Brussels, where he made numerous friends among leading Czechoslovak artists. The same year he left the Institute for the Theory and History of Art of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and took up the role of Modern Art Collection Manager at the National Gallery in Prague. He was active at the second congress of the Union of Czechoslovak Fine Artists, at which Adolf Hoffmeister was successfully elected as chairman. From 1964 to 1968 he was the editor-in-chief of the magazine Výtvarná práce (Art Work). After returning from a six-month postgraduate course in the USA, he took part in the events of Prague Spring. He applied and was chosen for the job of Director of the Museum of Art and Industry in Prague. In 1970 he was expelled from the Communist Party, he was banned from publishing, teaching, or taking part in public life. He was allowed to stay at the museum only thanks to the intervention of trade unions; however, he was relegated to the post of technical worker, which he retained until 1989. On the request of Sergej Machonin, he did not sign Charter 77 but instead helped hide Charter documents. He published under other people’s names, he was active in samizdat publishing, one example being the anthology In Memoriam. In the early 1990s he worked as Ministerial Adviser for Culture and Health at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Washington. The lifelong art-historic work, publishing and educational activities of Jiří Šetlík earned him numerous awards and rank him among the foremost Czech art historians. Jiří Šetlík passed away on January, the 28th, 2023.
