Josef Capek

Josef Capek was born in Hronov (Czechoslovakia) in 1887. First a painter of the Cubist school, he later developed his own playful primitive style. He collaborated with his brother Karel on a number of plays and short stories, on his own he wrote the utopian play 'Land of Many Names' and several novels, as well as critical essays in which he argued for the art of the unconscious, of children and of 'savages'. As cartoonist, he worked for Lidove Noviny, a newspaper based in Prague. Due to his critical attitude towards naziism and hitler, he was arrested after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939. He wrote 'Poems from a Concentration Camp' in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, where he died in 1945.