"You see, a painter, like an actor, must be able to live all those drawn adventurous moments in his imagination. If he wants to paint a horse swimming in the rapids, he has to become that horse for a moment - that is vain glory."
"I am distressed that people are destroying nature, even though it is a basic condition of their lives."
120 years ago he was born Zdeněk Burian, a prominent Czech painter and illustrator of magazines and adventure books. Maya, Verne, Foglar, Eduard Štorch, Rudyard Kipling, R. L. Stevenson and Jack London books with his pictures have accompanied generations of readers. In addition, he became famous as the author of pictorial reconstructions of prehistoric animals and people, of which he created over a thousand in collaboration with Professor Josef Augusta and other experts. He is considered one of the most important artists in this field. His oeuvre is extremely extensive, with a total of 14,000 works.
It is interesting that the painter, who loved adventure, exoticism and distances and painted the whole world, practically never left his studio. He had been abroad only once in all his years, on holiday in Italy shortly after his wedding. The story of his life is therefore the story of the work to which he devoted his life.
Zdeněk Michael František Burian was born on 11 February 1905 in Kopřivnice in northern Moravia. His father Eduard Burian was a Moravian builder, a teacher at a vocational school in Kopřivnice, a forensic expert and an important member of the Štramberk Czech Tourist Club. Only his first-born son, Karel, inherited his technical talent and acumen. Two years younger, Zdeněk, with his gentle and sensitive nature and love of art, was more like his mother Hermina, daughter of Michal Barabáš, a builder in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, where her husband started as an assistant.
For the first five years after Zdeněk's birth, the Burians lived on the square in Štramberk, then returned to Kopřivnice, where their father built a family house and opened an office. He also built a building for the municipal school, where Zdeněk and his brother began to attend. In the holidays of 1915 they moved again - this time to Brno. But the war came and his father had to enlist, so after a year they returned to Kopřivnice again. Already at the municipal school and then at the burgher school in Kopřivnice, where he joined after his return from Brno, Zdeněk showed extraordinary talent as a painter.
From the age of ten he filled his sketchbooks with pictures of animals, plants, people, clothes, weapons and exotic landscapes. His models were travelogues, adventure books and also the Šipka karst cave in Štramberk, where in 1880 the archaeologist K. J. Maška discovered the jawbone of a Neanderthal child and the bones of prehistoric animals. Since then, the area has become an important archaeological site. Burian often visited the cave in his childhood and later captured its prehistoric charm in his paintings.
His talent was noticed by his drawing teacher A. P. Bartoň, who himself painted, especially landscape motifs from the Beskydy Mountains. It was he who persuaded Burian's parents to send their son to study at an art industrial school in Prague. His father refused, as he could not earn money during the war and the family was in debt, and he had already paid for the elder Karel's studies at the technical school, so he was afraid that he would not be able to support his two sons and wanted to send Zdeněk to study to become a forester.
But the mother intervened and got money for the train and secretly went to Prague with her son, despite her husband's disapproval. There, in 1919, Zdeněk successfully passed the entrance exams to the Academy of Fine Arts. On the recommendation of the committee, which included Max Švabinský, Vojtěch Hynais and Jakub Obrovský, the 14-year-old boy was admitted as an exceptional student straight into the second year of J. Obrovský's class.
Zdeněk lasted only two years at school, and at sixteen he interrupted his studies. The main role was played not by his studies, but by existential problems, as he had to make his way through Prague all alone, without the help of his family and friends. He helped to build a student colony at Letná, carried suitcases to the station, arranged shop windows, often starved and sometimes slept under the railway bridge when he could not afford to rent. This was also due to his young age, for which he did not fit in with the collective. He later said: "I was fourteen and my colleagues were in their twenties. Naturally, they ignored me, they didn't associate with me, and so began the loneliness that has defined my life to this day. ... But the lack of interest of my colleagues was not the greatest evil, hunger was harder to bear. Once I stood in front of a bakery and thought of stealing a loaf of bread. But I realized how weak I was and that I wouldn't get far. That was the only thing that deterred me. ... You get hard then and you know you can take a lot. When you see life from a frog's perspective, you stop being afraid of death. I've died twice, and it didn't make any impression on me. And you also learn how hard and callous people are. ... But all in all it was a good school and since then I know that hunger is healthy, unless you starve to death."
Although Burian did not become an academic painter, after leaving school he became a successful and sought-after illustrator. The first book he illustrated was The Adventures of David Balfour by R. L. Stevenson, published in September 1921 by the publisher Antonín Svěcený. A year earlier, he had painted the covers of several Tarzan stories and characters from Alexander Dumas' novels for him, which Svěcený displayed in the window of his Worker's Publishing House. The drawings aroused great interest among readers.
The first fee Burian received for his work was stolen by Prague pickpockets - they snatched his money and the pocket of his flimsy winter coat. Fortunately, he was not discouraged, he quickly set to work and in the next three years produced over a hundred illustrations for eight books published by the Workers' Publishing House.
In 1924 he began to collaborate with geographer Stanislav Nikolau, author of geography textbooks, on the library Country and people and the magazine Through the wide world. Over five hundred of Burian's illustrations appeared in the magazine's 21 editions, for Country and people he painted over 200 of them.
He found the friends he missed at his studies among the tramps from the party of the clerk Čeněk Zahradníček. He went with them to Sázava, where in the autumn of 1921 they built the settlement of Arizona and built the first tramp hut. He was nicknamed Siddie Burka. After the hut burned down, they went to the settlements Montana on Berounka and Tornádo on Kazin. Tramping in the countryside gave Burian inspiration for painting, and he became a very good guitarist and singer. "Nature has an undeniably ennobling effect on man. Tramping was also of great value to me as a painter. To see a different forest every morning, to see nature from dawn to sunset, to see it at night. I made perfect use of it in my work."
At Mokrops, in the hills south of Prague, Burian arranged a curious dwelling - a disused bus. There, he and his friends dressed up as cowboys around a campfire and filmed a western movie on a borrowed horse. Burian remained faithful to tramping until the end of his life, even his studio resembled a backwoodsman's cabin.
Thanks to tramping, in the summer of 1924 he met his future wife, Františka Loudová, a Vinohrady shopkeeper, whose long braids reminded him of an Indian girl. They married in February 1927 and in May their only daughter Eva was born.
In the same year Burian began illustrating magazines for the publishing house of J. R. Vilímek Little reader, Humoristic letters a Adventure World and later, adventure books. At the same time he worked for S. Nikolau. Relations between him and Vilímek were sometimes strained because of his work, but the fact is that in 1928 Vilímek helped him get an apartment in Žižkov, where Burian and his family moved from their sublet in Vršovice and lived there until 1956, when he bought a family villa in Podolí. The cooperation with Vilímek lasted until the publishing house's dissolution in 1948. During that time, Burian illustrated around fifty titles - books by J. Verne, A. Dumas, J. F. Cooper, R. Kipling and many other authors are still among the collector's gems.
The 1930s were Burian's most prolific period when it came to illustrating adventure books. He worked for the publishing house Toužimský & Moravec, which revived the fame of Karel May's novels in successful editions With a rifle and a lasso a The novels of Karl May, published adventure series about Tarzan and Biggles the Aviator, as well as works by Czech authors such as A. V. Frič, E. Holub or E. S. Vráz. He illustrated books by Jaroslav Foglar for the publisher J. Kobes Boys from the Beaver River, Cottage in Jezerní kotlina, Fight for the first place or Under the heroic flag.
An important milestone in his work was 1932, when in the magazine Little reader Eduard Štorch's short story was published Hunters of reindeer and mammoths, accompanied by five illustrations by Burian. It came into the hands of Josef August, then associate professor of Charles University in Prague, a paleontologist. He invited Burian to his home in 1935. "He presented me with a picture of the skeleton of a diplodocus, a herbivorous super-eater. I drew it in twenty minutes," Burian later recalled. Thus began their friendship and creative collaboration on paleontological reconstructions of prehistoric animals, recognized by the world's expert community. It lasted until August's death in 1968.
A prehistoric herbivorous dinosaur, whose remains were found in 2003 near Mezholez in the Kutná Hora region, was even named after both men. Burianosaurus augustai. A life-size model of a pair of burianosaurs (the first of its kind in the world) has been on display since June 2018 in Prague's DinoPark on the roof of the Galerie Harfa shopping centre near the O2 arena.
After the success of the short story Hunters of reindeer and mammoths Štorch expanded it into a novel, and so in September 1937 the book Mammoth Hunters with many illustrations by Zdeněk Burian. "The primordial truth that was in my blood lay fallow until I got my hands on the wrappers of Storch's manuscript. As I read it, my ancient cave dreams came to life, including the goosebumps that ran down my back." In later years Burian illustrated most of Štorch's books with prehistoric and historical themes, such as Minehava, Raven Settlement, The Call of the Family, Bronze Treasure, Hero Nik Also.
During the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, there was a great decline in the publication of adventure books, every title had to be licensed by the relevant authorities and many authors were banned. Burian then focused on purely national themes and illustrated Fairy Tales Bozena Nemcova, her Grandma, Mountain Villageor Neruda's Tales from the Lesser Town (they didn't work out in the end). In 1941 he illustrated a book by Josef Augusta A cloudy life and the very next year his 750-page book The Wonders of Hail subtitled Chronicle of prehistoric nature. In 1949 he painted his first "school paintings" with themes from prehistoric times.
After 1948, most private publishing houses disappeared or were nationalized. From 1949, the State Publishing House of Children's Books, later Albatros, with which Burian collaborated, had a monopoly in the field of children's adventure literature, illustrating many books by authors such as Jules Verne, Karel May and Jack London, as well as The Jungle Book Rudyard Kipling, Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe, Treasure on the island R. L. Stevenson, The Last of the Mohicans J.F. Cooper or Tarzana E. R. Burroughs. Among Czech authors, books by E. Štorch, A. V. Frič, J. Moravec, M. V. Kratochvíl, V. Zamarovský, L. Souček and others.
From the mid-1950s until his death, he also illustrated popular children's magazines Fireplace, Pioneer (two editions under the name Pinwheel) or ABCwhich were published in Mladá fronta.
In the 1950s, Burian was often the target of art critics who called his paintings too naturalistic and formalistic and accused him of academicism. They also disliked his orientation towards Western literature or his active involvement in tramping.
Burian's artistic and scientific reconstructions of the prehistoric world became the basis for two world-famous films - Godzilla by Japanese director Ishiro Honda in 1954 and Journey to prehistory directed by Karel Zeman in 1955, on which Josef Augusta collaborated scientifically. Incidentally, American director Steven Spielberg also said in an interview that he was inspired to make the cult film Jurassic Park was inspired by "an important prehistoric painter from Europe", meaning Burian.
In 1956 Josef Augusta's book was published Tiere der Urzeit, the first foreign-language publication with illustrations by Zdeněk Burian. It was published in many languages, in Czech under the title Through the depths of prehistory and thanks to it, Burian earned a position in the world as one of the leading painters and illustrators of the prehistoric period.
After August's death, he collaborated from 1969 with the paleontologist Zdeněk Vlastimil Špinar and in 1971-76 created a new series of reconstructions of our ancestors for the series of zoologist Vratislav Mazák From the prehistory of man in the journal Živa, which provoked a great response among Czech and foreign experts and became the basis for Mazák's 1977 publication How man came to be subtitled The saga of the genus Homo.
In 1977, Burian began painting a series of reconstructions of the development of life on Earth from the Protohistoric to the Quaternary for the gallery in the ZOO in Dvůr Králové nad Labem. He worked on it until his death, and managed to paint 22 of the originally intended 34 paintings on large canvases.
In May 1980, Z. Burian was awarded the title of Meritorious Artist in 1980. His wife Františka, who had been his support and sometimes even his model for years, unfortunately did not live to see this honour; she died in October 1979.
Burian's life's work is reaping laurels all over the world. His biography is included in the famous book Who's Who in the Worldwhere only eminent personalities in their field are included. In 1980, a book by Vratislav Mazák was published in London Prehistoric Manwhich became a recapitulation of Burian's paleoanthropological work. In the same year, an exhibition in the Japanese amusement park Seibuen near Tokyo met with great success and enthusiasm.
"I did it all here and I did it for our people - especially the youth. Out there, they can have reproduction. They can have as many as they want, I never prevented that, but the originals - they stay here." This is how Zdeněk Burian characterised the connection of his work with the country where he was born.
At the beginning of 1981, three exhibitions recapitulating Burian's work were held in Prague - at the Václav Špála Gallery, then at the Mánes Exhibition Hall and finally at the Albatross Exhibition Hall. The exhibition opened on 1 July 1981, and it was on that day that Zdeněk Burian died. At the age of 76, he succumbed to post-operative complications following an abdominal aortic surgery at Prague's Na Františku Hospital. Before his death, he had often spoken of his wish to be buried in Moravia under an old pine tree. However, his ashes were scattered in the Zbraslav Cemetery.
In 1991, four years before his death, Burian's daughter Eva, married to Hochman, published a biographical book about her father Zdeněk Burian: Prehistory and Adventure (family memories). The Museum of Zdeněk Burian in Štramberk, which opened in July 2011, also maps the fate and work of the popular painter.
Wikipedia /Facebook /burianzdenek.cz/ gnews.cz - Jana Černá
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