The Czech painter and graphic artist Karel Holan (December 4, 1893 in Prague - October 4, 1953 in Prague) is rightly ranked among the important personalities of Czech interwar and postwar art. He was born as the eldest of three sons of the Prague freight forwarder Karel Holan, grew up in a house in Rybná Street in the Old Town, and remained faithful to Prague throughout his life.
At first he attended the high school in Karlín (1906–1913) and at the same time the private drawing school of M. Boháč and the private studio of V. Beneš and O. Nejedlý. After graduating in 1913, he began studying architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague, which he did not complete, as he was conscripted into the army in 1914. After he deliberately shot himself in the leg, he was released and was able to start studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where in the years 1915–1921 he attended the studios of professors M. Pirner, K. Krattner and V. Bukovac.
After completing his studies, he took a study trip to Germany in 1921, later three more trips to France (1925, 1927, 1946) and finally visited Italy (1948). In 1920, he became a member of Umělecká beseda (until 1924) and participated in the editing of several editions of their anthology "Life", where he also later published a program of social art. In 1924, together with P. Kotík, M. Holý and K. Kotrba, he founded the Social Art Group (later called HoHoKoKo). He was also a member of SVU Mánes (1927–1930), SVU Myslbek (1932–1934) and from 1936 of the Union of Fine Artists, where in 1938–1939 he edited its magazine Dílo. He died at the age of 60 in 1953, when a collective exhibition was organized for him in December, but he did not live to see it.
Karel Holan was one of the initiators of Czech social art, but he was primarily a landscape painter, whose landscape is closely connected with the city, especially with its poor outskirts. And it is precisely this Prague periphery with sunken backyards and dark corners that becomes the central motif of his work. The urban landscape, most often shrouded in oppressive autumn and winter, its corners and social context, became an important lifelong theme for him. Holan's entire work is permeated by balladry, melancholy and loneliness expressed by darkened and restrained colors (the so-called "Holan grey"). Color is his basic means of expression and carrier of atmosphere. The painter often made do with only a small number of ochres, grays and whites, with which he masterfully captured the atmosphere of the snow-covered corners of old Prague and its periphery, preserving in a unique way the fleeting beauty of everyday moments of the capital city. Such an example of Holan's penchant for finding artistic subjects in unusual places and in atypical urban corners is a painting from the property of the OGV in Jihlava called Part of the Backyard in Střešovice. We are commemorating this work on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of its creation, which is evidenced by the author's signature on the lower right with the date 1949.
Jana Bojanovská