One of our finest contemporary academics, also known as Portraitist Prague, is a classic in the true sense of the word. He does not try to replace honest painting with a wide range of themes and ideas with a self-serving play of colour or abstraction. His road to success at home and abroad is paved with a lifetime of diligence and countless hours spent in the plein air or in the studio.
František Leták (born 1949 in Ústí nad Labem) lives and works in Prague. After studying at the Secondary School of Glass Industry, where he studied painting, shaping and etching of glass, he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague as an outstanding talent. In the studio of professor František Jiroudek, he was engaged in landscape painting. He studied figure painting under Professor Karel Souček. He was initiated into the secrets and alchemy of the restoration craft by the legendary professor and restorer Raimund Ondráček.
A name is a concept in its field. The professors passed on to their bright and hard-working pupil everything they knew and knew how to do. Their diligence was not wasted.
Flyer's varied palette
Today, our editorial guest is a renowned painter at home and abroad. He paints landscapes, still lifes, figures, portraits and nudes, but above all Prague motifs of various formats. From miniatures to large canvases, including triptychs.
Outside the Republic, Leták exhibited his works in Greece, Cyprus and Mexico. He regularly exhibits in Japan.
František Leták joins a group of free artists from the fields of glassmaker, ceramist, artist and photographer who call themselves Notedwith whom he has made more than a dozen joint presentations over time. This is a group that, together with Leták, lived through the 1960s at the Secondary School of Glass Art in Kamenický Šenov. Jaroslav Staněk, Lenka Jelínková, Milan Brodský, Jiří Rydlo...
A time of balance and celebration
Literally at the end of 2024 František Leták celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday. And although he never stops looking more ahead than behind him, he has not avoided some summary of how his time, interspersed with his art work, has gone.
As we have already indicated, Flyer has a number of solo exhibitions at home and abroad. Outside Europe, he has been exhibiting successfully and regularly for two or three years, even in Japan. Due to the recent coronavirus epidemic, he has dropped out of this rhythm, but he is currently preparing for an exhibition in Tokyo in the near future with personal participation at the opening.
If he is working on a large-scale night panoramic Prague, as it happened at the time of our visit, he attacks the canvas with brush strokes reminiscent of Pissarro's point touches, which the famous impressionist used to paint. At that moment, he resembles a swordsman with a sword, practicing the basic routine - the so-called tertium. The simile is by no means an unflattering one, for in his youth František Leták was indeed a fencing athlete.
But let us return to the balance sheet itself and possible celebrations of the master's jubilee birthday. The main moment should be the fifteenth summer group exhibition Noted in Pelhřimov. In September, a group exhibition of canvases and prints with the launch of an artistic autobiography about the life and work of František Leták. The publication will have a summary in both English and Japanese and will certainly delight visitors to the Tokyo gallery at the planned Leták presentation in 2025.
Paintings with mood
Art lovers are enthusiastic about his works. Professional journalists nickname him after his favourite subject, as we have already mentioned above, Portraitist of Prague and is being talked about as Nightingale's successor. His paintings, unlike the work of a long line of contemporary painters, are in demand. His art adorns the salons of collectors and the offices of businessmen, and his canvases are in private collections as well as in state galleries. It is not surprising, because it is an honest craft and skillful painting, which successfully follows the note of the modern Czech artistic tradition.
Especially good is Leták in the moments when he expresses himself with a Schikanederian twilight while working on the themes of Prague streets and alleys, corners and embankments. When Leták starts talking about Prague, his eyes glisten again and again. Even after years of work, he is as in love with it as a seventeen-year-old student with a girl. He woos her in his own way. He paints her in her Sunday dress and evening gown, laughing on a summer afternoon and crying in the autumn drizzle. His Portraits of Prague are as magical as the Mother of Cities herself. Once you look at them closely, you will find it is not easy to tear yourself away from them. Especially the large-format ones. Who would have thought of the hours of preparatory work behind them? Photographing the whole panorama in the day and evening, observing at dusk or dawn, not missing detailed knowledge of the streets and individual houses. No block or apartment building is missing or missing. In most cases, even the number of windows agrees, as evidenced by the curious reproach of one of the connoisseurs of old Prague, who noted that at their house on the Leták Embankment he had neglected to paint - a balcony...
Wine, women and Japan
František Leták is a born landscape painter. But he also has other favourite subjects. These include various still lifes, including classic ones with flowers, fruit or Moravian smoked meat, garlic and onions. He also likes to paint a vineyard, grapes and glasses of red. Like any painter, he also admires female beauty. However, he is particularly attracted to the fairer sex by their eyes - the mirrors of the soul, as the Japanese say, who, unlike European art lovers, are not too keen on nudes.
The soulful beauty of the fair sex is not limited by age, he says, and is undoubtedly the most beautiful thing about women. Otherwise, even the most beautiful body is just an empty vessel, reflects Leták on the image of a young lady.
But one of the greatest chapters of his life is his work for Japanese gallerists.
As they say, fortune favours the prepared. It has been some twenty-five years since he exhibited in Mladá Boleslav "together with the Mánes brothers and Preisler", he smiles in remembrance.
Not to confuse the reader, the paintings by Mánes and Preisler were hung in the central part of the gallery, the canvases by František Leták on the upper floor of the exhibition space. They were discovered there by a Japanese gallerist who was led by fate to the city of cars on his way across the country and was immediately enthralled by Leták's paintings. It must be said that they differ considerably from classical Japanese works in subject matter and processing, although they share a perfectionist approach to painting and a relationship to detail and even miniature. In addition, the Japanese are interested not only in everything from Czech music, but also in our glass and fine art. And so the first purchase was made and the invitation to a fortnight's stay in Tokyo. Today he regularly exhibits there in two-year cycles, and the business partners have become friends. Thanks to them, he has come to know most of the most important places of this island empire, he recognizes their traditions and admires them. The Japanese gallerists, in turn, officially paid him tribute and gratitude when, unlike the complete Czech Philharmonic Orchestra's expedition during the tsunami disaster, the nuclear power plant accident, František Leták refused to fly home to safety, unlike the musicians.
Ivan Cerny
Photo - Jiří Vlastník
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