Adolf Hoffmeister (15 August 1902 – 24 July 1973) was a Czech writer, playwright, painter, draughtsman, scenographer, cartoonist, translator, diplomat, lawyer, university professor and traveller. During the war, he served as editor of the radio station Voice of America, and after the war the Czechoslovak ambassador to France. In 1951 he became a professor at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague. He was a founding member of Devětsil (1920), chairman of the Union of Czechoslovak Visual Artists (1964–1967, 1968–1969), and a member of International Association of Art Critics. Hoffmeister represented Czechoslovakia at UNESCO, the PEN Club and other international organizations. Hoffmeister's career was ended by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the subsequent occupation.
Life Youth and studies Adolf Hoffmeister was born in Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic) on 15 August 1902. He was born into the family of the Prague lawyer Adolf Hoffmeister (1870–1936) and his wife Marie, née Schnöbling (1881–1967). He grew up in a cultivated intellectual environment – his uncles were the composer and teacher Karel Hoffmeister and the classical philologist Ferdinand Hoffmeister. From 1914 the Hoffmeister family lived in the cubist house Diamant at the corner of Spálená Street No. 4, which was commissioned by Adolf Hoffmeister.
In 1912–1921 he studied at the Masaryk Ist State Czechoslovak Real Gymnasium in Křemencova Street in Prague, where most of the future members of the avant-garde group Devětsil met. When Devětsil was founded on 5 October 1920, Adolf Hoffmeister became its youngest member and its managing director. In 1919 he met the Čapek brothers and S. K. Neumann. After graduating from high school, he continued his studies at the Faculty of Law of Charles University in Prague, which he completed in 1925 with a doctorate (JUDr). In the summer semester of 1924 he studied Egyptology at Cambridge University. He joined his father's law firm as a law clerk, becoming one of three partners between 1930 and 1939. After Hitler came to power, this law firm represented a number of German exiles, including Thomas Mann.
From 1917 onwards, he wrote poems, which he initially published in magazines under various pseudonyms, and devoted himself to drawing and linocutting. In 1922, he published his first book of poems and prose, participated with seventeen works in the spring exhibition of the Devětsil, and in the same year made a trip to Paris. He became acquainted with Man Ray and Ossip Zadkine. He became a member of the New Group, which split from the Devětsil, and exhibited with it at the Mánes Hall in 1923. Members of the New Group were accepted into the Mánes Union of Fine Arts, but Hoffmeister stopped painting at that time and did not apply for admission. In the following period he devoted himself to caricatures, which he sent to Lidové noviny newspaper.
From autumn 1925 he became a core collaborator of the publishing house Aventinum and contributed cartoons, illustrations, articles about artists and interviews with important foreign authors to Rozpravy Aventina (Aventinum Talks).
1926–1930 After graduating in law, he travelled abroad regularly and worked as a correspondent for many magazines. In addition to information on cultural events, he also sent his own sketches of personalities he had met in person (G.B. Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, London 1926). In 1926 he published a novel, The Tropic of Capricornus, and a collection of poems, The Alphabet of Love. As editor of the magazine Pestrý týden he became close to the magazine's editor-in-chief, Staša Jílovská.
In 1926–1930 he was married to the prose writer and art theoretician Maria Prušáková (1903–2004, later remarried Honzíková, wife of the architect Karel Honzík).
In 1927 he had his first solo exhibition in the gallery of the publishing house Odeon. In April 1927, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky stayed at his home during his visit to Prague. At Jiří Frejka's Dada Theatre, E.F. Burian presented a Voice-band programme with choral recitation of verses by several poets, including A. Hoffmeister. Together with Nezval, he accompanied the French poet Philippe Soupault and the publisher Léon Pierre-Quint around Prague. Miroslava Holzbachová performed Hoffmeister's ballet Park to music by Jaroslav Ježek at the Umělecká beseda. His merry play The Bride, directed by Jindřich Honzl, premiered at the Osvobozené divadlo. The photographer of the performance was Jaroslav Rössler. Hoffmeister began a permanent collaboration with Voskovec, Werich and Ježek, for whom he prepared programmes and posters and drew numerous cartoons. The Mánes Union of Fine Arts organised a large exhibition of Hoffmeister's drawing portraits and accepted him as a full member, and the publishing house Aventinum, for which he prepared an advertising campaign for the opening of the Aventinum Mansard sales gallery, published a book of his feuilletons illustrated with drawings. He also illustrated books by G. K. Chesterton for the publishing house L. Kuncíř.
In 1928–1930 he worked as an editor at Lidové noviny and in 1930–1932 at Literární noviny. He illustrated his own satirical page, Pestrý týden / The Colourful Week, for the magazine Kmen, which was directed by Julius Fučík. As a cover designer and illustrator, he collaborated with the publishing houses L. Kuncíř, V. Petr, A. Srdce, Odeon J. Fromka, Kvasnička and Hampl, Aventinum. He arranged with James Joyce the Czech edition of his Ulysses (V. Petr, 1930).
In 1928, he had his first solo exhibition in Paris (Visages par Adolf Hoffmeister) at the Galerie d'Art Contemporain and a reprise of this exhibition at the Galerie l'Epoque in Brussels. The success of this exhibition opened up the possibility of collaboration with the foreign press, especially with the newspaper L'Intransigeant. He became a member of the committee of the PEN Club in Prague.
From 1929 he was a member of the progressive organisation of Czech intellectuals, the Left Front. He exhibited 149 portraits in the Aventine Mansard (catalogue with introduction by Karel Teige, opening George Voskovec and Jan Werich) and prepared a series of Czech likenesses for Rozpravy, which was printed on the front page. He participated in an exhibition of caricatures in Louisville. He illustrated Gulliver's Travels, Eliška Junková's Auto-compass calendar and his own Calendar published by Aventinum (1930) and created covers for the Aventinum publishing house. He was one of the members of the Mánes Union of Fine Arts who left the association in protest against conservative trends (the so-called Secessionists of Mánes) and took part in a joint exhibition of secessionists in 1930. He opened Josef Šíma's exhibition in the Aventinum Mansard.
In 1930, the publisher Otakar Štorch-Marien sent him on a tour of Europe to make interviews with important figures of European culture and illustrate them with his caricatures. Hoffmeister met with Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Le Corbusier, André Gide, Paul Valéry and George Grosz. After returning to Prague, he passed the bar exam and became a partner in the law firm of Hoffmeister Sr., Tonder, Hoffmeister Jr.
1931–1939 In 1931, the artists of the so-called Secession from Mánes returned to the Mánes union when they were offered full artistic freedom. Hoffmeister temporarily returned to painting and exhibited two paintings at the 162nd Mánes Members' Exhibition in the autumn. In the summer he travelled with Bedřich Feuerstein to the Soviet Union and met Luncharsky, Tatlin, Tairov, Piscator, Meyer, and on the way back to Leningrad also G. B. Shaw and A. Huxley. He published his experiences in the book The Surface of the Five-Year Plan. He proposed the set for the V. Dyk's play Forgetful at the National Theatre.
Hoffmeister's caricatured map of Europe was used on stage and in print in a new play Caesar by the Osvobozené divadlo (1932). Hoffmeister's critical comedy Singing Venice (published in book form by Melantrich, 1946) was staged at the Estates Theatre.Srp K, 2004, p. 340 Hoffmeister's reworking of Carlo Goldoni's play La bottega del café was successfully staged at the National Theatre and then in theatres throughout the country. He participated in an exhibition of surrealist art at the Mánes (Poetry 1932), and visited Egypt and Palestine.
In 1933, he exhibited 106 caricatures in České Budějovice (together with Antonín Pelc) and was elected to the committee of the Mánes union. Together with Nezval, he visited James Joyce in Paris and brought him his Czech translation of Anna Livia Plurabella. He was involved in replacing the editorial board and securing funding for the magazine Volné směry and as a lawyer in the drafting of the new statutes of Mánes union. He contributed to the play The World Behind Bars by the Osvobozené divadlo.
In 1934, he prepared an international exhibition of cartoons and humour at the Mánes union, which he himself took part in. The exhibited anti-fascist works of John Heartfield, who lived in Prague as a German exile, aroused the displeasure of the German ambassador Walter Koch, who demanded their removal. The building was attacked by right-wing students, and at the time the Mánes union eventually succumbed to police pressure, 60,000 people saw the exhibition thanks to the diplomatic scandal. In August, as a member of the delegation to the First Congress of Soviet Writers, Hoffmeister captured images of Gorkij, Pasternak, Babel, Bukharin, Bedny and Radek, which were then published by the magazines Ogoniok, Svět práce, Doba, exhibited at the Mánes Members' Exhibition and published as the album Images. At the end of the year he visited Spain, where the civil war was about to break out.
In 1935 he exhibited cartoons with the Mánes union in Ostrava, Bratislava and Košice, and with A. Plec in Benešov. He became a member of the anti-fascist Club of Czech-German Theatre Workers, where he became acquainted with a circle of Prague Germans and the composer Hans Krása, for whom he later wrote the libretto of the children's opera Brundibár (1938). In 1938, his comedy Youth in a Play with music by Hans Krása was staged by the Prague Kleine Bühne Theatre, directed by E.F. Burian, and the same year it was performed in German translation (Anna sagt nein). In the March issue of Teige's journal Doba he published a critical article Socialist realism on the need for creative freedom, and he also criticised the conditions in the USSR in a series of articles in Volné směry (1935–1936). In Prague he accompanied André Breton and Paul Éluard. He created an updated map of Europe for the stage of the Osvobozené divadlo performance Reverse and Obverse (1936).
After the death of his father in 1936, he became head of the law firm Hoffmeister, Tonder, Pacák. E. F. Burian´s Theatre D 36 presented the Matinee of Caricatures, a screening of caricatures by Hoffmeister, Bidlo, Pelc and Heartfield, accompanied by stage performances. In the fall, he traveled with arch. Jaroslav Fragner around the US and published the drawings and texts in the book American Swings. He became a member of the Committee for the Relief of Democratic Spain.