Pavel Brázda

Born on August 21, 1926, in Brno, into  a family of the famous solicitor Osvald Brázda. His grandmother was Helena Čapková, the sister of the writers Karel and Josef Čapeks and the wife of a major Czech poet, diplomat, translator and post-war politician Josef Palivec. In 1945 Pavel Brázda read, for a short time, art history and philosophy at Masaryk University. In the following year he left for Prague and at the Academy of Arts and Design he read art history and painting. He did not care much for his studies and was expelled in 1947. In the very same year he was accepted at the Academy of Art, Prague, which he joined in the third semester, working with Vladimír Sychra. He did not finish this study either, since he was expelled out of political reasons in early 1949, same as his future wife Věra Nováková. Only in 1952 the two of them finished their formal education at the College of Art and Design. In the following years Pavel Brázda could dedicate himself to art, but as a non-member of the Association of  only in a limited manner. This meant in practice that he was allowed to illustrate biology and medical books. Both he and his wife were banned from exhibiting their works. In 1977, he took up a job as a worker in coke plant and stayed here for the next ten years until retirement. The work of Pavel Brázda was, for a long time, quite unknown to the general public and was not in fact revealed to the public until after 1989, first thanks to Revolver Revue who were the first to publish reproductions of Brázda’s paintings. In 1992, he was the first artist to be awarded the Revolver Revue Awards. President Václav Klaus awarded him the Medal of Merit in 2008. Five years later though, Pavel Brázda decided to return the medal, as he could not identify with Klaus’s publicly voiced opinions and his deeds.

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