Svatopluk Pitra (9 March 1923 – 15 July 1993) was a Czech graphic designer, illustrator, cartoonist, designer of animated films and painter. He graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. At first he became known as a cartoonist. He began working on animated films in the late 1950s. In collaboration with directors such as Břetislav Pojar, Jiří Brdečka and Stanislav Látal, he designed cartoon and puppet films. In 1963 Pitra emigrated to Canada. He lived in the US from the mid-1960s. While in Canada, he worked for the National Film Board of Canada as a creator of advertising and promotional films.
Life and work in Czechoslovakia 1923–1963 Svatopluk Pitra was born on 9 March 1923 in the small village of Štěnec (now part of Jenišovice). His childhood was spent in a former mill with his mother's parents. In 1929 he moved to Poděbrady along with his mother and older brother Bohumil, where he started attending elementary school. Even many years later he could still remember his first school assignment: drawing six rows of vertical lines that gradually transformed into ones.PITRA, Svatopluk. Vlastní životopis. In RYŠKA, Pavel (ed.). SVATOPLUK PITRA: grafik, ilustrátor a výtvarník animovaných filmů (1) Tucet mých tatínků. Olomouc: Pastiche Filmz, 2015. – Recenze Veroniky Zýkové na stránkách Národního filmového archivu.
Starting in 1935 he attended the grammar school in Vysoké Mýto. Due to poor grades, in fourth year he had to leave for a two-year Amelioration School, which he successfully completed. During his two years of military service in the years 1945 to 1947 he was assigned to the cartographers. Subsequently, he went to work at the Pipe Rolling Mill in Chomutov as a technical draughtsman. As a reward for discovering an error in technical documentation, he received a recommendation for university studies in 1951 HORÁKOVÁ, Ljuba. Svatopluk Pitra. Kresby a obrazy ze sbírky Ireny Bryndové-Pitrové. Praha: Irena Pitrová, 2007, s. 8. and was accepted to the Special Studio of Animated and Puppet Film under professor Adolf Hoffmeister at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. His classmates included Vratislav Hlavatý, Zdeněk Kirchner, Ladislav Rada, Šárka Kašpaříková (Šefranková) and Jaroslava Nesvadbová. During his studies he married and shortly thereafter divorced Milica Kudrnová, who became the mother of his only son Torsten.
While working at the studio Pitra did not shun drawing based on a model, but he very quickly found his own style, at first relying on a ruler and French curve, with which he constructed pronounced figures formed with a strong line and sharp contrasts of black and white areas. He was just as masterful in handling lettering, which he placed in his drawings in the form of various signs and labels. Pitra admired the drawings of František Bidlo and above all the portrait shorthand of his professor Adolf Hoffmeister, for whom the medium was a "mask that is truer than the face".HOFFMEISTER, Adolf. Svatopluk Pitra a Vratislav Hlavatý, dříve vdova. Výtvarná práce. 1957, roč. 5, č. 10, s. 9. Pitra also understood drawing as a record of his internal life that was to be rendered with as economical means of expression as possible.
Telling is the account of the difficulties he encountered when trying to take out the First Republic magazine Simplicus from the University Library. Although they acquiesced in the end, they apparently first "interrogated" him on what he needs the magazine for and then demanded a "confirmation of a true need to study the item".PITRA, Svatopluk. Sláva a bída moderní karikatury. Květen. 1958, roč. III, č. 8, s. 416.
Pitra had his first exhibition in 1957 along with schoolmate Vratislav Hlavatý in the prestigious Czechoslovak Writer Gallery in Prague. Originally, professor Hoffmeister himself was to appear in the former Topičův salon vystoupit i sám professor Hoffmeister, but in complete secrecy he relinquished the whole space to his two students. He introduced them at the opening for the show Caricature and Other Unpleasantries as a new hope for Czech humorous drawing, which in his words was wasting away in the shroud of the magazine Dikobraz.HOFFMEISTER, Adolf (1957), s. 9. At the exhibition Pitra displayed cartoons and photo montages, clips from his graduate animated film Klobouk ve křoví[Hat in the Bushes], anti-war and advertising posters, and designs for record sleeves and book covers.Katalogový list k výstavě Karikatury a jiné nepříjemnosti Svatopluka Pitry a Vratislava Hlavatého v galerii Československého spisovatele v Praze v květnu 1957.
In his review of the exhibition, Miloš Macourek praised Pitra's "keen-edged wit and political involvement" and expressed the conviction that the author would no doubt soon establish himself in the broad field of practical graphic art as well.MACOUREK, Miloš. Dva mladí karikaturisté. Výtvarná práce. 1957, roč. 5, č. 10, s. 8–9. He was not wrong in this prediction. After completing school, Pitra began to work as a graphic designer for domestic and international trade fairs; among other things, he participated in the graphic design for the Czechoslovak pavilion at the EXPO 58 World's Fair in Brussels. Much like his schoolmate Ladislav Rada, he also designed advertisements, posters and record covers for Gramofonové závody – Supraphon.
At the start of 1959 he sent in a set of caricatures for a competition announced by the editorial board of Literární noviny. Up against more than eight hundred participants, the juryAdolf Hoffmeister, Zdenek Seydl a grafik Literárních novin Jiří Schmidt found Pitra's satirical drawings to be the most interesting, "artistically clear, almost cruelly exact".Výsledky soutěže literárních novin. Literární noviny (II), 1959, roč. 8, číslo 42, s. 6. – Stránka Literárních novin v digitalizovaném archivu časopisů Ústavu pro českou literaturu AV ČR. The award Literární noviny confirmed the distinguished position Pitra had taken on at the turn of the sixties in the circle of cartoonists associated in the Polylegran group. Cartoonists were abandoning illustrated anecdotes and wordy civic satire, ceasing to use dialogues and even monologue captions and began exploring the possibilities of semantically encoding the drawing itself. Some invented sharp-witted absurdities, others sought out a universal language in the tangled world of lines.RYŠKA, Pavel a ŠRÁMEK, Jan (2016), s. 78–83. Foreign-policy and anti-fascist caricature had considerable prestige in the official art scene. Svatopluk Pitra took part in a large show of anti-war drawings and collages called To Be or Not To Be, organised in 1961 for the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, along with Adolf Born, Oldřich Jelínek, Miroslav Liďák, Vladimír Hlavín, Vladimír Jiránek, Václav Kabát, Jiří Kalousek, Milan Kopřiva, Jaroslav Malák, Zdeněk Mézl, Jiří Šalamoun, Františk Skála sr., Bohumil Štěpán, Jiří Toman, Josef Žemlička, Jiří Žentel and Jaroslav Weigel.
Drawing was to "work with poetic metaphors like poetry, conflicts like drama, and sequencing surprising contrasts and contexts like a film montage".HAĎÁK. Malý katechismus. Prah: Mladá fronta, 1959. Adolf Hoffmeister became the patron of this new wave of Czech artistic humour, though the genealogical lines led more towards western artists such as Raymond Peynet, Jean-Maurice Bosc, Maurice Sinet and especially Saul Steinberg, Saul Steinberg, who showed Czech cartoonists that a line can be "drawn in such a way so as to reveal the ridiculous side of reality more deeply than a sophisticated replica, so as to evoke amazement, embarrassment, disgust and laughter all together".MACOUREK, Miloš a SUS, Oleg. O KRHU neboli kresleném humoru. Kulturní tvorba. 1964, roč. 2, č. 52, s. 3. The first Czech anthology of Steinberg's drawings STEINBERG, Saul. [Obr. monografie] Miloš Macourek (ed.). Praha : SNKLHU, 1959. appeared on the shelves of Czech book shops in 1959 with a cover by Svatopluk Pitra, who had debuted in book illustration the previous year when he accompanied a collection of satirical texts by Jiří Robert Pick entitled Kladyátor.PICK, Jiří Robert. Kladyátor. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1958. with his rough-hewn characters. At the end of the fifties Pitra also illustrated Jirotka's SaturninJIROTKA, Zdeněk. Saturnin. Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1959. and Emil Vachek's satirical novel Až se ucho utrhne.VACHEK, Emil. Až se ucho utrhne. Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1959. Both titles came out in the Humour and Satire Edition, which was issued by the Československý spisovatel.
Pitra's drawings were aptly characterised by the artist's friend, cartoonist, illustrator and creator of animated films Jaroslav Malák: "[Pitra] is cruelly critical of humanity as a whole and of the depicted individuals. Though he draws very beautiful women, they are all actually beasts [...]. Pitra treats the other half of the population, men, even worse. I don't know a single drawing of Pitra's that depicts a model husband, a good father and breadwinner of a nice family. On the other hand Pitra has depicted a plethora of fraudsters, cardsharps, gangsters, corrupt politicians, detectives and the oddest of individuals."MALÁK, Jaroslav. Vzpomínkový text. In HORÁKOVÁ, Ljuba (2007), s. 36–37. We can find a whole gallery of such characters in Pitra's illustrations for the detective stories by Alexandr Grin, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Seičó Macumota and Georges Simenon, that came out in the year 1962 in the seventh annual revue Světová literatura [World Literature].
Another frequent motif of Pitra's drawings was vehicles: motorcycles, cars, planes or helicopters. He shared this admiration for modern technology with his peers Dobroslav Foll or Teodor Rotrekl, who formed the core of the artistic group RadarFORMÁNEK, Václav. Radar. Anatomie tvůrčí skupiny. Praha: Odeon, 1971. along with other Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague classmates at the end of the fifties. For Pitra, however, the interest in human nature predominated. This is also evident in his drawings for Eternity Lost by Clifford D. Simak the anthology Labyrint (SNKLU, 1962), organised by Adolf Hoffmeister. At the time when this remarkable collection of western science-fiction stories came out, Pitra was already fully involved in artistic design for animated and puppet films at the studio Bratři v triku.
Animated film designer 1957–1963
Pitra's first animated films were made at the advertising business Propag, where he designed puppets for a piece by director Josef Kluge on family shopping at department stores Vánoce (Christmas) (1957). He also drew and self-directed Atomic Century (Timely Purchase of Fuel) (1957). He is also listed as designer and director for the advertising pieces An Idea from Heaven (1957) a That's Not How It's Done (1957), which promoted the advantages of newly introduced self-service retail.HAVELKA, Jiří. Čs. filmové hospodářství III. Dokumentární a animovaný film 1922–1957. Praha: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství, 1959, s. 212; 224; 235; 237. Of the four-part series Samoobsluha it is likely that only Who Asks for What has been preserved. The illustrated anecdotes in it were drawn by Pitra's colleague Jaroslav Malák, core cartoonist for Dikobraz and one of the founders of the association of caricaturists Polylegran.