Czech graphic artist, painter, illustrator and pedagogue Karel Tondl (July 2, 1893 Krásno nad Bečvou - February 3, 1980 Prague) was born in South Moravia to the family of teacher Jan Tondl and his wife Emília, née Pullerlíková from Polná. He first attended the grammar school in Kroměříž and then went to Prague, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts with professors Jan Preisler and Max Švabinský in the years 1911–1917. He then continued to study graphics at the Sorbonne in Paris (1918–1919) and at the same time studied mathematics, geometry, perspective at the Czech Technical University and art history, philosophy and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. After his studies he traveled around Europe and the USA, lived in Switzerland and Paris for several years, worked in a tapestry workshop in Madrid and the Vatican mosaic workshops in Rome. From 1925 he worked as a teacher at the State School of Graphics in Prague.
He was one of the founding members of SVU Aleš, he was also a member of UB Slovenská in Bratislava, the Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Print Society in London and the Association of Czech Graphic Artists Hollar.
Karel Tondl was active in professional literature, he also lectured and published about art, for many years he was the art reporter of Naše doba (Our time newspaper), he gave numerous art and science lectures and lectured about the work of Hugo Boetinger and the graphics of his teacher at the Max Švabinský Academy. He published bibliophilia, devoted himself to playing the violin and also gave concerts.
His artistic focus was versatile, he devoted himself to painting, free graphics, illustration, stamp making, monumental compositions and tapestries. His great creative passion was landscape – he depicted the surroundings of Prague, Slovakia, the High Tatras, he was also interested in landscape motifs from Switzerland and France (mainly Paris and the Alps).
The focus of his creative work was graphics, he excelled as a creator of colorful monotypes and woodcuts. An example of his art in this graphic technique is a woodcut from 1919, which is in the collections of the Vysočina Regional Gallery in Jihlava under the title Winter in the Village. It captures the motif of a characteristic winter mood in the middle of an unnamed village covered in snow, where the life of ordinary people has not stopped. On a well-trodden path winding between cottages, we can see country poultry in the foreground and the figures of a woman in a scarf, a small boy and a silhouette of a man in the background. Here, following the example of his teacher Max Švabinský, Karel Tondl made maximum use of the limited possibilities of this popular technique reduced to only black and white elements, lines and surfaces, in accordance with the chosen subject.
Jana Bojanovská