iburkard.worklog
Saturday, August 04, 2007
More Trnka information... again, from the "Artist & Puppet Master" book by Jaroslav Bocek, translated by Till Gottheiner
CHAPTER II
In June 1935, Trnka graduated from the School of Applied Arts, he was now twenty-three and had to face the vital question of his future career.
He had an income from his newspaper illustrations which more or less covered his current expenses. His work had been accepted by other publishing houses, so that he was no longer dependent on the children's magazine Night Time. But he did not feel this to be sufficient, and decided to seek a proper job.
By this time Josef Skupa had left the Holiday Camp Theatre, which, despite its reputation, as really in the strict sense an amateur company. Skupa had turned professional, and had set up his own traveling theatre, with the result that the Holiday Camp Theatre had been closed down. Trnka, acting on the suggestion of one of Skupa's assistants, wrote a review for its reopening, which took place in the autumn, with Trnka as director and stage designer.
Trnka's review was called The Merman. It was a grotesque piece following the traditions of Skupa's own reviews. It was a parody of the fantastic adventures and exaggerated pathos of sea-faring adventure stories. The stock characters were burlesqued by such figures as Captain Joe Flint, Legless Jack and Wild Sam. The plot was as far-fetched and accompanied by continuous back-chat. There was also a musical accompaniment which included parodies of popular songs current at the time, taken from the repertoire of Marlene Dietrich.
The opening night was a success, the reviews were favorable, and, after a number of performances in Plzen, the company performed The Merman in Prague, as guest artists. Again they were successful. Trnka realized all the more forcefully, however, that to return to Plzen with the Holiday Camp Theatre was no permanent solution for him. It was an amateur company which could at best offer only occasional work. Skupa's other theatre, though it was always traveling about the country, was really based in Plzen, and the suburb could not support two professional theatres. Trnka therefore rejected a plan to set up a new puppet theatre of his own.
Almost a year passed in part-time activities. Trnka continued to make his own puppets and he still earned his living doing illustration for the newspapers while keeping a lookout for more important work.
Trnka's opportunity came exactly a year after he graduated: in June 1936. On this date the two-man satirical theatre the Theatre in Fetters, run by Voskovec and Werich, moved out of the Rococo Hall in Prague. Trnka was able to take it over, and on September 13th of the same year, he opened his Wooden Theater with a play called Among the Fireflies.
Trnka had great hopes for this Theatre, and cherished secret dreams of outshining his teacher, Josef Skupa. His assistants were carefully chosen, and he was lucky in them. The staff numbered twenty-four. But it was Trnka himself who made and clothed the puppets, designed the stage, produced the play and took part in it. He also managed the publicity. Everything was carefully thought out, and Trnka had had several years of experience as a puppeteer. Success seemed assured. The opening performance was free to school-children in Prague. Trnka was hoping later to give children's matinees several days a week, and to produce plays for adults in the evenings.
Among the Fireflies was based upon a currently successful book, and Trnka thought it would be bound to attract attention. But it failed to win the acclaim he had hoped for. For his second play he tried the effect of a publicity stunt. Basil and the Bear was introduced as a play by a well-known author who wished to remain anonymous. Actually is was by Josef Menzel, and was a rough paraphrased of a Russian fairy tale. It was not the publicity, but the play itself, with its simple appeal, which attracted crowds to the hall. Basil and the Bear was the most successful play ever put on at the Wooden Theatre, but unfortunately it was the only real success achieved there. It was followed by Christmas at the Fireflies by Trnka and his collaborator J. Kuncman, and another play by Josef Menzel, Mr .Eustachius, the Dog and the Sultan, which had the atmosphere of an Oriental fairy tale, and seems to have been something of an artists achievement. But neither of thee plays was as warmly received as Basil and the Bear.
Trnka was never bale to put on any performances for adults. Throughout the autumn season the theatre just managed to keep its head above water, and the winter brought only a slight improvement. With the fist days of spring, the audience fell off, and the theatre finished the season only with great difficulty. It was never to open again.
There were several reasons for Trnka's failure. Josef Skupa had not turned professional until the fame of the Holiday Camp Theatre had been firmly established, not only in Plzen, but in the whole country and beyond. His name had, in fact, become a household word, and his puppets attracted theatre-goers everywhere. Trnka, in following Skupa's example, had failed to take this into account, and had turned professional before he and his company had acquired a name, or established a tradition of their own. Then, Trnka had also conceived his enterprise on too grand a scale to pay. Expenses were heavy: his staff of twenty-four all had to be paid.
There were other reasons, too. Trnka's interest in art dominated in his theatre, while producing was his weakest side. He did not study his audience sufficiently in his choice of play. The two plays by Skupa, featuring Dad Spejbl and his son Hurvinek. But these were taken straight from life, and they made a definite point about children's education. They were appealing to children for this reason. Trnka and Kuncman produce only an imitation: a shell, and an empty one at that.
The two plays by Menzel were more effective. Basil and the Bear, being based on a folk tale, was in key with a child's imagination, and ha the sort of simple poetry that children understand. It was the story of the peasant Basil, and his fight with a bear. The clocks, the chairs, the oven and the table, all came to life, and the cock, goat, and pig, all took part. This was something a child could understand without much difficulty. Mr. Eustachius, the Dog and the Sultan was more complex, and, to judge by the reviews and the script, it gave scope for Trnka's leaning toward lyricism and his skill in stage design. It seems to have been the artistic highlight of the wooden Theatre. But even so, it could not keep the theatre open after February.
Trnka was deeply disappointed by the failure of this theater, all the more because he had felt this to be the thing he did best, and he had planned to make it his future.
But, strangely enough, the failure of the puppet theatre coincided with his first major success as an illustrator. He was still earning a regular income from magazines, and his reputation had grown. Now he was invited to illustrate a book by Vitezslav Smejc, Mr. Boska's Tiger.
CHAPTER III
Because the puppet films through which Trnka became famous followed up his work as an illustrator of children's books, attempts have been made to trace the characters in his films, and his development as an artist, back to his drawings. This of course is a mistake, and can only result in the superficial, distorted impression. Trnka was a puppeteer before he became an illustrator, and puppetry was his dominating passion. His drawings derived from his puppets, rather than the other way round. His drawings, of course, had their own influence in preparing him for his later work, but it was of a secondary nature.
The fact that his drawing derived from his puppets is plainly shown by his first successful illustration. These were for a book by Josef Menzel, entitled Bruin Furryball in His Forest Home. This was an expanded version of Menzel's puppet play, Bruin the Bear, the big success of the Wooden Theatre. Trnka's illustrations were based upon the original wooden puppets who acted in the play. Puppets also inspired the illustration to the books by Jan Karafiat, which were expanded version of the puppet plays Among the Fireflies and Winter at the Fireflies. When he illustrated Caravan by Willhelm Hauff, he modeled his drawing on the puppets who had acted in Menzel's play, the Oriental Fairy tale, Mr. Eustachius, the Dog and the Sultan
Illustration, which Trnka regarded as a side-line, now had to take the place of his chief love, puppetry. His talent and personality were too strong for it to prove a blind alley. His art continued to develop and he had a powerful influence upon Czech children's books, and the whole technique of illustration.
He may, in fact, be said to have revolutionized it. Bruin Furryball in his Forest Home was the sensation of the Christmas book trade in 1939. Trnka was still experimenting. He used contrasting patches of colour instead of outlined drawings, and the effect of the pure colours, without graduations in tone, was simple but original. Basil the peasant had a red nose, a brown moustache and a brown beard. Bruin had a white front, goggle eyes, and a red dot for a tongue. Trnka's characteristic of rounding of the form of his characters, combined with touched of the grotesque, made the pictures distinctive and exactly in key with the atmosphere of the text. He held closely to the story, but succeeded also in conveying the spirit of it, as well as the events. Children responded at once to the poetry of his simple little drawings.
Thus he gave a new meaning to the illustrator's work. The works of his early period varied in style and technique. He approached each book differently, as though he were testing the potentials of the methods of reproduction. He used large loosely applied patches of colour, simple black and white lines, light water colours, and intricate techniques in which drawings and gouache were combined.
In the fireflies books he used a technique sharply contrasted with that on Bruin the Bear. The insects are drawn with thin lines, and he creates a world of tiny creatures dressed in period clothes, their behavior in keeping with these. By tiny touches, such as the angle at which he sets the eyes, antennae and wings, he indicated the dream world, the world of insects.
The full-page illustrations are in bright coloured paint thinly applied. Trnka used a kind of spiral composition, building up his ideas from the top downwards. By linking certain shades of colour, and by the used of thin lines, he managed to convey the idea of weightlessness and irreality. The dream became real, and reality turned back into a dream.
This variety of techniques led only gradually to a unified style. Trnka was feeling his way towards it, and it took him some time to find it. But the basic concept never changed. Trnka did not illustrate scenes or situations. He mirrored the atmosphere, the dramatic or poetic meaning of the story.
The first book in which his individual approach as an illustrator took definite shape was Susan Discovers the World, by H. Chovokova. It was, in face, a little book written by his wife about their daughter Susan's first steps into the bigger world, and it was a powerful source of inspiration to Trnka. It had double-page illustrations in which he developed his notion of reality combined with dream in a way which was to become typical of all his work, not only as an illustrator. For the first time, he used a number of separate events to compose on illustration, placing them side by side for the sake of their association, at times superimposing or overlapping them, or linking them by an inner poetry, stressed outwardly through colour.
By painting the dreamlike aspects of reality Trnka was doing the same as the surrealists, but his illustrations have none of the cruelty or artistic ruthlessness of surrealism. His roaming brush reflected a child's roaming mind, with is inability to concentrate, its tendency to fantasy. He created a world where a lion leaps out of the sea on to the shore; where bears on ice floes admire floating roses; where the body of a drowned man sinks to the bottom through the seaweed; where a princess lights a stove, and a rider calms his prancing horse. The events seem unconnected, but everything is really subtly inter-related and full of magic, like and enchanting fairy-tale vision. Trnka had the first of endowing animals and things with mysterious and splendid inner life. His baby elephant suggest a toy for a small child; his water-lily a cradle. He draws a fish telling a fairy tale. His squirrel, hare and fawn are companions. Remote objects seem close, intimate, utter gentle.
Even where he did not use puppets as models, his figures were reminiscent of them. He never attempted to conceal that he was at heart a puppeteer. He drew attention to the relationship between his two medium of expression in his first exhibition.
This was held at the Arts and Crafts Museum in Prague, between November 29th and January 5th, 1941, under the title ‘The Children's Painter'. Trnka laid his complete work before the public, putting his puppets side by side with his illustrations. He showed no only the puppets from the Wooden Theatre, but also those private puppets which he had continued to make over the years, for no special purpose: the old decorative puppets of characters from Shakespeare, or inspired by the words of Maeterlink, Zeyer, or Mozart. And by their side were new ones, made in his spare time, as a realization from the tension of the work on book illustrations. Like the toys his mother had made, they were sometimes of rag. Trnka had an understanding of the quality of material, and he could use fabric to express character. He made rag figures of Indians, foresters, chimneysweeps, old men, musicians. They were all charming, in spite of their clumsiness. They were intended as children's toys, and were sewn by Trnka himself, though he had designed them with an eye to mass production. He had dreams of replacing the ordinary mass-produced dolls, which he though inartistic and unsuited to children's psychological needs. He put his rag dolls on exhibition to attract the attention of the public and also the toy makers.
‘The Children's Painter' exhibition was the event of the season. Its great attraction was the diorama The Insect Wedding, which excited the small visitors, and even won praise from the art critics, who were generally niggardly, since they did not take puppets and children's book illustration seriously. The response from the public and critics established Trnka in his position in the forefront as an illustrator.
One thing disappointed him, however. They toy-makers did not show the interest he had anticipated. There were some voices raised in the Press, drawing their attention to Trnka's dolls, but nothing came of it.
Trnka's second more carefully planned attempt to bring his puppets to life had failed.
CHAPTER II
In June 1935, Trnka graduated from the School of Applied Arts, he was now twenty-three and had to face the vital question of his future career.
He had an income from his newspaper illustrations which more or less covered his current expenses. His work had been accepted by other publishing houses, so that he was no longer dependent on the children's magazine Night Time. But he did not feel this to be sufficient, and decided to seek a proper job.
By this time Josef Skupa had left the Holiday Camp Theatre, which, despite its reputation, as really in the strict sense an amateur company. Skupa had turned professional, and had set up his own traveling theatre, with the result that the Holiday Camp Theatre had been closed down. Trnka, acting on the suggestion of one of Skupa's assistants, wrote a review for its reopening, which took place in the autumn, with Trnka as director and stage designer.
Trnka's review was called The Merman. It was a grotesque piece following the traditions of Skupa's own reviews. It was a parody of the fantastic adventures and exaggerated pathos of sea-faring adventure stories. The stock characters were burlesqued by such figures as Captain Joe Flint, Legless Jack and Wild Sam. The plot was as far-fetched and accompanied by continuous back-chat. There was also a musical accompaniment which included parodies of popular songs current at the time, taken from the repertoire of Marlene Dietrich.
The opening night was a success, the reviews were favorable, and, after a number of performances in Plzen, the company performed The Merman in Prague, as guest artists. Again they were successful. Trnka realized all the more forcefully, however, that to return to Plzen with the Holiday Camp Theatre was no permanent solution for him. It was an amateur company which could at best offer only occasional work. Skupa's other theatre, though it was always traveling about the country, was really based in Plzen, and the suburb could not support two professional theatres. Trnka therefore rejected a plan to set up a new puppet theatre of his own.
Almost a year passed in part-time activities. Trnka continued to make his own puppets and he still earned his living doing illustration for the newspapers while keeping a lookout for more important work.
Trnka's opportunity came exactly a year after he graduated: in June 1936. On this date the two-man satirical theatre the Theatre in Fetters, run by Voskovec and Werich, moved out of the Rococo Hall in Prague. Trnka was able to take it over, and on September 13th of the same year, he opened his Wooden Theater with a play called Among the Fireflies.
Trnka had great hopes for this Theatre, and cherished secret dreams of outshining his teacher, Josef Skupa. His assistants were carefully chosen, and he was lucky in them. The staff numbered twenty-four. But it was Trnka himself who made and clothed the puppets, designed the stage, produced the play and took part in it. He also managed the publicity. Everything was carefully thought out, and Trnka had had several years of experience as a puppeteer. Success seemed assured. The opening performance was free to school-children in Prague. Trnka was hoping later to give children's matinees several days a week, and to produce plays for adults in the evenings.
Among the Fireflies was based upon a currently successful book, and Trnka thought it would be bound to attract attention. But it failed to win the acclaim he had hoped for. For his second play he tried the effect of a publicity stunt. Basil and the Bear was introduced as a play by a well-known author who wished to remain anonymous. Actually is was by Josef Menzel, and was a rough paraphrased of a Russian fairy tale. It was not the publicity, but the play itself, with its simple appeal, which attracted crowds to the hall. Basil and the Bear was the most successful play ever put on at the Wooden Theatre, but unfortunately it was the only real success achieved there. It was followed by Christmas at the Fireflies by Trnka and his collaborator J. Kuncman, and another play by Josef Menzel, Mr .Eustachius, the Dog and the Sultan, which had the atmosphere of an Oriental fairy tale, and seems to have been something of an artists achievement. But neither of thee plays was as warmly received as Basil and the Bear.
Trnka was never bale to put on any performances for adults. Throughout the autumn season the theatre just managed to keep its head above water, and the winter brought only a slight improvement. With the fist days of spring, the audience fell off, and the theatre finished the season only with great difficulty. It was never to open again.
There were several reasons for Trnka's failure. Josef Skupa had not turned professional until the fame of the Holiday Camp Theatre had been firmly established, not only in Plzen, but in the whole country and beyond. His name had, in fact, become a household word, and his puppets attracted theatre-goers everywhere. Trnka, in following Skupa's example, had failed to take this into account, and had turned professional before he and his company had acquired a name, or established a tradition of their own. Then, Trnka had also conceived his enterprise on too grand a scale to pay. Expenses were heavy: his staff of twenty-four all had to be paid.
There were other reasons, too. Trnka's interest in art dominated in his theatre, while producing was his weakest side. He did not study his audience sufficiently in his choice of play. The two plays by Skupa, featuring Dad Spejbl and his son Hurvinek. But these were taken straight from life, and they made a definite point about children's education. They were appealing to children for this reason. Trnka and Kuncman produce only an imitation: a shell, and an empty one at that.
The two plays by Menzel were more effective. Basil and the Bear, being based on a folk tale, was in key with a child's imagination, and ha the sort of simple poetry that children understand. It was the story of the peasant Basil, and his fight with a bear. The clocks, the chairs, the oven and the table, all came to life, and the cock, goat, and pig, all took part. This was something a child could understand without much difficulty. Mr. Eustachius, the Dog and the Sultan was more complex, and, to judge by the reviews and the script, it gave scope for Trnka's leaning toward lyricism and his skill in stage design. It seems to have been the artistic highlight of the wooden Theatre. But even so, it could not keep the theatre open after February.
Trnka was deeply disappointed by the failure of this theater, all the more because he had felt this to be the thing he did best, and he had planned to make it his future.
But, strangely enough, the failure of the puppet theatre coincided with his first major success as an illustrator. He was still earning a regular income from magazines, and his reputation had grown. Now he was invited to illustrate a book by Vitezslav Smejc, Mr. Boska's Tiger.
CHAPTER III
Because the puppet films through which Trnka became famous followed up his work as an illustrator of children's books, attempts have been made to trace the characters in his films, and his development as an artist, back to his drawings. This of course is a mistake, and can only result in the superficial, distorted impression. Trnka was a puppeteer before he became an illustrator, and puppetry was his dominating passion. His drawings derived from his puppets, rather than the other way round. His drawings, of course, had their own influence in preparing him for his later work, but it was of a secondary nature.
The fact that his drawing derived from his puppets is plainly shown by his first successful illustration. These were for a book by Josef Menzel, entitled Bruin Furryball in His Forest Home. This was an expanded version of Menzel's puppet play, Bruin the Bear, the big success of the Wooden Theatre. Trnka's illustrations were based upon the original wooden puppets who acted in the play. Puppets also inspired the illustration to the books by Jan Karafiat, which were expanded version of the puppet plays Among the Fireflies and Winter at the Fireflies. When he illustrated Caravan by Willhelm Hauff, he modeled his drawing on the puppets who had acted in Menzel's play, the Oriental Fairy tale, Mr. Eustachius, the Dog and the Sultan
Illustration, which Trnka regarded as a side-line, now had to take the place of his chief love, puppetry. His talent and personality were too strong for it to prove a blind alley. His art continued to develop and he had a powerful influence upon Czech children's books, and the whole technique of illustration.
He may, in fact, be said to have revolutionized it. Bruin Furryball in his Forest Home was the sensation of the Christmas book trade in 1939. Trnka was still experimenting. He used contrasting patches of colour instead of outlined drawings, and the effect of the pure colours, without graduations in tone, was simple but original. Basil the peasant had a red nose, a brown moustache and a brown beard. Bruin had a white front, goggle eyes, and a red dot for a tongue. Trnka's characteristic of rounding of the form of his characters, combined with touched of the grotesque, made the pictures distinctive and exactly in key with the atmosphere of the text. He held closely to the story, but succeeded also in conveying the spirit of it, as well as the events. Children responded at once to the poetry of his simple little drawings.
Thus he gave a new meaning to the illustrator's work. The works of his early period varied in style and technique. He approached each book differently, as though he were testing the potentials of the methods of reproduction. He used large loosely applied patches of colour, simple black and white lines, light water colours, and intricate techniques in which drawings and gouache were combined.
In the fireflies books he used a technique sharply contrasted with that on Bruin the Bear. The insects are drawn with thin lines, and he creates a world of tiny creatures dressed in period clothes, their behavior in keeping with these. By tiny touches, such as the angle at which he sets the eyes, antennae and wings, he indicated the dream world, the world of insects.
The full-page illustrations are in bright coloured paint thinly applied. Trnka used a kind of spiral composition, building up his ideas from the top downwards. By linking certain shades of colour, and by the used of thin lines, he managed to convey the idea of weightlessness and irreality. The dream became real, and reality turned back into a dream.
This variety of techniques led only gradually to a unified style. Trnka was feeling his way towards it, and it took him some time to find it. But the basic concept never changed. Trnka did not illustrate scenes or situations. He mirrored the atmosphere, the dramatic or poetic meaning of the story.
The first book in which his individual approach as an illustrator took definite shape was Susan Discovers the World, by H. Chovokova. It was, in face, a little book written by his wife about their daughter Susan's first steps into the bigger world, and it was a powerful source of inspiration to Trnka. It had double-page illustrations in which he developed his notion of reality combined with dream in a way which was to become typical of all his work, not only as an illustrator. For the first time, he used a number of separate events to compose on illustration, placing them side by side for the sake of their association, at times superimposing or overlapping them, or linking them by an inner poetry, stressed outwardly through colour.
By painting the dreamlike aspects of reality Trnka was doing the same as the surrealists, but his illustrations have none of the cruelty or artistic ruthlessness of surrealism. His roaming brush reflected a child's roaming mind, with is inability to concentrate, its tendency to fantasy. He created a world where a lion leaps out of the sea on to the shore; where bears on ice floes admire floating roses; where the body of a drowned man sinks to the bottom through the seaweed; where a princess lights a stove, and a rider calms his prancing horse. The events seem unconnected, but everything is really subtly inter-related and full of magic, like and enchanting fairy-tale vision. Trnka had the first of endowing animals and things with mysterious and splendid inner life. His baby elephant suggest a toy for a small child; his water-lily a cradle. He draws a fish telling a fairy tale. His squirrel, hare and fawn are companions. Remote objects seem close, intimate, utter gentle.
Even where he did not use puppets as models, his figures were reminiscent of them. He never attempted to conceal that he was at heart a puppeteer. He drew attention to the relationship between his two medium of expression in his first exhibition.
This was held at the Arts and Crafts Museum in Prague, between November 29th and January 5th, 1941, under the title ‘The Children's Painter'. Trnka laid his complete work before the public, putting his puppets side by side with his illustrations. He showed no only the puppets from the Wooden Theatre, but also those private puppets which he had continued to make over the years, for no special purpose: the old decorative puppets of characters from Shakespeare, or inspired by the words of Maeterlink, Zeyer, or Mozart. And by their side were new ones, made in his spare time, as a realization from the tension of the work on book illustrations. Like the toys his mother had made, they were sometimes of rag. Trnka had an understanding of the quality of material, and he could use fabric to express character. He made rag figures of Indians, foresters, chimneysweeps, old men, musicians. They were all charming, in spite of their clumsiness. They were intended as children's toys, and were sewn by Trnka himself, though he had designed them with an eye to mass production. He had dreams of replacing the ordinary mass-produced dolls, which he though inartistic and unsuited to children's psychological needs. He put his rag dolls on exhibition to attract the attention of the public and also the toy makers.
‘The Children's Painter' exhibition was the event of the season. Its great attraction was the diorama The Insect Wedding, which excited the small visitors, and even won praise from the art critics, who were generally niggardly, since they did not take puppets and children's book illustration seriously. The response from the public and critics established Trnka in his position in the forefront as an illustrator.
One thing disappointed him, however. They toy-makers did not show the interest he had anticipated. There were some voices raised in the Press, drawing their attention to Trnka's dolls, but nothing came of it.
Trnka's second more carefully planned attempt to bring his puppets to life had failed.